Brain Pacemakers Tackle Depression

Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press e-mail

May 27, 2008 -- It's a new frontier for psychiatric illness: Brain pacemakers that promise to act as antidepressants by changing how patients' nerve circuitry fires.

Still, the early results are promising. Dramatic video shows one patient visibly brightening as doctors turn on her brain pacemaker and she says in surprise: "I'm starting to smile." And new reports this month show that some worst-case patients -- whose depression wasn't relieved by medication, psychotherapy, even controversial shock treatment -- are finding lasting relief.

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