Are Brain Implants the Future of Treatment for Depression and Anxiety?
Sarah, clinical trial participant, at an appointment with Katherine Scangos, MD, PhD, at UCSF’s Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute.
When she woke up after a procedure involving drilling small holes in her skull, a woman suffering from chronic depression reported feeling “euphoric”. The holes were made to fit the wires that connected her brain with a matchbox-sized electrical implant; this would deliver up to 300 short-lived electricity bursts per day to specific parts of her brain.
Over a year later, Sarah, 36, says the brain implant has turned her life around. A sense of alertness and energy have replaced suicidal thoughts and feelings of despair, which had persisted despite antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy. Sarah is the first person to have received a brain implant to treat depression, a breakthrough that happened during an experimental study published recently in Nature Medicine.
“What we did was use deep-brain stimulation (DBS), a technique used in the treatment of epilepsy,” says Andrew Krystal, professor of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and one of the study’s researchers. DBS typically involves implanting electrodes into specific areas of the brain to reduce seizures not controlled with medication or to remove the part of the brain that causes the seizures. Instead of choosing and stimulating a single brain site though, the UCSF team took a different approach.
They first used 10 electrodes to map Sarah’s brain activity, a phase that lasted 10 days, during which they developed a neural biomarker, a specific pattern of brain activity that indicated the onset of depression symptoms (in Sarah, this was detected in her amygdala, an almondlike structure located near the base of the brain). But they also saw that delivering a tiny burst of electricity to the patient’s ventral striatum, an area of the brain that sits in the center, above and behind the ears, dramatically improved these symptoms. What they had to do was outfit Sara’s brain with a DBS-device programmed to propagate small waves of electricity to the ventral striatum only when it discerned the pattern.
“We are not trying to take away normal responses to the world. We are just trying to eliminate this one thing, which is depression, which impedes patients’ ability to function and deal with normal stuff.”
“It was a personalized treatment not only in where to stimulate, but when to stimulate,” Krystal says. Sarah’s depression translated to low amounts of energy, loss of pleasure and interest in life, and feelings of sluggishness. Those symptoms went away when scientists stimulated her ventral capsule area. When the same area was manipulated by electricity when Sarah’s symptoms “were not there” though, she was feeling more energetic, but this sudden flush of energy soon gave way to feelings of overstimulation and anxiety. “This is a very tangible illustration of why it's best to simulate only when you need it,” says Krystal.
We have the tendency to lump together depression symptoms, but, in reality, they are quite diverse; some people feel sad and lethargic, others stay up all night; some overeat, others don’t eat at all. “This happens because people have different underlying dysfunctions in different parts of their brain. Our approach is targeting the specific brain circuit that modulates different kinds of symptoms. Simply, where we stimulate depends on the specific set of problems a person has,” Krystal says. Such tailormade brain stimulation for patients with long-term, drug-resistant depression, which would be easy to use at home, could be transformative, the UCSF researcher concludes.
In the U.S., 12.7 percent of the population is on antidepressants. Almost exactly the same percentage of Australians–12.5–take similar drugs every day. With 13 percent of its population being on antidepressants, Iceland is the world’s highest antidepressant consumer. And quite away from Scandinavia, the Southern European country of Portugal is the world’s third strongest market for corresponding medication.
By 2020, nearly 15.5 million people had been consuming antidepressants for a time period exceeding five years. Between 40 and 60 percent of them saw improvements. “For those people, it was absolutely what they needed, whether that was increased serotonin, or increased norepinephrine or increased dopamine, ” says Frank Anderson, a psychiatrist who has been administering antidepressants in his private practice “for a long time”, and author of Transcending Trauma, a book about resolving complex and dissociative trauma.
Yet the UCSF study brings to the mental health field a specificity it has long lacked. “A lot of the traditional medications only really work on six neurotransmitters, when there are over 100 neurotransmitters in the brain,” Anderson says. Drugs are changing the chemistry of a single system in the brain, but brain stimulation is essentially changing the very architecture of the brain, says James Giordano, professor of neurology and biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington and a neuroethicist. It is a far more elegant approach to treating brain disorders, with the potential to prove a lifesaver for the 40 to 50 percent of patients who see no benefits at all with antidepressants, Giordano says. It is neurofeedback, on steroids, adds Anderson. But it comes with certain risks.
Even if the device generating the brain stimulation sits outside the skull and could be easily used at home, the whole process still involves neurosurgery. While the sophistication and precision of brain surgeries has significantly improved over the last years, says Giordano, they always carry risks, such as an allergic reaction to anesthesia, bleeding in the brain, infection at the wound site, blood clots, even coma. Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS), a technology currently being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could potentially tackle this. Patients could wear a cap, helmet, or visor that transmits electrical signals from the brain to a computer system and back, in a brain-computer interface that would not need surgery.
“This could counter the implantation of hardware into the brain and body, around which there is also a lot of public hesitance,” says Giordano, who is working on such techniques at DARPA.
Embedding a chip in your head is one of the finest examples of biohacking, an umbrella word for all the practices aimed at hacking one’s body and brain to enhance performance –a citizen do-it-yourself biology. It is also a word charged enough to set off a public backlash. Large segments of the population will simply refuse to allow that level of invasiveness in their heads, says Laura Cabrera, an associate professor of neuroethics at the Center for Neural Engineering, Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State University. Cabrera urges caution when it comes to DBS’s potential.
“We've been using it for Parkinson's for over two decades, hoping that now that they get DBS, patients will get off medications. But people have continued taking their drugs, even increasing them,” she says. What the UCSF found is a proof of concept that DBS worked in one depressed person, but there’s a long way ahead until we can confidently say this finding is generalizable to a large group of patients. Besides, as a society, we are not there yet, says Cabrera. “Most people, at least in my research, say they don't want to have things in their brain,” she says. But what could really go wrong if we biohacked our own brains anyway?
In 2014, a man who had received a deep brain implant for a movement disorder started developing an affection for Johnny Cash’s music when he had previously been an avid country music fan. Many protested that the chip had tampered with his personality. Could sparking the brain with electricity generated by a chip outside it put an end to our individuality, messing with our musical preferences, unique quirks, our deeper sense of ego?
“What we found is that when you stimulate a region, you affect people’s moods, their energies,” says Krystal. You are neither changing their personality nor creating creatures of eternal happiness, he says. “’Being on a phone call would generally be a setting that would normally trigger symptoms of depression in me,’” Krystal reports his patient telling him. ‘I now know bad things happen, but am not affected by them in the same way. They don’t trigger the depression.’” Of the research, Krystal continues: “We are not trying to take away normal responses to the world. We are just trying to eliminate this one thing, which is depression, which impedes patients’ ability to function and deal with normal stuff.”
Yet even change itself shouldn't be seen as threatening, especially if the patient had probably desired it in the first place. “The intent of therapy in psychiatric disorders is to change the personality, because a psychiatric disorder by definition is a disorder of personality,” says Cabrera. A person in therapy wants to restore the lost sense of “normal self”. And as for this restoration altering your original taste in music, Cabrera says we are talking about rarities, extremely scarce phenomena that are possible with medication as well.
Maybe it is the allure of dystopian sci-fi films: people have a tendency to worry about dark forces that will spread malice across the world when the line between human and machine has blurred. Such mind-control through DBS would probably require a decent leap of logic with the tools science has--at least to this day. “This would require an understanding of the parameters of brain stimulation we still don't have,” says Cabrera. Still, brain implants are not fully corrupt-proof.
“Hackers could shut off the device or change the parameters of the patient's neurological function enhancing symptoms or creating harmful side-effects,” says Giordano.
There are risks, but also failsafe ways to tackle them, adds Anderson. “Just like medications are not permanent, we could ensure the implants are used for a specific period of time,” he says. And just like people go in for checkups when they are under medication, they could periodically get their personal brain implants checked to see if they have been altered or not, he continues. “It is what my research group refers to as biosecurity by design,” says Giordano. “It is important that we proactively design systems that cannot be corrupted.”
Two weeks after receiving the implant, Sarah scored 14 out of 54 on the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale, a ten-item questionnaire psychiatrists use to measure the severity of depressive episodes. She had initially scored 36. Today she scores under 10. She would have had to wait between four and eight weeks to see positive results had she taken the antidepressant road, says Krystal.
He and his team have enrolled two other patients in the trials and hope to add nine more. They already have some preliminary evidence that there's another place that works better in the brain of another patient, because that specific patient had been experiencing more anxiety as opposed to despondency. Almost certainly, we will have different biomarkers for different people, and brain stimulation will be tailored to a person’s unique situation, says Krystal. “Each brain is different, just like each face is different.”
The Friday Five: Artificial DNA Could Give Cancer the Hook
In this week's Friday Five, artificial DNA could give cancer the hook. Plus, research suggests that this daily practice can improve relationships, social media could be good for finding factual information, injecting a gel may speed up recovery from injuries, and a blood pressure medicine is promising for a long healthy life.
The Friday Five covers five stories in research that you may have missed this week. There are plenty of controversies and troubling ethical issues in science – and we get into many of them in our online magazine – but this news roundup focuses on scientific creativity and progress to give you a therapeutic dose of inspiration headed into the weekend.
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Here are the promising studies covered in this week's Friday Five:
- Artificial DNA gives cancer the hook
- This daily practice could improve relationships
- Can social media handle the truth?
- Injecting a gel could speed up recovery
- A blood pressure medicine for a long healthy life
9 Tips for Online Mental Health Therapy
Research shows that, for most patients, online therapy offers the same benefits as in-person therapy, yet many people still resist it. A behavioral scientist explains how you can use it to improve mental health.
Telehealth offers a vast improvement in access and convenience to all sorts of medical services, and online therapy for mental health is one of the most promising case studies for telehealth. With many online therapy options available, you can choose whatever works best for you. Yet many people are hesitant about using online therapy. Even if they do give it a try, they often don’t know how to make the most effective use of this treatment modality.
Why do so many feel uncertain about online therapy? A major reason stems from its novelty. Humans are creatures of habit, prone to falling for what behavioral scientists like myself call the status quo bias, a predisposition to stick to traditional practices and behaviors. Many people reject innovative solutions even when they would be helpful. Thus, while teletherapy was available long before the pandemic, and might have fit the needs of many potential clients, relatively few took advantage of this option.
Even when we do try new methodologies, we often don’t do so effectively, because we cling to the same approaches that worked in previous situations. Scientists call this behavior functional fixedness. It’s kind of like the saying about the hammer-nail syndrome: “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
These two mental blindspots, the status quo bias and functional fixedness, impact decision making in many areas of life. Fortunately, recent research has shown effective and pragmatic strategies to defeat these dangerous errors in judgment. The nine tips below will help you make the best decisions to get effective online therapy, based on the latest research.
Trust the science of online therapy
Extensive research shows that, for most patients, online therapy offers the same benefits as in-person therapy.
For instance, a 2014 study in the Journal of Affective Disorders reported that online treatment proved just as effective as face-to-face treatment for depression. A 2018 study, published in Journal of Psychological Disorders, found that online cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, was just as effective as face-to-face treatment for major depression, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder. And a 2014 study in Behaviour Research and Therapy discovered that online CBT proved effective in treating anxiety disorders, and helped lower costs of treatment.
During the forced teletherapy of COVID, therapists worried that those with serious mental health conditions would be less likely to convert to teletherapy. Yet research published in Counselling Psychology Quarterly has helped to alleviate that concern. It found that those with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression, PTSD, and even suicidality converted to teletherapy at about the same rate as those with less severe mental health challenges.
Yet teletherapy may not be for everyone. For example, adolescents had the most varied response to teletherapy, according to a 2020 study in Family Process. Some adapted quickly and easily, while others found it awkward and anxiety-inducing. On the whole, children with trauma respond worse to online therapy, per a 2020 study in Child Abuse & Neglect. The treatment of mental health issues can sometimes require in-person interactions, such as the use of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. And according to a 2020 study from the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, online therapy may not be as effective for those suffering from loneliness.
Leverage the strengths of online therapy
Online therapy is much more accessible than in-person therapy for those with a decent internet connection, webcam, mic, and digital skills. You don’t have to commute to your therapist’s office, wasting money and time. You can take much less medical leave from work, saving you money and hassle with your boss. If you live in a sparsely populated area, online therapy could allow you to access many specialized kinds of therapy that isn’t accessible locally.
Online options are much quicker compared to the long waiting lines for in-person therapy. You also have much more convenient scheduling options. And you won’t have to worry about running into someone you know in the waiting room. Online therapy is easier to conceal from others and reduces stigma. Many patients may feel more comfortable and open to sharing in the privacy and comfort of their own home.
You can use a variety of communication tools suited to your needs at any given time. Video can be used to start a relationship with a therapist and have more intense and nuanced discussions, but can be draining, especially for those with social anxiety. Voice-only may work well for less intense discussions. Email offers a useful option for long-form, well-thought-out messages. Texting is useful for quick, real-time questions, answers, and reinforcement.
Plus, online therapy is often cheaper than in-person therapy. In the midst of COVID, many insurance providers have decided to cover online therapy.
Address the weaknesses
One weakness is the requirement for appropriate technology and skills to engage in online therapy. Another is the difficulty of forming a close therapeutic relationship with your therapist. You won’t be able to communicate non-verbals as fully and the therapist will not be able to read you as well, requiring you to be more deliberate in how you express yourself.
Another important issue is that online therapy is subject to less government oversight compared to the in-person approach, which is regulated in each state, providing a baseline of quality control. As a result, you have to do more research on the providers that offer online therapy to make sure they’re reputable, use only licensed therapists, and have a clear and transparent pay structure.
Be intentional about advocating for yourself
Figure out what kind of goals you want to achieve. Consider how, within the context of your goals, you can leverage the benefits of online therapy while addressing the weaknesses. Write down and commit to achieving your goals. Remember, you need to be your own advocate, especially in the less regulated space of online therapy, so focus on being proactive in achieving your goals.
Develop your Hero’s Journey
Because online therapy can occur at various times of day through videos calls, emails and text, it might feel more open-ended and less organized, which can have advantages and disadvantages. One way you can give it more structure is to ground these interactions in the story of your self-improvement. Our minds perceive the world through narratives. Create a story of how you’ll get from where you are to where you want to go, meaning your goals.
A good template to use is the Hero’s Journey. Start the narrative with where you are, and what caused you to seek therapy. Write about the obstacles you will need to overcome, and the kind of help from a therapist that you’ll need in the process. Then, describe the final end state: how will you be better off after this journey, including what you will have learned.
Especially in online therapy, you need to be on top of things. Too many people let the therapist manage the treatment plan. As you pursue your hero’s journey, another way to organize for success is to take notes on your progress, and reevaluate how you’re doing every month with your therapist.
Identify your ideal mentor
Since it’s more difficult to be confident about the quality of service providers in an online setting, you should identify in advance the traits of your desired therapist. Every Hero’s Journey involves a mentor figure who guides the protagonist through this journey. So who’s your ideal mentor? Write out their top 10 characteristics, from most to least important.
For example, you might want someone who is:
- Empathetic
- Caring
- Good listener
- Logical
- Direct
- Questioning
- Non-judgmental
- Organized
- Curious
- Flexible
That’s my list. Depending on what challenge you’re facing and your personality and preferences, you should make your own. Then, when you are matched with a therapist, evaluate how well they fit your ideal list.
Fail fast
When you first match with a therapist, try to fail fast. That means, instead of focusing on getting treatment, focus on figuring out if the therapist is a good match based on the traits you identified above. That will enable you to move on quickly if they’re not, and it’s very much worth it to figure that out early.
Tell them your goals, your story, and your vision of your ideal mentor. Ask them whether they think they are a match, and what kind of a treatment plan they would suggest based on the information you provided. And observe them yourself in your initial interactions, focusing on whether they’re a good match. Often, you’ll find that your initial vision of your ideal mentor is incomplete, and you’ll learn through doing therapy what kind of a therapist is the best fit for you.
Choose a small but meaningful subgoal to work on first
This small subgoal should be sufficient to be meaningful and impactful for improving your mental health, but not a big stretch for you to achieve. This subgoal should be a tool for you to use to evaluate whether the therapist is indeed a good fit for you. It will also help you evaluate whether the treatment plan makes sense, or whether it needs to be revised.
Know when to wrap things up
As you approach the end of your planned work and you see you’re reaching your goals, talk to the therapist about how to wrap up rather than letting things drag on for too long. You don’t want to become dependent on therapy: it’s meant to be a temporary intervention. Some less scrupulous therapists will insist that therapy should never end and we should all stay in therapy forever, and you want to avoid falling for this line. When you reach your goals, end your therapy, unless you discover a serious new reason to continue it. Still, it may be wise to set up occasional check-ins once every three to six months to make sure you’re staying on the right track.