With certain therapeutic and Big Pharma approaches to depression discredited, the pioneering North Vancouver psychiatrist Dr Dorothy Reddy, director of Neurogenex, suggests here that it may be time for technological healing.
Read Dorothy Reddy on dTMS and emotion.
"... Depression also damages brain cells, says Dorothy Reddy, MD, owner of Neurogenex. This damage can lead to the actual shrinking of the hippocampus—the part of the brain responsible for your emotions and processing memories—which impairs its function.
A 2013 study found that people with depression struggled to identify objects on a screen that they had seen before or similar to those they'd seen before. This might not sound like a big deal, but it means that their brains couldn't properly recognize patterns—a key mechanism for storing memories."
Trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, or dTMS, as approved by Health Canada and the FDA, is not a panacea for the depressed. But Dr Reddy's research shows that it helps a lot of people, a lot of the time.