Depression
Case Report:
The following are excerpts from an article by Dan Dinello, published in the
Chicago Tribune November 11, 2007:
After 20 years of anti-depressant drugs and therapy, Lisa Ferguson still
struggled with anxiety, poor sleep and panic attacks. Then she met a doctor who
suggested Neurofeedback. Ferguson
gave it a month, saw improvement and stuck with it.
"My sleep is incredibly better," she said. "I can function
during the day without ruminating, without worrying. It's been wonderful."
Professor of neurology at Loyola
University Medical
Center and director of
Neurohe"The objective is to normalize brain waves," said Dr. Kyle R.
Bonesteel, assistant alth Associates. It was Bonesteel who suggested treatment
to Ferguson.
Depression is in fact a complex disorder that finds
various expressions in our clinical populations. We have seen depression
increase in incidence for over a century, to the point where it is becoming the
single largest cause of loss of productive life years around the world.
Depression does not have the visibility that cancer and heart disease have in
our culture, but it has an impact that is comparably devastating. We believe Prozac is
not the answer.
From our own necessarily limited perspective, depression is to be seen as another "Disorder of Disregulation." We can train the brain to pull
itself out of depression and to maintain itself in a better state of dynamic
equilibrium. This finesses the issue of whether the nervous system is the cause
of the problem or the victim. A boot-strapping technique is available to abort
the depressive episode in many if not most of those who are depressed. This
finding is particularly dramatic in those who exhibit the kinds of depression
that are most difficult to treat: agitated depression and suicidality.
People who have a history of suicidality often fall into that pattern quite
suddenly, and even unprovoked. It may not even make sense given their life
circumstances. It is therefore to be seen as principally a problem of brain
organization. The proper Neurofeedback technique can in many such cases pull
people out of suicidal thinking just as rapidly as they fell into it, often in
a single 45-minute session. Over time, the brain is trained toward stability,
and then a recurrence is no longer expected. If a recurrence does happen, the
remedy lies close at hand. Suicide is a problem of the brain, not of the mind,
in the most intractable cases.
The above will seem like a startling revelation to most readers, but in fact no
one should be surprised. After all, the gold standard in the treatment of
severe depression remains shock therapy, in which a single treatment is
expected to "reset" the system so that depression no longer
manifests. In the perspective of Neurofeedback, shock therapy is just
monumental overkill. A gentle technique such as ours can just as effectively
coax the brain toward a more functional state. At a minimum, the gentle technique
should be tried before the brain is put into an artificial seizure.
Significantly, shock therapy does not involve pharmacology. So it has already
offered evidence to the effect that anti-depressants are not essential to the
resolution of depression.
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