Ride The Tiger - Deep brain stimulation - Dbs - Pbs
****** RIDE THE TIGER premieres Wednesday, April 13, 2016, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET on PBS. Brandy Ellis has suffered from depression for so long that she decided surgery was the best route. The surgery, which located the nerve connections that cause depression, brought on a sudden remission from despair in Brandy, who has spent years in a nearly vegetative depression.
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But she was desperate.
ELLIS: As you're laying on the table,
you're wondering how you got to the point
where holes drilled in your head sounds like a good idea.
♪
You're just there going,
"I wonder if this is going to work."
MAYBERG: Once we were prepared and had the first electrode in
and we're ready to stimulate,
you know, the instructions were really we're just going to start
and your job is just to record
if you notice anything happening.
NARRATOR: They started low--nothing.
They turned up the electrical impulses
on the electrode's first contact to a moderate maximum.
Still, nothing happened.
MAYBERG: We went to the next contact,
and we turned it on again, didn't get anything.
One possibility could be
we weren't using the right kind of settings.
But we decided we're just going to go in order.
We get to the third one, we start to turn it on,
we're at low current, we don't get anything.
We get to up about five volts, and patient goes,
"Boy, that's interesting."
ELLIS: At some point, they hit a spot.
And Dr. Mayberg noticed, and I noticed.
And she has me describe it.
NARRATOR: The transformation was dramatic.
A sudden remission from despair in a person who has spent years
in a nearly vegetative depression.
Happiness felt like a possibility again.
The success of DBS immensely increased our understanding
of the brain's biology.
The maps created are the lasting legacy of this work;
maps refined with ever more detail,
thanks to help from one of Mayberg's colleagues.
DEISSEROTH: Helen Mayberg and I are great friends.
We've been talking about this sort of thing for a long time.
And it's very clear that ideas from optogenetics already have
potential to help guide things, like placement of electrodes.
INSEL: In some ways, whether it works or doesn't work,
what's really important is what it teaches us about the wiring
that's essential for the regulation of mood.
NARRATOR: Three years later,
Brandy remains free of depression.
ELLIS: ...under my scalp.
The electrodes are still in,
and the wires go down into my frontal lobe,
and they run down into a connection
on the side of my scalp.
That has wires that run down my neck to a battery pack
that I have implanted under my chest wall.
