ABSTRACT
The majority of modern treatments for depression (talking therapies and
psychopharmacology) arise from two historical schools in medicine and
psychiatry. Modern western medicine largely descends from the
allopaths-who used medicinal compounds in large doses as treatments
(other competing schools were the homeopaths and osteopaths.)
Talking therapies emerged from Freudian theory and modern cognitive
psychology. The area of surgical treatments descends from the barber
surgeons. In contrast to these forms of treatment, reviewed elsewhere in
this book, there is a newly emerging class of antidepressant therapies
which involve stimulation of the brain through physical methods short
of ablative surgery. As a class, these treatments are sometimes referred to
as ‘physical treatments’ or somatic therapies. Modern psychiatrists are
quite familiar with one of these treatments-electroconvulsive therapy,
or ECT. These new treatments include as well, in order of increasing
invasiveness, light therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS),
vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), and to a lesser degree, deep brain stimu-
lation (DBS).
