Cutting-Edge Headset Brings Electric Therapy To Ease Depression At Home

A new kind of headset is helping people feel better at home by using a gentle electric current to treat depression. This approach, known as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), has been found to be effective when used for about 30 minutes several times a week. In the past, this therapy was only done in clinics or labs under medical supervision, but now a study has shown that using a tDCS headset at home can also reduce symptoms of depression.

Depression is usually treated with talking therapy or medicines, but these methods don't work for everyone. Electrical brain stimulation, like tDCS, is being explored as a potential treatment. The headset has two sponge electrodes placed on the forehead, and a mild current flows from left to right. This helps activate brain cells on the left side, particularly in an area called the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Studies suggest that this part of the brain is not as active as it should be in people with depression. So, by using the headset regularly at home, it's helping improve depression symptoms for some individuals.

According to a New Scientist, repeated sessions of stimulation may lead to longer-term changes in the brain cells, increasing their activity levels, says team member Cynthia Fu at the University of East London. "There are probably many brain regions underlying depression." Affecting activity in this region probably changes activity in multiple regions, she says.

To see if people can benefit from such stimulation while using an at-home device, Fu and her colleagues tested a headset made by the Swedish firm Flow Neuroscience, which delivers tDCS to the correct parts of the forehead via electrodes. The firm sponsored the study but "had no role in data analysis, interpretation of data, decision to publish, or manuscript preparation," the researchers write in their paper.

The team randomly assigned 174 people with moderate or severe depression to receive either stimulation from the Flow headset or stimulation from the same device that lasted just a few seconds, so people felt their skin tingling at the start and end of each session.

They were shown how to use the headset at home alone for 10 weeks via an online video call.