Potential Success With DBS: Reducing Stigma and Addressing Unmet Need

If deep brain stimulation (DBS) is successful for patients with treatment-resistant depression, could this intervention change the practice of psychiatry?

"If we are successful with TRANSCEND, I think that the benefits are multiple," Brian H. Kopell, MD, told Psychiatric Times. Kopell team of experts from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has become the first in the United States to perform a DBS implantation procedure as part of the TRANSCEND trial, investigating this technology for treatment-resistant depression.

These benefits are:

1. There is a huge unmet need in patients that are not responding to standard pharmcotherapy and other interventions.
2. DBS could fundamentally address the idea that mental illness is separate from a brain illness, and help reduce stigma.
3. DBS could alter the way insurance covers mental illness compared with neurological ones.
4. It could usher in more investment into technology for treatment-resistant disorders.

"To have a therapeutic intervention that is firmly in the realm neurology will certainly challenge that dichotomy further," concluded Kopell.

Dr Kopell is a professor of Neurosurgery, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience. He serves as director of the Center for Neuromodulation and codirector of The Bonnie and Tom Strauss Center for Movement Disorders at the Mount Sinai Health System. He has pioneered the use of intraoperative imaging during deep brain stimulation.