Summary
Currently, drugs or general electrical stimulation are used to treat mental illness. Many of the drugs that treat depression increase the level of the neurotransmitter serotonin and many of the drugs that treat schizophrenia block the actions of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Although treatments exist for schizophrenia, depression, and other neurotransmitter-related disorders, these treatments don’t work in all cases, and there are side effects when using pharmacological and electroconvulsive (shock) therapies. Moreover these therapies treat the disorders but do not cure them, and treatment may have to be continued for the life of the patient.Description
This new method identifies ways to uniquely manipulate the electrical activity of the nervous system for the treatment of mental disorders. By very specifically altering electrical frequencies at specific neural sites, using, for example, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), the neurotransmitters generated by those stimulated neurons could be changed to the desired neurotransmitter profile.