How It Works: The Science
The use of medications or medical procedures to reduce the symptoms of a range of mental health and addiction issues
What is biomedical therapy?
Used to treat depression, anxiety, chronic pain, or insomnia
What are antidepressants, including serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) used to treat?
This treatment helps people with treatment-resistant depression, but people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may also benefit.
What is ECT (electroconvulsive therapy)
In some states like California, only a psychiatrist or physician can prescribe mental health medications, not therapists. In others, a technician or nurse practitioner can perform the therapy.
What is a rule for biomedical therapy?
A new drug Cobenfy that targets muscarinic receptors in the brain and helps with positive and negative symptoms of this disorder.
What is a new(er) drug to help with schizophrenia.
Biomedical Treatments are pretty effective and at least one of the different types can help.
What is the effectiveness of Biomedical therapies?
This treatment uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain to improve depression symptoms; it is used when other treatments have not worked
What is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)?
A dip back into past symptoms, kind of like a relapse, after TMS
What is a TMS dip
Focuses on the biological causes of conditions.
What is does biomedical therapy focus on?
This form of treatment involves using an electrical current to induce seizures to help alleviate the effects of severe depression.
What is electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)?
A tiny wire (electrode) into the brain to target electrical irregularities and produce a more normal pattern of brain activity. The wire, or lead, is then connected to a neurostimulator device that is implanted near the collarbone. As needed, the device delivers current to nudge the cells in the brain into a regular electrical rhythm.
What is the procedure for DBS (Deep Brain Stimulation)?
This is a highly controversial procedure used in the 20th century to treat people with schizophrenia in which parts of the frontal lobe of the brain are destroyed or their connections to other parts of the brain severed
What is a Lobotomy?