Treating PTSD With Brain Implants?

DARPA is working on it:

The hope is to implant electrodes in different regions of the brain along with a tiny chip placed between the brain and the skull. The chip would monitor electrical signals in the brain and send data wirelessly back to scientists in order to gain a better understanding of psychological diseases like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The implant would also be used to trigger electrical impulses in order to relieve symptoms.

It’s just one facet of an emerging therapeutic field:

The program is inspired by deep brain stimulation, a surgery that implants a brain pacemaker to treat movement disorders like Parkinson’s and essential tremor as well as paralysis and or patients who are missing limbs.

Similar implants have been used in small trials to treat disorders like major depression but have yet to be widely approved for wider use. SUBNETS plans on demonstrating the technology it develops and then submitting those devices for approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Deep brain stimulation spans approximately 100,000 worldwide patients. But it still has its glitches. The treatment recently sparked headlines when a Dutch man being treated for severe obsessive compulsive disorder developed a strong urge to listen to American country singer Johnny Cash.

Patrick Tucker explains what the program hopes to accomplish:

If the DARPA program is successful, it will yield new brain-monitoring capabilities that are exponentially cheaper smaller, more useful and that collect data when the patient is most likely to actually encounter traumatic stimuli, not just when he or she is in a lab-making data collection much easier and the data more useful. “With existing technology, we can’t really record anxiety level inside the brain. We can potentially record adrenaline and cortisol levels in the bloodstream to measure anxiety. However, if a deep brain implant is to be used (as proposed in this project), it might be possible to monitor activity in the amygdala, and this would be a direct way of monitoring anxiety,” said [University of Arizona neuroscientist Charles] Higgins.

Using that data, the researchers hope to create models and maps to allow for a more precise understanding of the electrical patterns in the brain that signal anxiety, memory loss and depression. The data from devices, when they come online, will be made available to the public but will be rendered anonymous, so records of an individual test subject’s brain activity could not be traced back to a specific person.