interesting article

Depression Switch There is this interesting new treatment for depression where they send voltage to this part of your brain named Area 25. Like Area 51 perhaps?

Also, they quote Susan Sontag calling depression as "melancholy minus its charms." I like that - it really bothers me everytime I hear someone say that depression is perhaps a natural state for people, and that antidepressants make us flat and unnaturally happy (which contradicts the idea that they make u flat and feelingless). Some people seem to think being depressed is more artistic, more in touch with life's realities, not pretending everything is ok. I think those people have never actually experienced depression, as there is a big difference between feeling kind of down and dark and writing angsty poetry, versus not being able to snap out of feeling like shit all the time, or even worse, like the woman in the article, feeling nothing at all.

Anyway, the article was a good read, and i find always find it fascinating when people figure out a little something more about how our brains work. I'll end with a quote from the article:

For those of us who've never known depression, recognizing it may help us see depression not as a dead absence but as a live affliction. We might even stop indulging the romantic notion of depression as intrinsic to one's identity. For this notion, too, was tested by Mayberg's experiment. When a steady, 4-volt thrum calmed these patients' anguish, they did not lose their identities. They regained them, feeling again the engagements with the world that most define them: flowers for the gardener, lightness for the cyclist and, for Deanna, a long-missed connection to others.