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Do you feel sad all the time? Have trouble concentrating and making decisions? Or experience feelings of guilt, worthlessness and helplessness that won’t go away?
If so, you may be one of the 19 million Americans who suffer from depression. For most, treatment involves admitting they have a problem, talking regularly with a licensed professional and taking their prescribed medication.
Charles Donovan, 47, of St. Louis, did all that, but none of it worked. He is one of the 4.5 million Americans – 23 percent of depression patients – who suffer from Treatment-Resistant Depression or TRD.
He believes his battle with the condition began on December 9, 1968 when he was just 11 years old. “I lost my mother in a house fire that day,” says Donovan.
In the 1960’s and 70’s depression in children was not recognized by the general public or even within the medical community. “I kept hearing people say children are remarkable, they bounce back so quickly, but I couldn’t,” says Donovan.
Because of the stigma of depression, most sufferers mask this disease, and Donovan was no different. He spent the next several years perfecting the art of hiding his problem.
It wasn’t until the spring of 1980, while a senior at Georgetown University, that he finally decided to see a doctor. “Over the course of the next 20 years, I had tried everything,” he says. “Psychotherapy, more than a dozen different antidepressant medications and even shock treatments, but none of them had any kind of lasting effect.
“And it certainly isn’t a career booster talking about your chronic depression at the office,” says Donovan. Just when he had given up hope of ever finding relief from the demons that haunted him, Donovan had a conversation with his psychotherapist that he says saved his life.
“During a therapy session in October of 2000, she casually mentioned having seen an article in TIME or Newsweek about vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), a possible new treatment for my condition,” says Donovan. “When I saw my psychiatrist a week later, I asked if he’d heard about it. He told me there was a clinical trial about to begin at St. Louis University, which was just 10 minutes away from where I lived.”
Donovan spent hours on the phone working to track down the department doing the study. Once he found it, he got his name on the list of potential candidates, and four months later was approved to be a study subject in the pioneering double-blind placebo-controlled trial for the investigation of VNS as treatment for chronic depression.
All 235 participants had vagus nerve stimulators surgically implanted in their upper left chests. A lead wire was tunneled underneath the skin and coiled around the left vagus nerve. The procedure took just 90 minutes to perform, and was done on an out-patient basis.
During the short term part of the study only 50 percent of the patients had the stimulator activated (the “treatment” group). It cycled thirty seconds “ON” and five minutes “OFF” around the clock.
Eventually, the device was turned “ON” for those study subjects in the “placebo” group. Donovan believes he was in the placebo group. He was implanted in April of 2001, but it wasn’t until December of that year that he started to notice an improvement in his mood.
“The improvement was very gradual,” he says. “I experienced a series of up ticks over four to six months that allowed me to start a new life. Eventually, I didn’t feel the need to hide from crowds and avoid people anymore. I actually started to live my life.”
Once he started feeling better, Donovan decided to write a book about his experience so he could help others. “I won the mental health lottery. That’s the way I see it,” he says. “I was originally going to write a blog, maybe a 20 page e-book, but I said to myself, I have a responsibility to get this story out, so I self published a book.”
In “Out of the Black Hole: The Patient’s Guide to Vagus Nerve Stimulation and Depression,” Donovan shares his personal experience with depression and his eventual recovery. The book also includes detailed information about the procedure he underwent, and a depression patient’s manual.
To learn more about vagus nerve stimulation, which is the only FDA approved long-term treatment option for TRD, log on to Donovan’s Web site: www.OutoftheBlackHole.com. There you’ll find details about the treatment, along with facts about mental health disorders and links to organizations that can help.
“Out of the Black Hole” can be purchased directly from Donovan’s Web site. The book is also available through Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble bookstores.
EDITOR’S NOTES: In the brain, the vagus nerve protects the areas believed to be responsible for seizures, mood, appetite, memory and anxiety. Vagus nerve stimulation was originally used to treat seizures in epilepsy patients. Researchers decided to test VNS on depression patients after learning one of the side effects was improved mood. - ARA |
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