With regard to depression, medications don't exactly "fix" the problems; they mask the symptoms. When the medication is stopped the issues or symptoms return. Medications by their very nature are designed to block off feelings. They enable you to escape from the pain. However, more than pain is lost; pleasure in life is also diminished. And once the drug wears off, the problems are still there.

Through the use of fQEEG, neurodevelopmental assessments, neuro-processing and neuro-function tests, we can determine what is the root cause of the depression. The objective measurements and assessments help determine whether the depression is an organic, psychological or processing issue. We look at depression from its root cause(s)  rather than from expressed symptoms in order to correct neuro-circuitry and re-balancd the brain.

Balance the Brain
Source: University of California LA

The hallmark of depression is now believed to be too little activity in the right and left prefrontal lobes (behind the eyes) and the right and left parietal lobes (on the side of the brain, toward the top), and too much activity in the limbic system.

But the limbic system and prefrontal lobes, which govern thinking, are wired together, notes Dr. Helen Mayberg, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto who uses PET (positron emission tomography) scans to map depression in the brain.

In healthy people with sad feelings, the brain can quickly shift back to equilibrium. "The phone rings, the baby cries, the boss calls, and you immediately disengage from the sadness and the thinking part of the brain turns back on," Mayberg says. With depressed people, this ability to shift back to equilibrium is altered.

In some people, that may be because area 24a, a monitoring center for emotions, is stuck in the "on" position, Mayberg says. Curiously, however, depressed people with high activity in area 24a often get better with drug treatment, while those with low activity in 24a don't.

Dr. Andrew Leuchter of UCLA can predict which patients will respond to drugs with a simpler tool. Using a system called QEEG (for quantitative EEG), Leuchter studies depressed people with low activity in their prefrontal lobes. Then he looks at what happens when they start taking Prozac, which typically takes 6 weeks to improve mood.

(BrainTrackers uses the same objective measues but instead of medications strengthens the effected areas through neurotherapy, neurodevelopment exercises and Chinese Medicine.)

In the first few days, some people show a further decrease in prefrontal lobe activity followed by an increase about 1 week later. When Leuchter follows the patients over time, those who respond best to drugs are those who show the initial decline, a clue that may help doctors predict for whom the drugs will work.

Today, brain researchers view depression, which strikes about 19 million Americans, as a malfunction of circuits that connect the limbic system ("emotional brain") to the prefrontal cortex ("thinking brain") and the brain stem and hypothalamus, which control basic functions such as sleep, appetite, and libido.

In truth, there never was much proof that depression was merely a serotonin deficiency. That was an inference from data showing that people who are aggressive or suicidal often have low serotonin. But now, despite the obvious efficacy of serotonin-boosting drugs like Prozac (fluoxetine), it's clear that when a person is depressed, there's a lot more going wrong in specific areas of the brain than just low levels of serotonin.

Depression can be treated by getting the electrical circuits back to normal. The brain works by chemical and electrical signals. When an electric current passes through one cell, the cell releases a neurotransmitter, which floats to the next cell, causing it to "fire up electrically," notes Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, director of the transcranial magnetic stimulation lab at Beth Israel Deaconess.