Brain Zapping: Trans-crainial Direct Current Stimulation and Depression

By Peter Rodman

A depressed man's personal experiments with a home-built (for about $20) low-current brain stimulator. A circuit diagram is included. The experiments cover four months and were mostly positive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Rodman
• Release date: Feb 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310664502

Peter Rodman

Peter Rodman lives in Sacramento, California. He is generally considered to have more bad habits than good points. This need not be a concern, as you are welcome to read his stuff without ever actually meeting him. Please review what you read, whether you like it or not. Even a bad review is more helpful than silence.

Book preview

Introduction

No, I did not actually zap my brain, that was just to get your attention. The current involved will only give a light-emitting diode a faint, faint glow.

I am not a doctor; I do not recommend anyone do the stuff I have done. What I am, is a depressed man with some slight skill building electronic circuits. My diagnosis has been, over the past 20 years, clinical depression, severe depression, then refractory depression (meaning drugs do not work.) I have not tried electro-convulsive therapy because the sedation required for the treatments would prevent my driving for 2-4 weeks, an impossibility.

I picked up most of this information on the Internet, and, view it all with suspicion. Trans-cranial Direct Current Stimulation has been used successfully by medical doctors to treat seizures in children, and all sorts of claims for increased learning ability, pain relief, math understanding, and depression have been made, but not studied by doctors. The reasons why the medical profession are ignoring this sound like paranoia. I don’t know why something so simple isn’t being methodically studied.

I used myself as a subject, because I