Helen S. Mayberg

When psychiatric disease was assumed to arise from a neurochemical imbalance, Helen Mayberg showed through PET imaging that depression was associated with dysfunction in a corticolimbic circuit. She further demonstrated that successful depression treatment impacted activity in this circuit, regardless of treatment modality. She then made the daring postulate that deep brain stimulation of the circuit would help patients with treatment-resistant depression, and in 2005 published a proof-of-principle case series. Multiple centers have duplicated these results for many but not all patients. She has since shown using MRI tractography that differences in white matter targeting correlate with success or failure of the DBS.