Happiness is a magnet
- 05 August 1995 by David Concar
- Magazine issue 1989
FIVE stretches in hospital, one suicide attempt and a history of failed medication that would make a lab rat shudder, the patient, an American woman in her late forties, was no stranger to depression. So when, last November, a team of psychiatrists decided to try something new, the air was hardly thick with optimism. Especially when that something was a hand-held electromagnetic device the size of a baseball glove.
At first, nothing much seemed to happen, but over time the patient's state of mind gradually improved, so much so that eventually she reported feeling completely well for the first time in three years. Yet all the doctors had done was to hold the magnetic device against the front of her head, on the left side, for 20 minutes every other day. And all the device had done was emit pulses of a magnetic field which the patient could hardly feel. ...
