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SAINT: Hope for new treatment of depression

In her garden outside San Francisco, Deirdre Lehman tries to keep her demons at bay. For most of her life, medication and therapy have helped keep her depression under control.

“I’m technically bi-polar,” she said. “You can have episodes of the quiet time where the disease doesn’t appear.”

But when it does appear, for Lehman it’s like tumbling head-first into depression’s deepest abyss.

“I just drop off a cliff,” she said.

Clark, her husband, said one of the scariest episodes came back in 2018: “It wasn’t just depressed; it was suicidal, in a matter of hours.”

Deirdre recalled, “I said, ‘Clark, oh my God, the chatter is starting and I can feel it’s coming.’ This negative chatter about, ‘No one’s gonna love me. I’m ugly, I’m a burden. No one would miss me if I killed myself.'”

Correspondent Lee Cowan asked, “That’s what the chatter was telling you?”

“The chatter was telling me this.”

Clark hid all the knives, and all the pills, too.

She said, “You finally told my family, and then as each of them called, I said good-bye. I wanted to die.”

She was referred to Dr. Nolan Williams, the director of Stanford University’s Brain Stimulation Lab in Palo Alto, California.

“This is a brain emergency,” he said, “and we need to meet this with a really significant intervention.”

He was running a trial for an experimental treatment using targeted magnetic stimulation. It’s called SAINT, which stands for Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy.

“We treat it like a brain disease,” Williams said. “We find the spot to stimulate the brain back into not being suicidal, not being depressed.”

In photos of Deirdre’s first SAINT treatments, just days after that suicidal crisis began, she went from a blank stare, to eating, to actually smiling, all in one day.

She said, “I had no chatter. None.”

According to Williams, “Within 24 hours, she was totally normal.”

“Were you surprised?” Cowan asked.

“Initially, I couldn’t believe it. And at some point, it just struck me that we’d found something that was really, really important.”

The American Journal of Psychiatry just published the findings of SAINT’s latest clinical trial: Almost 80% of the study’s participants saw their severe depression go into remission. Williams said, “It’s huge. It’s huge.”

One of Dr. Williams’ first patients was 83-year-old Merle Becker, who’s tried everything to relieve her depression: “Meds for more fingers than you have on your hand!” she laughed.

Becker described her depression as, “You feel that there’s no light in your life.”

Cowan asked, “And how long were you living that way?”

“It’s been there all my life. Since I was 20.”

She’s a therapist herself, specializing in depression, so she knows what she’s talking about. “Most people with a history of depression, particularly serious depression, feel a sense of shame,” she said. “This is something very deep inside. A heaviness in your body. You’re in a tunnel and there’s no way out.”

Her husband, Bill, has been by her side for 41 years, and he’s seen first-hand how SAINT makes Merle feel more in control.