You may have heard the news that St Johns Wort Liquid is an effective treatment for mild depression.

Mild depression is a depressions that passes quickly. It may not require any diagnosis or treatment. However, when depression becomes recurrent, constant, or severe, it should be diagnosed by a licensed counselor, psychologist, or psychiatrist.

Diagnosis of depression may be crucial to determining appropriate treatment. For example, depression caused by low thyroid function can be successfully treated with prescription thyroid medication. Suicidal depression often requires prescription antidepressants. Persistent mild-to-moderate depression triggered by stressful events is often best treated with counseling and not necessarily with medications.

When depression is not a function of external events, it is called endogenous. Endogenous depression can be due to biochemical abnormalities. There’s a new treatment on the horizon for treating endogenous depression.

Stimulating the brain to treat disease is a concept has been around since the 1940s. Only recently, however, have neuroscientists had the technology to put such devices to use and have been using “pacemakers” for the brain to treat a variety of ailments.

But now researchers at the Cleveland Clinic are using a Brain Pacemaker as a treatment for depression.

“The technique is soon a common treatment for disorders like depression and OCD. Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic, Mass General, Harvard Medical School and Brown Medical School implanted the Medtronics brain pacemaker into 17 people suffering from depression and tracked them for a year, finding significant improvements in mood as well as social and occupational functioning, while 26 patients suffering from OCD were followed for three years and also showed “marked improvement.”

Clinical trials are scheduled for late 2008.

There are a lot of treatments for depression, including lifestyle and dietary changes my be helpful. Although some research has produced mixed results, several double blind studies have shown that food allergies can trigger mental symptoms, including depression.

Individuals with depression who do not respond to other natural or conventional approaches should consult a nutritionally oriented doctor to diagnose possible food sensitivities and avoid offending foods.

Restricting sugar and caffeine in people with depression has been reported to elevate mood in preliminary research. How much of this effect resulted from sugar and how much from caffeine remains unknown. Researchers have reported that psychiatric patients who are heavy coffee drinkers are more likely to be depressed than other such patients.

Bad news for coffee drinkers.  (I just finished off my first pot of the day!)