Can A Video Game You Play With Your Brain Help Depression?
My APA dispatch series continues!
Rapid Acting Mental Health Treatment LA 2025 is Tonight! This is an event at which experts will have rapid conversations about rapid-acting treatments. Think of it as “The Frontier Psychiatrists— LIVE!” Years back, I saw live productions of “Radiolab” and “Planet Money.” This is my homage to that format. It takes a whole team to make it real, and that means a special thank you to Grady Hannah, who had the vision to co-create this with me. This evening, in Los Angeles, we bring you the next edition. It’s at 6 pm tonight.
One of the more exciting developments that I can finally tell you exists? It regards the progress in EEG-fMRI-Pattern (EFP) digital biomarkers in Neurofeedback. Yes, I know, that is a mouthful. It has a brand name to save us all the hassle of saying any of that. It’s called PRISM Suite.
One of our sponsors for the event tonight is GrayMatters Health. They have a remarkable and medication-free treatment called PRISM for PTSD. Here is how it works:
They just got another FDA clearance, this time for use in depression. It’s available at Fermata now. We have already utilized PRISM-PTSD for PTSD for just about a year. The relief our patients are experiencing when they're getting PRISM treatment is qualitatively different from what I'm used to seeing in patients treated for PTSD with other modalities.
What is it? It's a video game you control with your brain…to help you heal. It’s got effect sizes that are larger than those presented in the now-retracted MDMA trials, as published in Psychiatry Research:
I know what you're thinking:
“Muir, tell us about this depression thing.”
They now have an alternate algorithm for treating depression that has been studied in a small sample and evaluated as safe by the FDA—we have to gather more data before it gets clearance for the indication of depression treatment. Does it work? The very short version? Yes, it works…in the initial study of 49 people. This is a small trial, but it’s larger than the pivotal trial that got the clearance for SNT (brand name SAINT) Neuromodulation, by quite a bit.
Prism’s MDD data (available here), which I will dig into more soon when I don’t have set up for my event this evening, is exciting for two reasons. The first is that it may prove another practical option for treating depression without medicine or external stimulation of any kind. With PRISM, the brain is its own stimulator, with a safety profile of which drugs can only dream.
The second is that we see evidence of a repeatable motion in science, leading to multiple treatments for human suffering. They trained an ML model to learn from fMRI and EEG simultaneously to identify changes in the brain. The EEG, now empowered with the data on brain change from the much more expensive and oft-impractical brain scans, is now able to operate independently. You put on an EEG cap and can use your brain to modulate first a trauma circuit, and now a depression circuit. Both approaches can lead to healing from different brain problems. How many more issues can this approach solve? I can’t wait to find out.
The future of mental health is effective. It's not just medicines and therapy. It's changing your brain in ways it’s hard to imagine —safely, quickly, and for the better.
Join us tonight at RAMHT in LA if you are able. We have so many excellent guests!
Our speakers include (with prior gigs in parentheses):
Grady Hannah, Co-Founder, Attentio AI & Co-Founder, NightWare
Kellie Newsome, NP, co-host Carlat Psychiatry Podcast
David Carreon, M.D., co-founder of Acacia Clinics.
Carlene MacMillan, M.D., DFAACAP, FCTMSS, Chief Product Officer at Radial (previously CMO at Osmind)
Daniel Karlin, M.D. Chief Medical Officer, MindMed, (previously at Pfizer, Nightware, Healthmode)
Jay Sanguinetti, Ph.D., Founder, Sanm.ai
Sandhya Prashad, M.D., Medical Director, Houston Ketamine Therapeutics & Houston Deep TMS Therapy, President at American Society of Ketamine Physicians
Sarah Norman, Executive Director, BrainFutures. (previously at CMS).
Chris Aiken, M.D., Director, Psych Partners. Editor of The Carlat Report
Oded Kraft, Co-founder & CEO at GrayMatters Health
Dominik Middelmann, Co-Founder & CEO MDHub
Jonathan Downar, MD, Co-Founder & CMO, Ampa Health
Chris Dougherty, Founder and Chief Strategist at Hydra Strategies
Here is a podcast about PRISM for PTSD from back when I was just a fan who hadn’t roped Oded into this event.