The Wearable That Treats Depression at Home Without Medication — Flow Neuroscience's CMO Explains
One in four adults in England is living with anxiety or depression. That's not a statistic from a bad year — it's the finding of the most rigorous long-term mental health survey in the world, and the trajectory has been heading in one direction for three decades. We are, by any measure, in a mental health crisis. And the treatments we have been relying on — antidepressants, talking therapies with months-long waiting lists — are simply not reaching enough people, fast enough.
takeaways
Dr Kolta Garcher explains that around 1 in 4 people in England have anxiety or depression, and that an estimated half of people with depression are undiagnosed even with good healthcare access.
Depression is described as very individual and on a spectrum, often showing up as poor sleep, low motivation, emotional numbness or relationship and work issues rather than obvious sadness.
Flow is a wearable device using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) at 2 milliamps to gently stimulate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area linked to executive function that can be underactive in depression.
The standard protocol is 30 minutes, 5 times a week for 3 weeks, and the device can be bought over the counter in the UK and EU, while in the US it is prescription-only after FDA approval.
A Nature-published trial of 174 patients found 57.5% of people in remission at 10 weeks, rising to 67% among those already on antidepressants, with reported side effect rates under 4% among over 60,000 users.
The conversation contrasts Flow's side effect profile with SSRIs, which can carry weight gain, sexual dysfunction (sometimes long-lasting) and difficult withdrawal, and looks ahead to more personalised, measurement-based depression care.
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