Informed Consent for Deep Brain Stimulation: Increasing Transparency for Psychiatric Neurosurgery Patients

What should a patient know before he or she allows a physician to control a part of the patient's brain? While this sounds like a philosophical thought experiment designed to twist the intuition, it is meant to address the ramifications of a widely used clinical therapy called deep brain stimulation (DBS). Deep brain stimulation is a therapy, approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), to relieve the symptoms of movement disorders, specifically dystonia [1], essential tremor [2], and the effects of Parkinson disease [3], and is currently being studied for a wide variety of psychiatric illnesses [4]. DBS is complicated to employ, requiring the coordinated effort of a team of health care professionals, chiefly a neurosurgeon, a neurologist, and a neuropsychologist.