Is an Antidepressant Right for You? Ask Your Brain Waves

People getting treated for depression often have to suffer through months of trial-and-error testing of different drugs to see which of them—if any—will help. For a long time, scientists and clinicians have hoped for a biological means of diagnosing depression or predicting which patients will do better on a given treatment. A new study takes a step toward the latter kind of prediction by finding a distinctive signature with the noninvasive technique of electroencephalography (EEG) to test who will benefit from one common antidepressant.