Having received my psychology degree from a university that prided itself on having a humanistic/phenomenological program that rejected medical intervention, and at the same time, having needed medical intervention for my own depression, I find myself sort of torn on this issue. In fact, whether you realize it or not, we're playing out an age-old debate in the world of depression treatment between the more scientifically minded and the more philosophically minded.
I think that the social view of depression has changed dramatically in recent years, and some of that has been for the bad as well as the good. On the one hand, our culture (and by "our" I mean American, as I can't speak for other countries) no longer attaches quite so much of a stigma to depression as it once did, and it is more accepting of those who seek treatment. On the other hand, the explosion in medications to treat it has, to a certain extent, undermined the psychological aspect of depression and encouraged many who experience it to take a pill and be done with it.
I know many staunch humanists who say, "someone suffering from depression should step away from the pills and deal with their problems in therapy!" Well, the issue here is that if someone can't get out of bed long enough to face their problems, this isn't going to do much good. I have a problem with any treatment that ignores either the psychological or the medical side of depression, so I feel no different about more radical interventions like surgery or brain implants. I think that the duty of medical intervention is to see that someone with depression is safe from harm and functioning. After that's accomplished, then talk therapy should be applied.
When we imagine things that sound like lobotomy, I think that we envision it like our psychology textbooks explain it: the state orders someone to have a part of his or her brain crudely chopped off to keep him or her from being violent. I don't think that exploring brain surgery to treat depression now is at all akin to that. I would hope that any treatment such as this now would keep the best interests of the patient in mind, and would seek, at all costs, not to mess around with any part of the brain that would affect one's fundamental personality (and on this I feel very strongly: no treatment should seek to cure someone's depression at the risk of losing some part that makes them the person that they are - but I don't know enough about the workings of the brain to speak intelligently on how this looks in brain surgery). But, if medication doesn't work, if therapy isn't working, someone who is deeply frustrated with crippling depression will want to try something, anything else that could help. As long as extensive research is done into any medical intervention (and I still would like to see plenty more work done on this particular treatment), and psychological treatment is still a part of it, I say that we should investigate every avenue possible to help those suffering from depression. Anyone who is depressed will tell you: sometimes it just doesn't make any sense why we feel depressed, and even after years of therapy, I still couldn't tell you with 100% certainty where mine came from. Even without fancy scientific studies, one who feels this way knows in their gut that something more is wrong than "my mother didn't breast-feed me" or "no one understands me," and that wrong is something biological. Talk therapy is GOOD, and it helps you learn how to deal with situations that might trigger a depressive episode, or work out any deeply-rooted problems you have, but you need to be able to get out of bed first. I don't think everyone should be lining up to get their brains operated on, but if someone is seriously out of options, more drastic measures can, and I think must, be considered.
I apologize for this lengthy treatise, but it was something I had to get off my chest. The long and the short of it is: depression hurts. There is a long way we still must go in treating it. If we can help those who really need it by operating on their brains without harming them or altering who they are fundamentally, we should investigate those possibilities while at the same time remembering that we are dealing with real people with real emotions and not just test subjects.
*steps slowly off soapbox*
