Response to Leentjens and Coenen

In their commentary on my Short Communication [1], Drs. Leentjens and Coenen argue for a more individual approach on whether to continue or discontinue post-trial DBS for MDD rather than base it on overall trial outcome [2]. I generally agree with them on this point. I did not adequately clarify and at times conflated the differences between individual and collective measures of the efficacy of DBS for patients with MDD. However, I wrote that “if … participants do not benefit from it, then there are no medical or ethical grounds for claiming that participants should continue to have these systems implanted and activated in their brains, Lack of access to post-trial DBS would not be unfair to participants if it did not result in symptom relief for them” ([1], p.32).