Received: 05. 05. 2009 Accepted: 16. 06. 2009 Original article Abstract Brain State Conditioning(TM) (BSC) is an innovative technology that optimizes brainwaves in real-time to achieve balance and harmony of the human brain. Since the brain function is imbalanced in individuals with psychiatric disorders and neurological diseases, we explored the possibility of using this technology to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. We conducted a pilot study of 8 adult subjects who had symptoms of PTSD, depression and anxiety problems. The severity of symptoms was evaluated by Objective survey and Beck's inventory for depression and anxiety. After the initial assessment of brain maps, individuals were administered with highly personalized training sessions, for example 4-5 sessions over 4-5 days. After the administration of BSC, we found a consistent decline in Beck's inventory scores, which implied alleviation of depressive and anxiety tendencies. All subjects in the study responded to BSC technology and showed noticeable improvement in the quality of their lives. Thus we suggest that BSC is a viable approach to brainwave optimization to help people overcome health problems due to PTSD and depression. Key words: Post-traumatic stress disorder, Depression, Psychiatric disorders, Brain plasticity, Brainwaves, Brain oscillations, Neuronal oscillations, Brain maps, Neural networks. (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Introduction Psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, particularly major depressive disorder (MDD), are serious medical illnesses that affect millions of people worldwide, including an estimated 20 to 25 million adults in the United States. The financial burden is huge and many don't seek medical help and yet others simply can't afford to pay for the much needed medication. The two disorders manifest some overlapping symptoms but they represent two separate disease entities. PTSD is more of an anxiety disorder that people acquire after exposure to traumatic or life-threatening events, such as war, rape, earthquake, hurricane, airplane crash or automobile accident. PTSD can cause problems like flashbacks, or feeling like the event is happening again, trouble sleeping or nightmares, feeling alone, angry outbursts, feeling worried, guilty or sad. Depression or MDD is a medical illness that characteristically demonstrates a significant change in an individual's ability to function on a daily basis. The symptoms of depression include persistently sad or irritable mood, pronounced changes in sleep, appetite, and energy, difficulty thinking, concentrating, and remembering, physical slowing or agitation, lack of interest in or pleasure from activities that were once enjoyed, feelings of guilt, worthlessness, hopelessness, and emptiness, recurrent thoughts of death or suicide and persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment, such as headaches, digestive disorders, and chronic pain. Although the mechanism of pathogenesis of PTSD and MDD is not very well understood, both of them have a neurobiological basis (1, 2) and they are manifested as the pathologies of the human brain, most likely because of imbalanced brain function (3). In the present study, we describe that the PTSD and depressive tendencies can be suppressed though brain training using Brain State Conditioning (BSC). Materials and methods We studied a total of 8 adult subjects in this pilot study. Four of these cases (all males aged 49 to 59 years) had goals to overcome manifestations of PTSD while the other four cases (2 males aged 35 to 38 years and 2 females aged 41 to 60 years) had goals to overcome depression. They all had additional goals such as improving sleep, cognitive performance, social interaction, decision making, attention and focus, drug addiction and dependency, motivation, mood stabilization, happiness and well-being, weight, pain and anger management, and physical health and balance, etc. …