I know someone who's state government employer paid for an extremely similar sounding therapy to be administered by themselves at home in 2023 unprompted. As the article says, research into this as a training or learning method has been completely dropped. It's some sort of emotional mood therapy now.
As much as this tech weirds me out I have seen and heard of no negative side effects. (And until today I was extremely skeptical of the sparse positive effects.) I'm really glad I read this article because it gives me a starting point to do more research on it.
If you want to read up on negative side effects, "TMS ruined my life" will get you stories. TMS isn't tDCS, but it's similar enough to at least give you pause. Personally I had TMS for anxiety and depression and it worked for me, but that's just as anecdotal as a bad story. I don't think we are at a point with understanding the brain to really understand what we're doing, other than it seems to work, most of the time.
I find it very interesting how when i search that term, 3 of the top 5 results are obviously SEO'd puff pieces from clinics themselves posted to their website, conspicuously containing multiple uses of the phrase "TMS ruined my life". The actual content of the page reads exactly like one of those $50,000 rehab places that scam vulnerable people out of huge sums of money. Like they're trying to keep those vulnerable people from thinking twice about their personal wellbeing and instead blindly keep their faith in the entity which will quickly, safely, and pleasantly fix all your problems (tm)
Embarrassingly, I may be wrong about knowing someone who went through this therapy. I talked to them and there's some disagreement about what exactly it was. I know it wasn't TDS or anything near that powerful/inensive but I can't confirm it was TDCS.
Caution this is very very experimental but you can build your own, and there are kits on Amazon that sell products as well. There's a whole universe of jargon and methodologies concerning "montage" but the community likes to study these through scientific right.
