Magnesium for Depression?

Maybe. PlosOne has a decent article on it: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article…

But compliance even with magnesium supplementation could be dicey. After all, even among patients who believe in their drugs and whose drugs are life-saving, compliance for popping a pill is less than 50%:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068890/. Thus, even if we convince people magnesium works, along with the placebo effect, we’re unlikely to get great outcomes, simply due to the fact that people are conditioned to not take care of themselves.

Efforts to quantify psychiatric disorders have generally found that anxiety and depression occur in an unmitigated EEG pattern of beta frequencies: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_rel…/2018-11/cp-eib110118.php. In fact, utilizing this finding, companies like Fisher-Wallace have long obtained FDA clearance for therapeutic interventions of running alternate frequency electrical stimulation across the brain in order to literally shift the brain out of pain, anxiety, depression.

Likewise, the Zengar Institute has case studies involving (via neural feedback) the reversal of severe PTSD by helping individuals control their brains to be in beta frequency less.
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Mechanistically, therefore, magnesium may have an ally in this research. That is, vagal tone and heart rate variability align with EEG patterns. This has been the foundational argument in favor of meditation’s and exercise’s benefit for psychiatric disorders. Although, in the case of magnesium, we know that if you just port in magnesium sulfate in the ER, tachyarrhythmia stops. It‘s likely that magnesium better manages this to an outcome of less beta frequency brain activity.