Nonpharmacological somatic therapies are among the oldest and the newest biological therapies in psychiatry. Convulsive therapy dates back to the very beginnings of modern biological psychiatry. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) now approaches its 70th anniversary, and older forms of chemically induced convulsive therapy date back even further. Novel somatic therapies are being developed to noninvasively stimulate the brain using electrical or magnetic fields applied through the scalp (e.g., transcranial magnetic stimulation [TMS], magnetic seizure therapy [MST], and transcranial direct current stimulation [tDCS]) via stimulation of the vagus nerve (i.e., vagus nerve stimulation [VNS]), or via electrodes implanted directly into the brain (e.g., deep brain stimulation [DBS]).