You've been trying to find solutions for your mental health, but you feel that you’ve just been spinning around on a hamster wheel with nothing to show for your efforts.
As you are already likely aware, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for mental health, and it often takes many attempts before finding an approach to which you respond well. As an example, approximately 30% of people with depression don’t respond to antidepressant medications.
This story is one we hear all too often here at Institute for Advanced Psychiatry, where Dr. Diana Ghelber and the team offer a much wider range of solutions for improving mental health, including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
In this blog post, we dive into how TMS is playing an important role in helping millions of people to finally overcome tough mental health hurdles — and how long this might take.
Let’s first quickly dive into how TMS works, which can help explain the timeline a little better.
With TMS, we apply magnetic fields to specific areas in your brain that influence your mood regulation. When you have a mental health issue like depression, certain areas of your brain can become dormant and our goal is to stimulate these regions to reactivate them, which should break the hold that the depressive state is having on your central nervous system.
To begin, we first map your brain to figure out which areas to target and then we track which areas respond well to the TMS treatments. From there, we deliver the noninvasive treatments about five times per week for several weeks.
This intensive TMS treatment schedule is designed to reset the neural pathways and neurotransmitter activity in your brain. In effect, we’re getting your brain “unstuck” from unhealthy neuron activity that’s having a negative impact on your mental health.
We mentioned the role that TMS can have in addressing treatment-resistant depression and there are some impressive numbers in this specific group — between 50% and 60% of people who fail to respond to medications do respond in a clinically significant way to TMS treatments. Furthermore, one-third of these people went into full remission from their depression.
So, TMS is clearly a very good choice for depression — treatment-resistant or not — as well as other mental health issues, including:
TMS is also a great solution if the side effects of any treatments are proving to be troublesome: TMS is entirely noninvasive and most people don’t report side effects.
Now let’s get to the tricky question we pose in the title of this blog about how long you have to wait to get results from your TMS treatments.
There’s no single answer as people respond to TMS treatments at different rates. Some of our patients experience improvements during the first week of treatments while others see best results after four or five weeks of TMS treatments.
We know this isn’t a satisfying response, but, remember, we’re working with the brain, which is a complex organ. We want to assure you that we monitor your progress very closely and make tweaks wherever necessary to speed things along. We might also suggest adjunct treatments, such as psychotherapy, which can help push positive results even further.
The bottom line is that we typically expect results from TMS treatments within six weeks, but they often come sooner if a person responds well to brain stimulation.
If you want to improve your mental health through TMS treatments, a great way to get to your results as quickly as possible is to come see us sooner rather than later. To get that ball rolling, please contact our office in Fort Worth, Texas, to schedule an appointment.
