Maybe you’ve tried antidepressants to help with your depression, but you’ve had little success and the dark cloud still hangs over you. Or, maybe your anxiety is at an all-time high, but you don’t want to take potentially addictive medications.
Whatever your situation, you’re part of the 26% of American adults (that’s around 1 in 4) who are trying to navigate a mental health disorder. And you’re not only trying to figure out how to improve your mental health, you want to find a road forward that isn’t paved with medications.
You’ve certainly come to the right place. Not only are Dr. Diana Ghelber and the team here at Institute for Advanced Psychiatry highly qualified and experienced mental health experts, we also focus much of our practice on improving mental health through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) therapy.
In the following, we explore why more patients are seeking treatments that don’t involve drugs and how we’re answering that call with TMS.
The idea of a magic pill sure is enticing, but the reality is that medications are an imperfect solution for mental health disorders for many different reasons, a few of which we review here:
When the words, “Treatment-resistant,” precede a mental health disorder, such as treatment-resistant depression, it typically means that standard drugs, such as antidepressants, aren’t making much of a difference. The fact is that 30% of people who have major depressive disorder have the treatment-resistant kind and they’re not responding to the drugs.
Some people don’t tolerate the medications that are prescribed for mental health issues all that well and develop side effects that include:
These are just some examples, but you can see that the potential side effects of common mental health medications are no small things.
If you’re dealing with an anxiety issue, such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD), or generalized anxiety disorder, a class of drugs that can quickly ease the anxiety is also highly addictive. We're referring to benzodiazepines, and 30% of the use of this medication classifies as misuse, which is a precursor to a substance use disorder.
Whether the reason for your desire to find nonpharmalogical medication alternatives to improve your mental health is part of this list or not, keep reading to discover our solution.
Back in 2008, the FDA approved TMS therapy to treat major depressive disorder and has since gone on to either approve or clear it for:
And, in Europe, the TMS system that we use — BrainsWay® Deep TMS — has the certification mark for treating PTSD, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
Our point here is that TMS therapy is fast gaining traction around the world as an effective treatment that can improve mental health without relying on medications.
With TMS, we deliver magnetic impulses into certain areas of your brain to encourage neuroplasticity, which then allows your brain to create healthier neural pathways. A great way to describe this is when you have a mental health issue like depression or anxiety, your brain can get stuck. With TMS, our goal is to get your brain functioning on a new network of pathways that favors better mental health.
The TMS treatments are not only devoid of medications, but they’re noninvasive and there’s no downtime afterward. We also feel that TMS offers more of a sustainable solution that isn’t just treating symptoms but getting to the source of the problem — your brain.
To learn more about TMS therapy and figure out whether it’s a good approach for your mental health, please contact us at one of our offices in Granbury or Fort Worth, Texas, to set up a consultation.
