You’ve been trying for months, if not years, to improve your mental health with psychiatric medications, to no avail. While psychiatric medications have been a godsend for millions of people, they’ve also proven ineffective for a large number, too. In fact, about 30% of people are resistant to antidepressant medications for depression.
We want you to know that there’s still hope. Recognizing that pharmacological solutions aren’t always effective, Dr. Diana Ghelber and the skilled mental health team here at Institute for Advanced Psychiatry offer alternative approaches to psychiatric medications, including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) therapy.
When antidepressants were first introduced in the 1950s, they went on to become the frontline treatment for many mental health issues, including depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome, anxiety, and even chronic pain.
These medications work by altering the chemicals in your brain to better control your mood regulation. More specifically, many of these medications work by ensuring that your levels of certain “feel-good” chemicals, namely serotonin, are in ample supply.
While this pharmacological approach has helped millions of people, it’s not right for everyone. As we mentioned, nearly a third of people don’t respond to antidepressants and there have also been issues with antidepressants losing efficacy over time.
Until recently, psychiatric medications and therapy were really the only solutions that were being used for mental health issues. TMS therapy was first introduced in the mid 1980s, but it’s only recently gained traction thanks to its increasing successes in addressing treatment-resistant mental health disorders like depression.
TMS is a noninvasive treatment in which we use a combination of electrical and magnetic impulses to target the areas of your brain that control mood regulation.
At our practice, we use the FDA-cleared BrainsWay Deep TMS™ system, which excels when it comes to treatment-resistant depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. With Brainsway, we’re able to safely access certain structures in your brain and target them with electromagnetic energy. This energy influences the target structures in a way that promotes healthier neural activity.
In most cases, we perform a series of BrainsWay TMS treatments — 10- to 20-minute sessions, five days a week or so, over the course of 4-6 weeks. This intensive therapy typically works quickly to alleviate symptoms and, by the end of your treatments, provide you with long-term results.
Since the TMS treatments are noninvasive, there’s no downtime afterward, which means you can keep up your normal routine during your TMS therapy.
If you’re frustrated with your psychiatric medications and you want to explore whether TMS therapy is right for you, please contact one of our offices in Granbury or Fort Worth, Texas, to set up a consultation.
