Nearly one in five people in the United States (46.6 million) struggles with a mental health illness. This includes both children and adults. And these numbers are only continuing to grow, especially in light of recent events.
One of the first lines of defense against mental health disorders are medications — which can work well for some, but not for others. If you find yourself with a treatment-resistant mental health issue, it may be time to explore transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) therapy.
At the Institute for Advanced Psychiatry, Dr. Diana Ghelber and our team offer TMS therapy to help our patients overcome mental health issues like depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
If your psychiatric medications are failing you, explore how our innovative TMS therapy may be able to help.
TMS therapy is a treatment that’s designed to address major depressive disorder and OCD, especially among those who’ve tried, and failed, to treat the issue using pharmaceutical options.
To be sure, psychiatric medications, namely antidepressants, have helped many people overcome mental health issues, but this approach can be hit or miss.
To start, it can take months before you find the right combination of medications as there’s no one-size-fits-all pharmaceutical solution. Second, the side effects of these medications can be significant, and this means some people trade one problem for another. Lastly, since many people don’t respond to these medications, it may turn out that they’ve wasted months, or even years, and are still left struggling with their mental health.
To put some numbers to the problem, 40% of those who suffer from depression, which is one of the more common mental health issues, don’t respond well to medications or find the side effects too cumbersome.
If you’re among those who haven’t found relief through psychiatric medications, TMS therapy may present a great solution.
While the human brain still remains much of a mystery, we do know that mood disorders like depression affect certain areas of your brain. More specifically, certain areas of your brain can go dormant, contributing to your mental health issue.
Granted, this is an oversimplification of what happens, but we’ve found that one of the keys to battling mood disorders is to reawaken these areas, which is exactly our goal with TMS therapy.
With TMS therapy, we use a magnetic field to stimulate a specific region in your brain to activate healthier neural pathways. To accomplish this, we use the BrainsWay® device, which was cleared by the FDA to treat depression and OCD.
Not only is BrainsWay noninvasive, it doesn’t typically produce any major side effects.
To give you an idea of the efficacy of TMS therapy with BrainsWay, one study found that one-third of those who turned underwent BrainsWay treatments for their OCD experienced a 30% reduction in symptoms.
The BrainsWay TMS treatment process is incredibly easy — you simply come in and we place a helmet over your head to deliver the stimulation. In most cases, we recommend that you come in for five sessions a week during the first four to five weeks. After that, we ratchet down the frequency of your visits over the following weeks and then use TMS for maintenance treatments as needed after your initial course of TMS.
If you’re tired of struggling with ineffective medications to treat your mental health problems, contact one of our two locations in Fort Worth or Granby, Texas, to explore how TMS therapy can help.
