You’ve been struggling with your depression for far too long and you feel like you're running out of answers. You’ve devoted months, if not years, to finding the right combination and dosing of medications, to no avail. Depression still has you in its grips.
The first thing that Dr. Diana Ghelber and the team here at the Institute for Advanced Psychiatry want you to understand is that you’re not alone— approximately 30% of people with major depressive disorder don’t respond to medications. This category is so large that we’ve designated a subtype of depression to it — treatment refractory depression.
The second important point that we want to make is that medications aren’t the only solution. At our practice, we’ve had great success treating treatment resistant depression with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which we explore here.
There’s still much that we don’t understand about the brain, but we are gaining some insight into what happens when people develop mood disorders like depression.
In very simplistic terms, your brain operates via neurotransmitters that allow nerve cells (neurons) to communicate. These neurotransmitters act as messengers between the cells by carrying signals.
When a person experiences stress or anxiety, these connections can break apart and this loss of connectivity can set the stage for mood disorders like depression to take hold. In other words, your brain cells aren’t communicating well and some areas of your brain, including those that regulate your moods, can malfunction or go dormant.
The goal behind TMS is simple — to wake up dormant areas of your brain that have been disconnected due to issues with neurotransmission. TMS is a noninvasive technique in which we deliver magnetic impulses directly into the areas of your brain that we want to stimulate. This stimulation creates more neural connectivity by increasing neurotransmitter activity between your nerve cells.
The FDA first cleared the way for the use of TMS in combating depression in 2008, and the organization has since recognized the valuable role that TMS can play in treatment-resistant depression.
While studies are ongoing as to the efficacy of TMS in addressing treatment refractory depression, the results so far have been impressive. For example, in a double-blind controlled study conducted at Stanford University in 2021, researchers found that one form of TMS — accelerated intelligent neuromodulation therapy — resulted in rapid remission of severe depression in 80% of participants.
Another meta analysis (a review of many different studies) of rTMS (repetitive TMS) concluded that the treatment excels in safety since there are few side effects and that “the day is not far when rTMS shall be practised routinely for [depression] treatment.”
Our own results here at our practice have been similar and we’ve helped many patients with treatment refractory depression to finally find much-needed relief from their stubborn mood disorder.
If you’d like to explore TMS and whether it might provide the solution you’ve been waiting for, we’re happy to sit down with you. To get that ball rolling, please contact our office in Fort Worth, Texas, to schedule a consultation.
