You live in fear, you avoid certain people or places, you’re drinking too much, and/or your moods seem to be out of your control. These hallmarks of post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD) can consume your life, making you a prisoner of the problem.
We want you to know that there are solutions — several, in fact — that go a long way toward helping you break free from PTSD. Dr. Diana Ghelber and the team here at Institute for Advanced Psychiatry have extensive experience helping patients break free from PTSD, and we’re confident we can do the same for you.
In the following, we explore some possible solutions for your PTSD.
The frontline treatments for PTSD typically include both medications and psychotherapy. With medications, such as antidepressants, our goal is to reduce your symptoms so that we can work through the trauma together through psychotherapy.
Our psychotherapy may include cognitive behavioral therapy, which is designed to turn your negative thinking around. We may also turn to eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, which can help you to process your trauma. Group therapy, too, can often play an important role as you work out your trauma in a comfortable and safe setting with others who are also suffering from PTSD.
Another effective treatment option for PTSD is TMS therapy, a noninvasive procedure in which we deliver magnetic impulses into certain areas of your brain. In sending these pulses into your brain, our goal is to activate the brain cells that control the release of mood-regulating neurotransmitters such as serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine.
A report that gathered information on several TMS studies and its effectiveness in resolving PTSD found that both low- and high-frequency TMS significantly reduced the symptoms of PTSD. Furthermore, the report concluded that TMS therapy is a promising alternative or add-on treatment for people who don’t respond to more conventional PTSD treatments, such as medications and psychotherapy.
If you’re suffering from severe symptoms of PTSD, we may recommend ketamine infusion therapy. With this treatment, we deliver doses of ketamine into your bloodstream through an IV, where it goes to work to rapidly change your brain chemistry.
To give you an idea about how effective ketamine can be, one study found, “Repeated intravenous ketamine infusions significantly reduce symptom severity in individuals with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder and the improvement is rapid and maintained for several weeks afterwards.”
As you can see, there are many solutions for resolving your PTSD and we want you to rest assured that we work tirelessly until we find the right treatment for you. To get started, contact our offices in Fort Worth or Granbury, Texas, to set up a consultation.
