Some individuals may start to feel results within the first week while others may not feel them until the end. It is important to trust the process and remind yourself that whatever you are feeling is normal!

No, TMS does not deliver any electrical shocks. It only uses magnetic pulses, similar in strength to an MRI.

TMS is covered by most major insurance providers, including Medicaid. Our TMS coordinator can look into your coverage specifics and give you an overview of your coverage at your free consultation.

TMS has one main side effect being discomfort at the treatment site. This feels different for all clients and is experienced on a spectrum. The majority of people say it feels similar to a tapping on the head. TMS therapy should not cause intolerable discomfort.

TMS does work for the majority of people who complete their treatments. 83% of people have improvement in their depression symptoms and 62% of people go into remission from their symptoms.

TMs is a great option for anyone who struggles with depression, and is especially great for people who have tried antidepressants without noticeable improvements.

Positive results last for different amounts of time from person to person. Right now, clinical studies show that TMS is durable for at least 2 years after treatment. However, there are studies being done to see how long these effects last. Some people go through the program and never need to return, and others do want to come back in a few years if they notice symptoms returning.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a procedure that uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain to improve symptoms of major depression. It's called a "noninvasive" procedure because it's done without using surgery or cutting the skin. Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), TMS usually is used only when other depression treatments haven't been effective.

The FDA also approved TMS for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), migraines and to help people stop smoking when standard treatments haven't worked well. Research continues into other potential uses for TMS, including epilepsy.

When used for depression, OCD and to stop smoking, this treatment involves delivering repeated magnetic pulses, so it's called repetitive TMS or rTMS.

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Transcranial magnetic stimulation, known as TMS or rTMS, may be a safe, effective, and noninvasive option for people who have depression that has not improved with medications. TMS creates a magnetic field to induce a small electric current in a specific part of the brain; the current comes from the magnetic field created by an electromagnetic coil that delivers pulses through the scalp. TMS is an FDA-approved treatment and recently (June 2019), the Brainsway Deep TMS device was approved for the treatment of OCD. There is ongoing research on the use of TMS to treat PTSD and other mental health conditions.

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Sharon Gray* has had depression for most of her life. She was first diagnosed at 30, but she believes her depression started much earlier. Now 61, the retired police lieutenant from Columbus, Ohio, has seen clinical psychologists and psychiatrists and taken antidepressant medication for most of the last three decades. The treatments have left her functional, she says, but still mildly depressed. Every so often, she's suffered periods of more severe depression.

In 2007, desperate for a new option, she flew to Atlanta for a therapy that, at the time, was still experimental: transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. Just past the halfway point in the monthlong course of treatment, "I had what I thought were miraculous improvements," Gray says. "I went to sleep on a Tuesday night depressed, and woke up Wednesday morning not depressed."
 

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Depression is the leading cause of disability in the United States among people ages 15 to 44. While there are many effective treatments for depression, first-line approaches such as antidepressants and psychotherapy do not work for everyone. In fact, approximately two-thirds of people with depression don't get adequate relief from the first antidepressant they try. After two months of treatment, at least some symptoms will remain for these individuals, and each subsequent medication tried is actually less likely to help than the one prior.

What can people with depression do when they do not respond to first-line treatments? For several decades, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT or "shock therapy") was the gold standard for treatment-resistant depression. In fact, ECT is still considered to be the most potent and effective treatment for this condition, and it continues to be used regularly across the country. For many people with depression, however, ECT can be too difficult to tolerate due to side effects on memory and cognition. For those individuals and the many others who have had an inadequate response to medications and therapy alone, there is a newer treatment option called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).

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