TMS THERAPY
FDA-cleared, non-medication depression treatment
Daniel Hageman
I’d been curious about it but never had the time to explore it until after years in private practice in Washington, D.C., I came to North Carolina. That’s where I first saw TMS Therapy firsthand. Once I completed Intensive training in TMS at the Medical University of South Carolina with Dr. Mark George, an early pioneer of TMS Therapy, I was on fire about TMS because of the great results seen in this course of treatment for patients struggling with medication-resistant depression.
So when I came back to my work, I went gangbusters on the TMS program at Novant Health, where I sought to strengthen and develop their TMS program and training. Upon leaving my work at Novant, I opened my wellness center and gladly took a position at Greenbrook TMS as their Regional Medical Director in Charlotte in order to do more TMS and let more clinicians know about it and to educate the public about it. After years and years in practice, if you go into medicine for the right reasons, your goal is to get people better consistently . Because there are so many people that don’t respond to antidepressants you want to have a place to go and Greenbrook TMS Therapy affords that.
Yes. Because life is unpredictable. There are events that can happen in a person’s life that can trigger a depressive episode. The loss of a spouse, a divorce, death of a family member, assault- Genetic makeup can put one person more at risk than another person, early childhood experiences, whether they were premature when they were born. There are many congenital or genetic factors that can impact a person’s risk for developing depression, and then there’s life. How someone was raised, whether or not depression was modeled in their home through a parent with untreated depression. There’s many factors. Even with no family history of depression and a fantastic childhood, there are still life circumstances. People should always have their ears and eyes open for it the way we look out for physical illnesses.
Isolation is a big one. Maybe you notice that you haven’t been picking up the phone when it rings, or that you haven’t made any contact with family and friends. There could be someone that you regularly talk to and you find a suddenly that you just don’t have the energy to call them. You’re calling out of work twice a week, you don’t want to see people or do things. When your regular interactions become too burdensome, that’s when you should consider that things aren’t right. Insomnia, loss of appetite, feeling worthless or hopeless and not having the energy to do what you used to love to do are important signs. And unfortunately for some, feelings of not wanting to live or wanting to take one’s own life, is a strong predictor of Major Depression and should be attended to immediately.
Children are so keen, they know what’s going on with their parents. When a parent is suffering with untreated depression, that child notices that the parent is isolating, doesn’t want to play with them like they used to. It’s a loss. With a depressed parent, the child notes the facial expressions, the lack of energy, they perceive the lack of joy. I talk to a lot of adult patients with depression who say “Oh, my mother absolutely had untreated depression” or “My father was definitely depressed. He might not have thought about it that way, but he definitely was.” Once they realize it after going through their own depression and recognize their parent in that, it make a strong impression. Once the depression has been treated, patients notice their relationships with their own children improving. Good parenting requires high energy and a Major Depressive episode saps that. After treatment, their decision-making is better, their irritability is decreased. Patients find themselves enjoying spending more time with their children.
The feeling that I get when a patient looks so much better and is able to say that their experience is so much improved. I’ve had patients tell me “you have saved my life.” Utilizing TMS Therapy, I will say that I’ve experienced more of seeing people turn around and so it’s definitely something that’s worth people knowing about. I genuinely believe that someday, TMS will just be par for the course as treatment for depression the same way antidepressants are now. I consider it a privilege-being let into someone’s life in a way that improves it.
One of the first things is more energy and motivation to get things done as well as improved sleep. They’ll tell me that they’ve noticed they were the one in their family who took the dog out for one of its walks yesterday. They noticed that they actually wanted to make their special lasagna last week, for the first time in two years. With untreated depression, the little joys that we have, the little things we love to do, they’re just gone.
One of my patients had told me that she was driving and stopped on the side of the road to check on something with the car she was towing. When she stopped, she noticed that next to her was a forest, with the sun coming through the trees. It was beautiful-she said. And my patient says she just stood there looking at it. She told me, “Those are the things I used to love. The beauty of nature. For 10 years, I hadn’t noticed it.” Those are the things we take for granted: that we can look at something beautiful and feel it. With depression, that just doesn’t happen and with TMS we often can get it back.
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