Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The past few years have been a struggle. You can probably relate. My mental health has gone from alright to bad to worse. It feels like my brain has literally abandoned me. I’ve been diagnosed with a slew of things, one of which is “treatment resistant depression,” which simply means that nothing helps. This is where it comes in handy to have a popular therapist who is very busy with lots of patients. When something works for someone else, I get to hear about it, which is how I heard about TMS. Keep reading below or watch my daily Tiktoks here to learn more.
I am currently about two-thirds of the way through my 30 TMS sessions. My Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) scores have improved by almost 20%. The target is 50% improvement, which my doctor says may be hard because I have “so many comorbidities.” In other words, I have other mental illnesses that will show up as answers on the BDI even if it’s not the depression causing that answer. When you have a list of mental illnesses, it can be hard to differentiate which is causing each symptom. It can be difficult to articulate feelings at all.
This difficulty articulating feelings is why I stopped tracking my moods daily. I was attempting to track helplessness, hopelessness, worthlessness, anxiety, and fatigue. I found myself unable to put my finger on these emotions and saying “meh, it must be a 5” every day. That’s not valuable information, so I stopped tracking.
The TMS treatments are transcranial magnetic stimulation. They use a 3D model of my head to place a coil in the right place to direct electromagnetic pulses at my dorso lateral prefrontal cortex. There are ten pulses then a rest, then ten more for a three and a half minute treatment. There is “overflow” that causes my eye and jaw to pulse along with the magnets. It is mildly uncomfortable but not painful.
I am just getting to the treatment count where they normally start to see big improvement. That is encouraging, since I have already seen some benefit from the treatments. Honestly, I would say this has been worth the (not small) expense even if I saw no further gains, but I look forward to seeing how good it can get. Can I possibly get back to my old self, or better yet, my new and improved self? I’ve been doing a lot of work and sometimes it feels like there is nothing to show for it. I’m in a funny place where I am simultaneously better off and worse off than I was three years ago. I try to focus on the better.
Stay tuned for another blog post as I finish up my treatments and follow me on TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook for daily updates.