Hi, it’s Tom from Optimal TMS and today we’re going to talk about depression.
Depression is a set of feelings or emotions that tends to leave people feeling empty or lonely or sad that can last for long periods of time. There are situations where depression is situational where something may happen in life or something may occur in life that makes you feel a little bit down or for a period of time feel that emptiness or sadness.
In some cases, that resolves on its own with time. In other cases, there are situations where it endures. And in those cases, we want to help try and address that so you can get back to life and feel like yourself.
When depression endures, sometimes people can be diagnosed with major depressive disorder. And in those cases, there are feelings that tend to linger or feel stronger or don’t want to go away. And sometimes you feel stuck and you feel like you can’t improve or pull yourself out of those feelings.
When somebody is stuck in these feelings, often times there’s been a change that has occurred. There have been some really interesting or great studies that have come out that have shown us that when somebody’s exposed to high levels of stress and whether that stress is from emotional dysregulation or that stress comes as a result of a situation that you’ve been involved in or that stress comes from an injury that you may have had, it disrupts pathways within the brain.
And if there are disruptions of pathways in the brain, the communication and networking that exists can be slowed down and the brain doesn’t quite process like it once did. With depression, when somebody is stuck, we want to try and help reestablish some of those connections to help processing improve.
The brain has many regions that are responsible for helping regulate and process what’s going on. We have the dorsal prefrontal cortex and that correlates with areas like the subgenual cingulate. We’ve got the limbic system and the amygdala. All of these different regions of the brain have a part to play in how depression is regulated.
There is a network that connects these things together. And sometimes when that network is disrupted due to these stressful situations, there is a change in the way that somebody is processing their emotions.
When people are trying to address these disruptions in their brain, there are many methods that are used. And for many years, most methods have been related to taking medications. There are a lot of medications out there that do a great job for many people. There are also many people who don’t want to take medications. And there are other methods that potentially could work better for people.
Talk therapy or other therapies that can be beneficial make a big impact for a lot of people. But there are things that we can do that also change physiologically some of the functions of the brain and that networking that does occur.
TMS or transcranial magnetic stimulation is one of these things that we can do that makes a great impact on how the brain functions. TMS is different than talk therapy, different than medications in that we are targeting specific regions of the brain.
Whereas things like medications are more systemic or we’re targeting larger areas. With TMS, we’re able to get more focal. We’re able to get more precise and start working on network connections within the brain.
Specifically, TMS is the process of generating a strong magnetic field. The magnetic field that we’re generating is powerful as you would find in an MRI machine, about 1.5 to three Tesla magnet, which is pretty impressive.
When we can take that intensity concentrated in a specific region of the brain, it allows us to change the way that the cellular structure and cellular function works.
This change enables neural pathways to function at their best levels to allow them to return to levels that they were prior to somebody who may have been dealing with depression and the symptoms of depression. The change is significant enough that people are able to get back to life, to feel motivated, to feel engaged, to feel driven to do the things that they felt like they once loved to do but have maybe as of late not been feeling quite as confident in.
TMS is actually allowing neurons within the brain to reestablish network connections and pathways by regrowing portions of the dendrites on the cell. Dendritic spines have been shown in recent studies to physically regrow after sessions of TMS, which is quite an impressive thing that we weren’t actually aware of in years past that the brain had the ability to grow portions of a cell.
So, if you or a loved one are currently working with a therapist, doing talk therapy, or taking medications to treat depression, and are looking for a method of treatment that can make an even greater impact, I would recommend looking into TMS, and we can help you with that.
Please look for information on our website down below to be able to help you address that. We’d be happy to talk to you and get things moving forward to get you back to where you want to be. You can get a free clinical consultation with myself or a member of our team from our website. Again, my name is Tom with Optimal TMS. Thanks for watching.
