Week Three

It is nice to hear from you, thank you for responding. I have struggled with depression since I was a child and also with increasing anxiety as I have gotten older. Both of my parents struggled with depression, anxiety, and OCD. My sister also has struggled with depression and anxiety. There are suicides within my extended family as well… so it seems it is at least partially genetic… I started taking antidepressant medications over twenty years ago… Prozac, Zoloft, Cymbalta… one after another has been prescribed to me. Currently I take 10 mg per day of lexapro. I have never gotten a lot of help from medications. Maybe I would be even worse without them. I was also prescribed benzodiazepines to help w insomnia and anxiety and have been trying for over a year to get off the benzodiazepines. I have managed to reduce dramatically the dose but the last bit has been tremendously challenging and I currently take 3/4 of a 2 mg diazepam every evening- just reducing from the whole pill to 3/4 of the pill was a nightmare for me and my depression got frighteningly bad. For many years I had a successful career but for the past six years I have found it impossible to hold a job. My life feels at a standstill, I am on disability, my social circle is small, I find it difficult to enjoy even simple things, and I read about TMS online and asked the psychiatrist who follows my medications about it. He gave me a referral. It felt to me like making this commitment to do the TMS was a communication to myself and to life itself that I needed intervention, needed help, just did not have the power to face life and face the challenges in my life without something major changing.

Hi Colleen, Next week is my last full week of treatment, then taper to 3 a week, then 2, then 1, then off. The Dr at the clinic said they do maintenance treatments once per month or once per three weeks for some clients, I do not know yet about that. I wondered what your experience has been or what you do for maintenance treatments if you care to share about it.
The psychiatrist at the clinic I go to says with the long term serious depression I have that it is best to take a multi-pronged approach, medication, therapy, TMS. I think next week is week eight for me but Christmas week I had four sessions and New Years week just three sessions. I think my total will be 40 sessions with the taper sessions included.
I have experienced some good days and good moments and new experiences, like one day I felt competent and motivated and a desire to contribute and interact with people that was really new and different for me, like this huge weight of hopelessness and negativity was gone. It felt pretty dramatic. My anxiety overall has diminished throughout the course of the treatment. I have noticed that a lot of what I thought was objective facts about my life turns out to be projection of my inner depression thoughts and feelings. Some days I feel a sense of possibility and openness. I have not been waking up with the huge not of fear in my heart and gut and the dread of having to face another day. All that being said it seems like I get to a new layer of the depression, like last week I felt strong experience of lack of motivation or ability to feel pleasure or anticipation of positive experience, I felt kind of really flat most of the week, although also I had some really pleasant and fun conversations. It is a mixed bag I guess… it feel like a worthwhile journey for sure. I do feel some disappointment that I have not experienced anything like consistent lifting of the depression. My Dr says she is still hopeful, I have another week of full treatment, and she said some people get benefits after treatment has ended.
I think it would be beneficial for me if I exercised more consistently, I have thought about it but haven’t gotten myself to the gym and it’s been rainy. Sometimes I will want to do something but still have a negative fear/expectation stop me from following through. I still feel like there are scales on my eyes metaphorically speaking that if they were gone I would see possibilities and options that I don’t currently see….

Wow Thank you for all the information on your journey Colleen, I cannot wait to hear what else you have to say. I think it is very fortunate that you had a Dr. that also underwent TMS and knew first hand what depression is like. It also sounds like your TMS team was/is willing to be creative and try things to meet patients individual needs. I don’t know if that is quite the case where I go. But maybe if I knew what exactly to ask for some time in the future, they would be willing to provide it.
I am on a different machine, not the neurostar. I forget the name of this machine but my sessions are twenty minutes each, instead of the longer sessions w the neurostar. I was assured this machine has been well tested for positive results. The one thing I get anxious about is whether it is placed right during each session, because this machine doesn’t give feedback about that. Sometimes I worry that they don’t have it in exactly the right spot and that is impacting the results I am getting. Hopefully this is just me worrying and not true. I hope I will continue to see changes after the treatments are over! Like today, I could not think of anything at all I wanted to do and I have just been reading most of the day. Not exactly my hoped for state of being, it would be nice to feel more desire and motivation I guess.
Thanks again Colleen!