Last 2 Weeks of Treatment-Everything Going Haywire

I agree with stingray, you need to finish off the last seven treatments. It’s pretty common for people in treatment to experience the TMS dip(s). In the course of six weeks, you’re stimulating parts of your brain that are underactive and, in some cases, slow down overactive regions. When you work out at the gym to build up your muscles, you will feel sore and even weaker after a workout—particularly in the beginning. TMS is no different. You may have to take one step back to take three steps forward during the treatment. Once you wake up those sleeping neurons and change their polarity, they are going to form no routes and connections. It takes time for this process to complete itself and you’re not going to feel the full benefit until the process is completed. The amount of time it takes for a brain to repair itself varies from person to person. You just need to stick with the program and don’t give up.

As for the resurgence of feelings of depression and self-harm, make sure your doctors know the situation. You may want to talk to them about ketamine, which can help get you over this hump and put the bad thoughts and feelings in check while you are recovering from the TMS. The ketamine is a terrific short term solution for depression, but it’s most effective in addressing issues of self-harm and suicidal ideation.

You’re not alone in this. There are lots of people out there who feel exactly the way you do right now. That said, understand that depression and depressive thoughts are a form of delusion. Those negative thoughts and feelings that keep looping over and over in your mind are not accurate reflections of yourself and the world around you. If you have a thought frequently enough it becomes a belief and if you hold onto a belief long enough, you consider it a fact. So, you can have some irrational guilt about being a lousy son, daughter, wife, husband, parent, employee etc. You fixate on that guilt as part of a thought feedback loop in your mind, which you keep going over and and over (and adding to the negative thoughts every turn through the loop). Over time, those thoughts and feeling become a native belief that you’re a bad person etc. and with more time, that belief becomes and irrefutable fact (to you at least). In truth that fact/belief/thought is a form of delusion which is part of this disease–no different than a psychic cancer cell. Any treatment you’re getting, CBT, talk therapy, pharmacological treatments, TMS, Ketamine, ECT etc. are intended to give you the strength and ability to terminate this negative thought process and improver your ability function, thereby improving your mood. It doesn’t matter how you get there, but your goal is to get to the point where you can recognize that these thought loops and processes are not real and you have the power and strength to tell those little nasty, irrational thoughts to go fvck themselves (and really mean it).

You probably already understand this intellectually, but actually doing it seems impossible right now. Nevertheless, you can get to that place where you have the strength to push those thoughts away but it doesn’t happen overnight (obviously). The TMS can work and help you get there but it may take a little longer of it to kick in. If you need something right now to help you get over the hump until the TMS kicks in, especially if you’re having thoughts of self-harm, you need to discuss this with your doctor and you might want to discuss ketamine infusions or injections. Ketamine is a great short term treatment for most people and it’s particularly effective in quelling thoughts of suicide and self-harm. Even in cases where ketamine doesn’t do anything to relieve the symptoms of depression in a suicidal patient, 90% respond that ketamine stops suicidal ideation and thoughts of self-harm. My wife is currently getting rTMS treatments (treatment 9 was today) and twice a week during her TMS treatment, she is getting a ketamine infusion. Even though the ketamine doesn’t get her out of her depression by itself, it does give significant relief and she looks forward to receiving the ketamine treatments (particularly when she wasn’t getting them with the TMS. She liked just getting the treatment and relaxing for a couple of hours.).

Hey there LAJP,

Just checking in to see how you’re doing. After reading your post from yesterday, it sounds like you were in a much better mood. Maybe you can string two of those days in a row???

–E

Hey Lajp,

Check out my response to today on stingray’s thread. I think it applies to you too. 🙂

–E