In March of this year while speaking of his lifelong struggle with depression, comedian Neal Brennan, during an interview with Trevor Noah for The Daily Show stated, “I tried something called TMS that worked great, it’s Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. […] I did it, and it actually did more for my depression than anything I’ve ever done.”
Brennan is not the first to publicly endorse this treatment. In her 2013 memoir – Martha’s story: 3,000 Pulses Later: A memoir of Surviving Depression Without Medication, poet and teacher Martha Rhodes described her depression as, “constant anxiety, sadness, fear, and despair,” that, “strangled me.” She wrote, “I felt inexorably alone and as if I were dying a slow death of emotional asphyxiation.” For Rhodes TMS was not, at that point, covered by her insurance, which left her with the choice of moving forward with Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), which was covered, yet highly worrisome to Rhodes due to the potential for memory loss, or investing in a new treatment she’d only read about in a magazine. Rhodes was particularly interested in the fact that unlike ECT, TMS does not require anesthesia and is an outpatient procedure. Rhodes discussed this research with her doctor and decided to move forward with the treatment.
The decision turned out to be a life changing one. “Somewhere around my 20th session [of TMS] I woke up one morning and that disgusting “UGH!!” feeling was gone,” Rhodes said, “a gentle lightness came over me as if I was lifted out of a dark hole.” This is precisely the type of result that Neurostar is hoping for, and the science behind how the treatment works so effectively supports Rhodes’s lasting success.
