Tms Therapy For Depression
If youre suffering from major depression that has been resistant to therapy, medication, and self-help, then TMS therapy may be an option. Transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy is a noninvasive treatment that directs recurring magnetic energy pulses at the regions of the brain that are involved in mood. These magnetic pulses pass painlessly through the skull and stimulate brain cells which can improve communication between different parts of the brain and ease depression symptoms.
While TMS may be able to improve treatment-resistant depression, that doesnt mean its a cure for depression or that your symptoms wont return. However, it could provide sufficient improvements in your energy and drive to enable you to begin talk therapy or make the lifestyle changessuch as improving your diet, exercising, and building your support networkthat can help preserve your depression recovery in the long term.
Types Of Talking Therapy
Talking therapies are psychological treatments for mental and emotional problems like stress, anxiety and depression.
There are lots of different types of talking therapy, but they all involve working with a trained therapist.
This may be one-to-one, in a group, online, over the phone, with your family, or with your partner.
The therapist helps you find answers to the problems you’re having.
For some problems and conditions, one type of talking therapy may be better than another.
Different talking therapies also suit different people.
Finding And Choosing A Psychotherapist
Psychotherapy can be provided by a number of different types of professionals including psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed social workers, licensed professional counselors, licensed marriage and family therapists, psychiatric nurses, and others with specialized training in psychotherapy. Psychiatrists are also trained in medicine and are able to prescribe medications.
Finding a psychiatrist or other therapist with whom an individual can work well is important. Sources of referrals include primary care physicians, local psychiatric societies, medical schools, community health centers, workplace Employee Assistance Programs , and online resources .
Federal law requires that in most cases mental health services, including psychotherapy, be covered by health insurance similar to other medical care costs.
Online Locators for Psychotherapy/Counseling:
Also Check: Clinical Depression And Anxiety Disorder
When To Get Help For Depression
If you experience depression symptoms for most of the day, every day, for more than two weeks, you should seek help from your GP. If your feelings start affecting many parts of your life, this is a sign you may need professional support.
The parts of your life that depression can have a negative impact on include, but are not limited to:
- relationships
- interests
- an overall sense of happiness and enjoyment
Thoughts of suicide and self-harm are also warning signs that your condition is getting worse. If you experience these, you should look to seek professional support.
For many, being treated for depression can seem an impossible task, but the sooner help is sought the better. In some cases, the illness can disappear without treatment. This is not always the case however and there is a danger that living with the condition will put significant emotional and physical strain on your health and well-being. Therefore, many people with depression opt for treatment.
In the initial stages, your GP will look to diagnose the condition by conducting tests to rule out other health problems such as an underactive thyroid. They will then ask various questions about your general health and how your feelings are affecting your mental and physical well-being. From here, the appropriate treatment options will be pursued. These will depend on the nature of depression and your personal circumstances.
Seeing A Psychologist About Depression
Licensed psychologists are highly trained mental health professionals with experience in helping patients recover from depression. Several different approaches to psychotherapy have been shown to help individuals recover from depression, especially those with mild to moderate depression. Psychotherapy can help people with depression to:
- Pinpoint life events that contribute to their depression and help them find ways to change, accept or adapt to those situations.
- Set realistic goals for the future.
- Identify distorted thought processes or unhelpful behaviors that contribute to feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.
- Develop skills to cope with symptoms and problems, and identify or prevent future episodes of depression.
Two of the most common evidence-based therapies for depression are cognitive behavioral therapy and interpersonal therapy.
There is no one “right” approach to therapy. Therapists work closely with their patients to create tailored treatment plans to address their unique needs and concerns. Psychotherapy can help patients learn ways to better cope with stress and manage their symptoms of depression. These strategies can lead to recovery and enable patients to function at their best.
To find a licensed psychologist in your area, use our Psychologist Locator.
Recommended Reading: Why Do I Feel So Depressed In The Morning
What Will It Be Like
We know its not easy to open up to someone new, so we start by simply getting to know you. Your counsellor will help you to make sense of any worries you have and ease you into your therapy journey.
Your first sessions will be about getting a good picture of what you are finding difficult in your life, and how this is affecting you and those close to you. Your counsellor may ask some questions, but you are free to only share as much as you feel comfortable with.
As you and your counsellor get to know eachother, you will start to share ideas about what you want to achieve, and the areas you want to focus on. Over time, your counsellor will help you to explore the feelings underlying your depression. They will support you to start to make sense of those feelings and find new ways of looking at yourself and the world around you.
How Long Will Therapy Be Needed
Research indicates that 50 percent of patients recover within 15 to 20 sessions. As with drug therapy, patients fare better when therapy is continued for a period beyond symptom remission. There are three goals of psychotherapy. The first is responsean improvement in symptoms. Patients may begin to experience improvement within a few sessions. The second is remissiondisappearance of all symptoms and a return to healthy functioning in all domains of life. There may be a temptation to stop therapy at this point, but the consensus of experts is that treatment should continue at least four months after disappearance of symptoms to ensure recovery and to maintain the ability to handle the stresses of daily life that challenge coping skills. Completing a full course of therapy is critical for full recovery.
Recommended Reading: Mental Hospital For Anxiety And Depression
Overcoming Depression: How Psychologists Help With Depressive Disorders
Depression is extreme sadness or despair that lasts more than days and affects people in different ways. Fortunately, depression is highly treatable.
Overcoming depression: How psychologists help with depressive disorders.
Everyone experiences sadness at times. But depression is something more. Depression is extreme sadness or despair that lasts more than days. It interferes with the activities of daily life and can even cause physical pain. Fortunately, depression is highly treatable.
Depression, also known as major depressive disorder or clinical depression, is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States. In 2014, an estimated 15.7 million adults in the U.S. about 6.7 percent of all U.S. adults had at least one major depressive episode, according to the National Institute of Mental Health .
How Will Know That Therapy Is Working
Feeling better is a good yardstick, but it is by no means the only measure of therapeutic effectiveness. Mental health professionals regularly assess the progress of therapy and rely on two important tools to monitor patient gains. One is their own experienced judgment of the patients ability to engage in the therapeutic process. The other is a standardized symptom rating scale that assesses patient standing on each of the constellation of symptoms of depression, from personal outlook to physical slowness. Has the veil on thinking or sluggishness of thought or speech persisted, lifted slightly, lifted significantly, or completely disappeared? Does the patient weep frequently, occasionally, or not at all? The most widely used symptom checklist is the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, often called the Ham-D.
You May Like: How To Deal With Post Concert Depression
Depression Therapy Vs Depression Counseling
While counseling and psychotherapy are words often used interchangeably, it helps to know the difference. Whereas psychotherapy is typically a more long-term approach, depression counseling is typically a short-term therapy for mild or moderate symptoms.
That said, in a depression counseling session, your counselor or therapist will still employ talk therapy to help you understand work through the problematic issues affecting your life. Their overall role is to listen, give feedback, and work with you to find effective coping ways.
A counselor or therapist will start by helping you understand and deal with the underlying causes of your sadness. Developing coping skills to address that sadness and other symptoms is also part of the first step toward feeling better. You can also rely on your counselor or therapist to track your progress and adjust sessions as necessary.
In terms of efforts outside of your sessions, you may be asked to do things intended to supplement your progress. This could include reading, trying a technique, or tracking your feelings and moods.
Why Is Therapy Important For Treating Depression
From one perspective, depression can be seen as a state of depletion that occurs when problems overwhelm a persons resources for solution. Therapy aims directly at the development of new solution patterns. It is at least as effective as medication during the period of treatment but its effects last longer and it is effective in preventing recurrence of depression. The coping techniques, problem-solving skills, and understanding of ones own vulnerabilities gained during therapy are useful over the course of a lifetime.
Don’t Miss: Depression Medicine Without Weight Gain
How Is Progress Evaluated In Therapy
While unstructured interactions with patients under their care can provide a window into patient functioning, therapists providing good care make regular assessments of a patients clinical status using criteria that have been validated in many studies. To know whether and how much depression is improving, they regularly monitor treatment progress by measuring the severity of multiple symptoms of depression on standardized scales. The most widely used assessment instrument is the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, or Ham-D, which gauges progress in 21 constellations of symptoms, from level of sadness to degree of guilty feelings to lack of energy to sleep problems. Severity is rated for each cluster of symptoms. Comparison of results over several sessions provides an accurate picture of treatment effectiveness and indicates areas where more intensive work may be needed.
Common Reasons Behind The Development Of Depression Include:
1. Distressing life events Discomforting and troubling life events can take a toll on us. It could be a divorce, family problems, financial issues or losing a job.
2. Bereavement Losing someone extremely close to you can increase the risk of falling into the trap of depression.
3. Childhood experiences Believe it or not, your childhood experiences can affect you in adulthood, as well. You may be bullied, ragged, physically or emotionally abused, or not taught to confront problems that enter your life.
4. Anger Frozen anger is a term thats closely associated with depression. There could be times where you went through something that resulted in you being very angry.
5. Circumstances The overall atmosphere and feelings a person goes through can trigger depressive episodes.
Don’t Miss: How To Cure Depression Without Medicine
Benefits Of Counselling For Depression And Anxiety
Working through therapy and counselling has many benefits for those experiencing anxiety and depression. Our counselling team has tremendous experience with:
- Finding effective, positive ways to handle difficulties in day-to-day life
- Building or repairing your meaningful relationships
- Gaining relief from lasting effects of mental or physical trauma
- Overcoming anxiety and depression
- Talking about suicide or having no reasons to live
- Misuse of substances like alcohol and drugs
Can Any Type Of Therapy Help
For patients, recovery from depression requires understanding the kinds of events that precipitate a depressive response, awareness of their own psychological vulnerabilities, identifying distorted thinking patterns that lead to feelings of hopelessness, recognizing behavior patterns that exacerbate problems, developing problem-solving skills, and taking action even when they may not feel like it. An experienced therapist will gauge the best way to treat depression based on individual patient needs but incorporate all such goals into their treatment plan. However, there are several types of psychotherapy that specifically target one or more of these needs through treatment protocols that have been well-validated by extensive field-testing.
Recommended Reading: Is Celebrex Used For Depression
Cbt For Persistent Depressive Disorder
Matt, a 28 year old male, has been experiencing a low and depressed mood, difficulty sleeping, low self-esteem, and difficulty with concentration for the last two and a half years. He works a difficult job and felt it was related, but was informed by family that they noticed this low-grade depression even when he was in less stressful positions.
Matt reached out to a therapist, who diagnosed him with persistent depressive disorder.2,5,6,9 His therapist began working with him on journaling about his day on a regular basis, especially if something made him happy. The therapist encouraged him to write down and challenge his negative and irrational thoughts.
Matt and his therapist also worked noting triggers for aggressive thoughts towards himself to increase his awareness. Matts therapist began encouraging him to engage in problem-solving tasks to help him function and build resilience when his depressive symptoms flared up.2
Is Group Therapy Ever Helpful
Although depression is a very individualized disorder, with each patient exhibiting a distinctive patterns of symptoms, group therapy can sometimes be helpful. One area of special value may be group education in coping skills, problem-solving skills, and techniques for managing difficult emotions, as deficits in those areas are known to underlie most expressions of depression. Such treatment is often labeled psychoeducation and it may be especially appealing to people who cannot afford an individual course of therapy or who feel stigmatized by it. Whatever the format of depression group therapy, it can offer some advantages over individual therapy. Most obviously, it counters the social isolation that is a major precipitant of depression. Groups also allow for working though the dysfunctional relationship patterns that contribute to depression. Further, group interaction provides a forum for credible challenges to the negative evaluations depressed people make about themselves.
You May Like: Recovery From Burnout And Depression
What Is Counselling For Depression
There are lots of forms of counselling. At italk we use a treatment called Person-Centred Experiential Counselling for Depression. This is an innovative treatment that aims to get to the root of your symptoms by exploring your emotions, the way you relate to others, and how you feel about yourself.
Although depression is a common problem, everyones experience is unique, so we start by understanding you and your view of the world. You are the person who knows yourself best, and with this approach, your counsellor will help you to find your own way forward.
There are two key things that we believe makes our approach so successful:
Vitamins And Supplements For Depression
The jury is still out on how well herbal remedies, vitamins, or supplements work in treating depression. While many supplements are widely available over the counter, in many cases their efficacy has not been scientifically proven. If your depression symptoms are in part due to nutritional deficiency, you may benefit from vitamin supplements, but this should be on the advice of your healthcare professional.
If you decide to try natural and herbal supplements, remember that they can have side effects and drug or food interactions. For example, St. Johns Worta promising herb used for treatment of mild to moderate depressioncan interfere with prescription drugs such as blood thinners, birth control pills, and prescription antidepressants. Make sure your doctor or therapist knows what you are taking.
Recommended Reading: Sun Lamp Therapy For Depression
Counselling Versus Antidepressants For Depression In Primary Care
In the treatment of depression specifically, psychotropic medication is used as a front-line treatment method. Rather than comparing counselling with standard GP care, a more focused question would be to ask how counselling compares with the delivery of antidepressant medication. This question was addressed in a study carried out in the Trent Region and which also aimed to establish whether providing patients with a choice between these two treatment methods affected their outcome. The randomised trial comprised 52 patients assigned to counselling and 51 to antidepressant treatment. In the preference group, 140 patients chose counselling compared with 80 choosing antidepressants. Patients in the randomised trial had a moderate-to-high level of depression as indicated by the BDI .
Comparison of within-group effect sizes for the Trent, London/Manchester, and Derbyshire counselling studies at initial follow-up and 12-month follow-up.
What Are The Different Types
Cognitive therapy, behavioral therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy focus on how your own thoughts and behaviors contribute to your depression. Your therapist will help you learn ways to react to things and challenge your preconceptions. You and your therapist might come up with goals. You might also get “homework” assignments, like to keep a journal or apply problem-solving techniques in particular situations.
Interpersonal therapy focuses on how your relationships with others play a role in your depression. It focuses on practical issues. You will learn how to spot unhealthy behaviors and change them.
Psychodynamic therapyis more traditional. You and your therapist explore behavior patterns and motivations that you may not be aware of which could contribute to depression. You may focus on any traumas from your childhood.
Individual counseling is a one-on-one session with a professional therapist who might be an MD , PhD , PsyD , LCSW , or NP , with experience in treating depression and other mood disorders. Your therapist can teach you more about depression and help you understand yours. You can discuss new strategies to manage stress and to keep your depression from getting worse or coming back.
Family therapy is a great way for your relatives to learn about depression and the early warning signs. Studies suggest that family sessions might really help with treatment, too, improving lifestyle, compliance with medication, and sleep habits.
Also Check: Social Media And Depression Questionnaire