Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), commonly called depression, is a mental disorder that negatively impacts a person’s life with the overwhelming sadness, emptiness, and an overall lack of hope. When this lasts at least two weeks with low mood, which is present across most situations, it is considered impairing your way of life. Consequently, this is often accompanied by low self-esteem, loss of interest in things you used to love, low energy, and pain without a clear reason. However, MDD is not your fault, it can happen without warning and without a trigger.

Psychotherapy (talk-therapy) and antidepressant medications are often administered together as a depression treatment. Although antidepressants can be effective for many patients suffering with depression, they do not work for everybody. More than 4 million MDD patients do not receive adequate benefits from antidepressant medications. For these patients, an alternative depression treatment, Transcranial magnetic stimulation is an option. In the treatment of depression, TMS finds the nerves in the brain that are slow and sluggish, and energizes them back into action.

Treatment-Resistant Depression (TRD) is a term used when there is a poor response to the medication designed to treat depression. A poor response can be from either the medication not actually improving the negative symptoms of depression, or that side effects of the medication are unacceptable. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was developed to address TRD by stimulating the depressed part of the brain that has resisted medications, reviving those connections.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is an anxiety-based condition recognized as its own unique mental health disorder due to its complex nature. OCD is defined as obsessive thoughts and the compulsive actions taken in an effort to stop the anxiety that occurs because of the constant worrying over these obsessive thoughts. A common theme of OCD is being overly concerned with one specific area of typical life: such as cleanliness, needing everything to be “just right,” or obsessively focusing on a bad thing happening. TMS technology focuses on the parts of the brain that are sending obsessive signals and slows them down.