Psychoactive drugs must make their way through the bloodstream to ease depression; talk therapy takes an even more roundabout route. Now, a promising new treatment is getting closer to depression's source: it stimulates parts of the brain via a magnet placed directly on the patient's scalp.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, was once used mostly as a tool to explore the relationship between brain and behavior. Now, more than 20 studies worldwide are taking a closer look at its application as a treatment for depression.
"There's a stampede on now," observes Mark George, M.D., of the Medical University of South Carolina, who published the results of his own TMS study in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Like other researchers, he found that a series of daily magnetic stimulation sessions significantly improved the depression of patients, many of whom had not responded to other methods of treatment. And it did so without serious side effects.
