Real Patient Reviews

Below, we have published a variety of stories written by our patients about their experience with TMS and how the therapy helped them. Consider their experiences when deciding if TMS Therapy is for you.


To TMS Staff at TMS of Knoxville

Dear Terry, Tessa and Dr. Cook,
This husband and my dear wife are extremely grateful for your care and guidance. Dr. Jobson recommended Dr. Lane Cook and TMS after the meds just were not delivering their desired results. The plan was for 30 sessions starting at the end of November, 2017 and were to continue through 12/30/17. By 12/15/17, the veil was beginning to lift. Last session delivered and my wife was well. We are a truly blessed couple. My wife is like a mature teenager and her old, wonderful self again.
She takes 15 MG Lexapro with her vitamins every day. I just cannot thank all your Team members for giving us this wonderful life back. TMS works! It works well. We are expressing gratitude and thanks every day without ceasing.
Free at Last!
Heartfelt thanks,
K and K

My last treatment is today. I feel like I’m graduating. I am so grateful for this treatment. TMS has given me my life back. I appreciate your kindness and compassion and your professionalism. I always knew I was in good hands.
TMS is a breakthrough treatment, an answer to a prayer for me. My brain doesn’t feel foggy anymore, so I can think more clearly. I find that I can make decisions more easily and I don’t feel completely overwhelmed all the time. My outlook is now one of hope and determination, rather than one of hopelessness and despair. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Sally D.

I was severely depressed over a period of three years. I tried several antidepressants but nothing really seemed to work. I had a severe allergic reaction. My family was very poorly impacted by the whole problem of my depression. By the end of the TMS treatment, things were better than I could have imagined. After that six week, I was so excited that my life was starting to resume. It could actually get better and that I had more to look forward to. – Garret A.

During that time, it was probably the darkest time in my life. I was sad and miserable all the time. Before when I was going through depression, I felt hopeless. Since TMS, my perspective on life has been so positive that I know there is hope. – Martha F.

I think I've always had depression. One of my earliest memories has been as a little girl on the playground watching other children playing and having a good time and being alone on the sidelines and wondering why I couldn't have that kind of fun. Depression first began to interfere with my life in my early 20's and I began to get treatment for it. For thirty years I was in and out of hospitals with severe depression. I can't even count the number of medications and hospitalizations. I was willing to do anything. My mother's new boyfriend happened to be a psychiatrist who attended a seminar about TMS. He mentioned it to me and my mom and we went to a consultation. I was hopeful but very frightened. I was scared to be hopeful because so many times doctors have said "this is what is going to work for you" and it would maybe work for a couple of months and then it wouldn't work so I was always being disappointed.

I was concerned about the cost but it was my mom who said to me, "don't you want to try something that could possibly change your life, no matter what the cost"?? And I really wanted to try.

I wasn't quite sure when I started feeling better but I think it was a couple of weeks into treatment. My mom started noticing I was more alert and aware and my face wasn't so tight.

TMS has helped me to feel the best I have ever felt. I have come off an enormous amount of medications from which I suffered a great deal of side effects. Fatigue during the day, all day was the worst side effect for me to deal with. This made it very difficult to keep a job. Now I am alert and awake and I sleep like a normal person. I am not falling asleep in the afternoon and unable to get out of bed in the morning. That has been the best change and that has been because I have been taken off so much medication.

If I had given into my fears I could probably right now be in the hospital, feeling helpless and hopeless and not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. That is so far from where I am right now. – Marcea

I've pretty much had depression since I was a child. I had separation anxiety in elementary school and its basically followed me throughout my life in variant degrees. My first depressive episode was when I was 35 - I was hospitalized for 30 days. That was when I first began taking antidepressants and it's been over 20 years that I've been on them. And then I just hit a wall - my doctor and I were discussing new options and changing them again. TMS Therapy came along at the perfect time because I started to feel like my options were running out. It felt like medication was putting a band-aid on my depression. I came to realize that this wasn't my fault and I just needed help. I brought up the idea of TMS Therapy with my doctor and he said he would be offering it in the next few weeks so I knew this was meant for me. I had done my homework and learned all about it and I knew it was right for me.

It has been a wonderful experience - everyone has been wonderful and caring through this whole process. They genuinely want me to get better. After about a week and a half I really started to feel different. I felt like I was alive - like the veil had been taken off of my eyes. I could see clearly and colors were brighter. Every day it gets better and better. Even though life still happens it is so much easier to deal with things... I don't want to crawl under a table anymore. My house is cleaner. I want to see people, and don't want to be by myself like I used to. Everything looks and feels different - like before I was a robot going through the motions. I truly believe if it wasn't for the meds I wouldn't be functional at all. But the meds took me to that final level where I could function but I wasn't living. – Debbie

I have battled depression for more than 20 years. I was diagnosed at age 19, though I suspect I was depressed in utero and it wasn't until I started contemplating suicide that I was actually diagnosed. (Good thing I recognized it for what it was.) I was put on an SSRI (a very expensive one, I recall) and within a few weeks I felt fantastic. I woke up one morning and said to myself, "Wow, my life doesn't suck!" I had a good life, and I loved it. I was cured. Life could go on.

9 years later the drug stopped working. Life started to suck again. Over the next 10 years, a revolving door of doctors switched me from one medication to the next, then tried combinations of multiple medications, all of which made me more depressed.

After quitting meds in frustration, I ended up in the hospital for observation because I was contemplating suicide. Back on the meds I went. Instead of pushing my luck I decided to pick one drug that didn't make me irritable/paranoid/suicidal and didn't interrupt my sleep too bad. After all, when life sucks the least one can hope for is a fairly uninterrupted bout of sleep.

I was beginning to resign myself to this feeling of not-quite-on-the-verge of utter despair. Medication kept me from being a suicidal nutbag, but I certainly had no zest for life.

Over the past 3 years, my mood and personality had devolved into a single dimension that my boyfriend and I jokingly refer to as "meh." Get a promotion at work? Meh. Boyfriend does something completely extraordinary by cooking dinner, doing the laundry, changing the cat box AND buying flowers? Meh. Win a million dollars in the lottery? Meh.

Nothing I experienced changed my mood. I didn't care about anything. I wasn't sad, I felt no joy, sometimes I felt despair. I hated myself for feeling that way, but my brain left me so distracted that I could never concentrate long enough to do anything to change it. Or to care. Meh, indeed.

On top of that, I felt like my latest drug was beginning to betray me. I couldn't think logically or rationally anymore. I couldn't multi-task. My memory was shot. I poured all of my energy into my job, but I was faltering there, too. I would come home and ignore the state of my existence-I was physically/mentally/emotionally incapable of doing laundry, feeding my pets, vacuuming my carpet or generally taking care of myself. I was becoming a shut-in. I slept a lot. Or not at all. I gained 30 pounds. I stopped doing all the things I loved-walking, running, cooking, reading. Living.

And all of this "meh" jeopardized my relationship with my boyfriend, who is my best friend and has been my partner for over 6 years. If I didn't do something I was going to lose everything. But what hope do I have? Over the years I've tried more than a dozen different medications and combinations of meds and they simply don't make me feel better. I am avoiding confronting head-on the notion that "meh" might be as good as it gets.

And then, a miracle.

I saw my psychiatrist, Dr. Tim Jennings, in August 2011 for my semi-annual state of "meh" evaluation. Nothing was "really" wrong, really. But certainly nothing was right. He told me about a new treatment called TMS. I'm sure the look on my face was one he'd seen before.

"Let me get this straight," the expression on my face was saying. "You're going to point a magnet at my head for 6 weeks, and I'm going to feel better?" He briefly talked about the studies, the science, how the treatment works. I was skeptical, but felt a glimmer of hope. I started to cry. Too implausible. No way. I schedule a free consultation anyway. I grow more hopeful. I go home and read up on TMS, review other patient testimonials, and still can't believe it.

Today I'm almost finished with my TMS treatments and will be transitioning to maintenance treatments in the next 30 days. Never in my entire life have I felt as fantastic as I feel today, and I owe these feelings to TMS. I am a multi-dimensional human being again! I am experiencing true feelings and real emotion like everybody does, but I'm feeling them for the very first time, unfettered and uninfluenced by emotion-numbing medications.

Like a wandering traveler in a foreign land who experiences tastes, touches, smells and sounds that are alien and wondrous and marvelous, I'm rediscovering who I am and who are the people around me. I'm alive! And I love it.

If I could give one bit of advice to other people enduring a lifelong battle with depression, it's this: You owe it to yourself to explore TMS as a treatment option. It's expensive, yes. But so is a lifetime on anti-depressants. Consider it an investment in your happiness.

And while you go through the treatment, be patient with yourself. You won't feel a difference in your mood for weeks, and then one day you'll wake up and realize that everything has changed. "Hey!" you'll shout, overjoyed. "Life doesn't suck!" – A Lutz

 


TMS+YOU is an online community and national patient advocacy site for TMS Therapy. Those considering Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation can connect with patients who have had the treatment to answer questions, share insights, and get the latest information.