Depression: Depression is one of the most common mental illnesses with 18.4% of Americans reporting they have been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those, over 30% have treatment-resistant depression, meaning their symptoms have not improved with multiple trials of antidepressants and/or psychotherapy.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and Cory Weissman, MD, PhD, psychiatrist at UC San Diego Health, is available to discuss transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) therapy, a non-invasive, FDA-approved intervention for treatment-resistant depression that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate specific areas of the brain associated with dysfunction in depression. TMS is significantly more effective than standard treatment approaches for treatment-resistant depression, according to Weissman, and can be a life-changing intervention for those who do not find relief from standard treatments.

UC San Diego Health is a leader in TMS and other areas of interventional psychiatry and offers three TMS clinics that fuse cutting-edge treatment approaches with world class care. The clinical program also works closely with the interventional psychiatry research program at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, where study of predictive biomarkers and treatment personalization is guided by advances in the understanding of how the brain is affected by mental illness. Newswise/SP