In addition to feeling lazy, lethargic, and even lackadaisical, people suffering from moderate to severe chronic clinical depression often deal with manifestations of general loss of interest in once-loved activities, failing to get enough sleep despite feeling chronically tired, unexplained body pain or headaches, an all-day-long inability to concentrate as usual even after drinking coffee or taking physician-prescribed ADD or ADHD medicine, and constant, often-severe anxiety despite not having enough mental energy or proverbial pep in one's figurative step.
Arguably everyone with depression - their manifestations ranging from mild depressive episodes that last just a couple of weeks all the way to chronic, lifelong major depressive disorder - has been told to "just get out and exercise," or "just get over it," as if depression is a mental disorder that can willingly be turned on and off akin to a light switch's mechanism.
Medical and mental health professionals have ideas about what causes depression, including exposure to environments with high levels of industrial activity and generally-unclean air, water, and earth, though few mental health disorders are understood with complete clarity. This makes reliable treatment that works in 100% of cases currently impossible.
How do counselors, psychiatrists, physicians, and other medical and mental health professionals treat depression?
Research indicates that regularly using prescribed antidepressant or anxiolytic medication, seeing a mental health counselor or prescribing psychiatrist, exercising, eating a balanced mix of produce, staying away from processed food, and taking vitamins to address potential deficiencies together is the most effective treatment for depression.
However, some people's symptoms of major depressive disorder can only be partially masked - and that's in a best-case scenario - by conventional treatments. Alternative treatments for advanced, severe, chronic, long-running episodes of clinical depression - the term is generally interchangeable with major depressive disorder - like transcranial magnetic stimulation, an innovative therapy popularized by the depression-specializing mental health facility TMS Health Solutions, a good-hearted business founded by veteran psychiatrist Richard Bermudes, a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine known as one of Northern California's tried-and-true, well-established leaders in the field of treating patients with stubborn cases of depression that - for whatever reason it may be - simply don't respond to traditional treatments that work for eradicating most people's depressive symptoms either mostly or entirely.
While some providers of innovative therapy in the name of improving mental health disorders' overwhelming, widespread, negative manifestations use controversial treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy, invasive deep brain stimulation, and full-on psychosurgery. Another similar yet different procedure is the aforementioned transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment typically abbreviated as TMS in most modern, relevant publications, academic works of research, and other literature you'll find across the Internet.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation - the TMS in TMS Health Solutions' name comes directly from the non-invasive treatment for unresponsive instances of depression - is not painful, unlike the handful of controversial treatments mentioned above. Further, it doesn't require the implantation of devices inside the skull.
Although TMS has a few potential side effects - there isn't a single modern medication without side effects that appear in at elast some patients - like the rarely-incurred phenomenon of hearing loss or somewhat-more-common headaches, it was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2008 specifically for people with depression that had not responded positively to standard treatments used in modern medicine and psychotherapy.