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Shock Treatment & The Lure Of Ctrl-Alt-Delete
Look out! The first is pestiferous, the second mortiferous. – First recipient of electroshock therapy, 1938 “Look out!” the Italian man bellowed indeed, presumably first spitting the rubber tube out of...
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TMS & Insomnia: The World Just Got Interesting-er
Something is happening. Week one of my clinical trial was utter discouragement. The machine’s Playskool racket coupled with a depressive crash told me I’d gotten the placebo, after all. I was that...
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Waking Up: Electromagnetism Busting Depression?
I knew it. A few days after I first posted about the very 19th-century noises of NeoSynch‘s “eggbeater,” the could-be depression-busting device at the heart of my clinical trial, I noticed a faint...
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Magnets, Mental Health, & Me: Down The Rabbit Hole
The first time I heard of magnetic therapy was years ago in Wyoming. I’d screwed up my neck. Couldn’t turn my head or move around. Incredible pain. A chiropractor gave me valerian root capsules to...
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Consider Me Vivified (Mothra Braves The Magnetic Fields)
I’m on my back in the dim light. The eggbeater is wilding on my skull. As I drift into and out of awareness I feel a moth fluttering against my right ear. Would I break protocol if I swiped after it?...
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What I Like (Because There Are Times I Forget)
There have been times, many of them, lasting weeks and months and years, where I have trouble thinking of anything I enjoy about this world. More than once I’ve been encouraged to make lists of those...
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The Little Eggbeater That Could (Therapists’ Full Employment Act)
In my final week of the trial and the Facilitator says she is going to work with me to find an affordable therapist back in my home town. The idea is floated following my fifth-week assessment, which...
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Synchronized Eggs & Sham: STMS Trial Ends, Treatment Begins
“Wait. Aren’t you the one with the freakishly low blood pressure?” – sTMS clinical trial facilitator Mile-a-minute. Blabbing about how my brain doesn’t get tired. How my body does. How I don’t nap....
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Preparing For Goodbyes & Lame Illuminati-Inspired Tattoos (Send In The Clowns)
Getting ready to cut out and head home after three months away, eight weeks of daily treatments, and two weeks of certified, real-deal, off-label sTMS treatment. Plan is to complete next week and pack...
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Stigma Letters: Mental Health and the Permanent Record
Greg, I read your column “Come stand with me.” It really hit home for me. I was diagnosed with depression in 1998 and have definitely been on a roller coaster ride since then. I am a nurse employed at...
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Make The Investment: Treat Our ‘Half-Trillion-Dollar Depression’
Though, I didn’t do myself any favors taking the paratrooper approach to my mental illness, I saved my old company major bank by taking the big leap and quitting. I’d been debating it for over a year,...
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The Egg & I: My Austin Chronicle Feature Story
I’m on my back in a dimly lit room on the seventh floor of a Dallas research hospital. A device roughly two feet tall resembling an oversized egg is wheeled up behind me, its single blue clawlike...
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