Veteran Jonathan Warren: Skepticism About Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

People share the same skepticism that I had when I was coming into the center where it’s like, this is snake oil, what are you doing here? So a lot of people … it’s kind of a paradigm shift in the way that we look at mental health. So it’s very new and new things are often challenged and feared and then finally accepted as obvious. And what we find is, especially with the veterans they’re willing to come in there, they’re willing to try it, even if they don’t believe it. And what’s different about this treatment is it doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, it’s like if you have a broken arm and I put a cast on it, you don’t believe it’s going to heal, well, it’s probably going to heal, unlike you know maybe some psychological therapies where you really do have to invest and believe and have faith that it’s going to happen. One of the obstacles that we have right now is FDA. So we’re using an off label, which just means that under practice of medicine we’re using an FDA approved device to treat a disorder other than depression. So we’re currently in FDA grade trials and hopefully to have that finished by the end of the year. And then another year after that we’re hoping for the FDA approval and then we can go ahead and get this out to the masses. One of our biggest frustrations is there are so many people that need it and right now it’s private pay so it’s very expensive and prohibitively. So for most, for the veterans we partner with different nonprofits who underwrite their treatment, so we don’t have to charge the veterans themselves. This video was produced by BrainLine thanks to generous support from the Infinite Hero Foundation.