The treatment that brought her out of the darkness
Non-invasive therapy healed CAMH technician’s depression without the nasty side effects
“I finally got my brain back.”
That’s how Virginia Wilson describes the effect of a new brain stimulation treatment on the depression she’s battled her whole adult life.
Wilson, who now calls her life enjoyable and says she finally feels good about herself, works as a technician at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), where she helps to test schizophrenia drugs. But it was not always this way. In the summer of 2010, suffering from an extreme psychotic form of depression, she made a desperate visit to the CAMH emergency room on College Street. She’d been to emergency rooms many times before in the previous three decades, but this time was different, because a doctor recommended repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS).
This non-invasive intervention uses a magnetic field to deliver weak electric currents to targeted brain cells. In use at CAMH since 2002, rTMS can lead to significant and longlasting benefits.
“It has been a much more profound change than simply making me feel less depressed,” says Wilson, 59, who had multiple sessions of rTMS for almost two years. “Everything became easier to understand and things are less overwhelming.”
The way rTMS works differs in important ways from earlier brain-stimulation intervention, electroconvulsive therapy. While considered more effective than rTMS, ECT requires patients to be anaesthetized during sessions and can cause nausea, migraines, muscle pain and memory loss. With rTMS, patients stay awake, and the only side effect might be a headache.
Before rTMS, Wilson’s life was dominated— and at times nearly destroyed—by depression. As a teen in her native Scotland, she heard voices goading her to kill herself. That same voice haunted her as she tried to defend her biochemistry thesis at the University of Glasgow; the experience prevented her from getting her doctorate and put her in hospital for her first episode of clinical depression. Since then, she has been hospitalized more than 20 times, and has tried to kill herself twice.
“I couldn’t hold down a job, and it made me decide not to have children. It was agony—I was not able to enjoy anything,” Wilson says.
Before moving with her husband to Toronto in 1991, they lived in Baltimore for about a decade, and during that time she tried ECT. She says it didn’t work, and also caused extreme nausea and memory problems. Over the years she has also taken many different antidepressants, with mixed results.
But nothing made a difference like rTMS, which she says has healed her almost completely.
“My husband says it’s so much more interesting talking to me now, and we make each other laugh,” she says. “I don’t feel like a worthless person any more. Everything just feels better.”