TMS
Right before the new year I started TMS treatment. TMS stands for transcraninal magnetic stimulation and you can think of it as microdosing electroconvulsive therapy. Instead of shocking your whole shit, they use a precisely positioned electromagnetic coil to sends bursts of energy through the skull and into the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Exactly what it does no one has satisfactorily explained to me. Not that I trust explanations from psychs— I was on antidepressants for years before I learned that the whole chemical imbalance spiel is, generously speaking, a loose metaphor (or, less generously, complete bullshit). As far as I understand, TMS is supposed to work like a paperclip slotting into the reset button of my brain. Fourteen sessions in, this has not yet happened. But I still have 21 more to go.
I do a session each weekday. They lean me back into what looks like a dentists chair and strap my head just so, and move the foam-covered coil over the left side of my head. Then an invisible woman floats into the room and taps my skull very rapidly with a two-inch acrylic nail. She does a burst of ten taps, then waits five seconds, then another burst, and so on. Two minutes and thirty seconds later, I am done.
A couple of the techs have asked me what the treatment feels like, and I have to admit I get some sense of superiority having experienced something they will never truly understand. (I also get this feeling looking at, say, Barack Obama and thinking about how he’s never sucked dick). Mark, my favorite tech, admitted the first day that he had asked during training to be shocked but they wouldn’t do it, “for liability reasons.”
“But the doctors do it to each other,” he told me conspiratorially. I was still feeling a bit dazed and so just accepted this comment, but I regret not digging into it a little more. How often are they shocking each other, and why? I have to assume it’s out of curiosity, and if that’s the case I think it is a little fucked up they didn’t let Mark in on it.