About one in four adults in the United States suffer from a mental health condition. Although many receive effective treatment via psychotherapy and medications, others continue to struggle despite their healthcare provider’s best efforts.

For these adults, medications may not work at all or could come with powerful side effects that make them impossible to use. Psychotherapy on its own may not be enough, either. When this happens, your condition may be considered treatment-resistant. However, there are still effective options available, even if you’ve not had success with traditional treatments.

This is where interventional psychiatry comes in. It’s a growing field focused on helping people with treatment-resistant mental health concerns get relief from their symptoms. Take a closer look at what these treatments involve and the benefits that they can offer.

What Is Interventional Psychiatry?

Interventional psychiatry, also called “neuromodulation treatment,” uses in-clinic, procedure-based therapies to help people who can’t find relief from mental health symptoms via conventional options. But how do you know if you have a treatment-resistant condition?

To diagnose treatment resistance, psychiatrists try a variety of medications and therapies over a number of months. If the person sees no improvement, then they may receive this diagnosis.

Interventional psychiatry can help with people who face treatment-resistance in several mental health conditions, such as:

  • ADHD
  • Substance use disorders
  • Depression
  • Anxiety
  • Schizophrenia
  • Bipolar disorder

The goal of interventional psychiatry is to find and correct the brain circuits that might not be functioning as they should. To do this, there are a few key therapeutic options available.

Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

Deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) relies on magnetic fields that stimulate brain nerve cells to improve the symptoms of major depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can also be effective in helping people stop smoking.

Deep TMS uses a different coil than standard transcranial magnetic stimulation. The deep coil stimulates wider and deeper areas of the brain, with the magnetic field that it creates impacting your brain’s electrical activity.

Deep TMS can be customized by using different pulse frequencies, coil strengths, pulse patterns, and stimulation targets.

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy involves patients breathing in 100% oxygen in an environment featuring elevated air pressure. This pressure makes it easier for the lungs to absorb more oxygen, which then saturates the blood. As that oxygen-rich blood travels through the body, it can promote healing while also reducing inflammation.

Additionally, it can improve nerve function and boost the brain’s oxygen supply. This can lead to the stimulation of activity in certain areas of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, potentially helping with symptoms of depression.

Ketamine-Assisted Therapy

Ketamine-assisted therapy uses ketamine, a pharmaceutical created to function as an anesthetic, to provide fast relief from major depressive symptoms. This is combined with therapy from a therapist trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy. Ketamine offers trance-inducing and pain-relieving properties that can make it easier to work through mental and emotional challenges.

During a typical session, you lie down in a quiet room and take your specific dose of ketamine. The dissociative effects you may feel can allow you to explore things you may have hidden from yourself that may be preventing you from healing. A therapist monitors you to ensure you’re safe.

Ketamine is thought to function like a rapid-acting antidepressant. You may start feeling positive symptoms just hours after your session.

Neurofeedback

Neurofeedback is a type of interventional psychiatry that teaches you to regulate your brain’s response to a stimulus. For this therapy, you wear a cap of electrodes that record brain activity.

Using the information gathered from this recording, you and your therapist can work toward reorganizing and regulating brainwave frequencies. Essentially, neurofeedback teaches your brain how to change on a biological level to improve functioning.

The brain can adapt, but it usually takes a significant amount of time. With neurofeedback therapy, the process of neuroplasticity can speed up because it leverages the language your brain understands: brain waves.

If you have a mental health condition, your brain wave patterns can become disrupted. This can lead to unhealthy biological activity. Neurofeedback strives to get these faulty wave patterns back to what they should be.

Stellate Ganglion Block

A stellate ganglion block is an injection of anesthetic that you receive in your neck. This injection helps to reset the autonomous nervous system, which can help lessen or eliminate negative feelings, as well as reduce the fight-or-flight response. This can be crucial for those who struggle with anxiety disorders.

When you have anxiety, the same areas of the brain associated with this fight-or-flight response are activated. By essentially de-activating them, the stellate ganglion block helps you focus on therapy and on making the behavioral changes that can result in long-term relief.

Electroconvulsive Therapy

Electroconvulsive therapy sends a brief electrical stimulation through the brain while you’re under general anesthesia. This electrical stimulation leads to changes in brain chemistry that can help improve symptoms of serious mental concerns. It’s particularly useful to treat severe depression and mania that don’t respond to other treatments.

This type of therapy is often most effective when combined with psychotherapy. It provides the necessary relief to make talk sessions possible.

Benefits of Interventional Psychiatry

Interventional psychiatry offers a number of key benefits for treatment-resistant conditions, from enhanced personalization to longer-lasting results.

Avoidance of Medication Side-Effects

People with treatment-resistant mental health conditions often struggle to find any medications that provide relief. Not only do these medications not diminish mental health symptoms substantially, but they can also cause side effects that make life even more complicated.

For example, many psychiatric medications affect metabolism, resulting in weight gain, while others lead to sexual dysfunction. By choosing interventional psychiatric treatments, however, you can avoid these side effects while getting relief from the symptoms of the condition.

Maximum Personalization

One of the most important benefits that interventional psychiatry offers is the chance to get the individualized treatment you need. With your therapist, you can tailor the treatment sessions to what can benefit you most, taking your unique brain chemistry into consideration.

That’s not possible to do if you take standard psychiatric medications. The drugs work in a particular way, and they can’t be altered to suit your needs. Interventional psychiatry provides precision that can help you get closer to your desired results.

Relief From Symptoms

Perhaps the most important reason to try interventional psychiatry is that it can help with many symptoms. For people with treatment-resistant conditions, these therapies may be the only options available that actually make an impact.

By giving you some relief from major depressive or obsessive-compulsive symptoms, you can then focus on psychotherapy. That’s often impossible for those whose symptoms are so crippling, stepping out of the house for talk therapy isn’t an option.

Potentially Fast Results

Another significant benefit of interventional psychiatry is that many of these therapies provide fast results. Ketamine-assisted therapy, for example, can start relieving symptoms in mere hours.

With standard medications and talk therapy, it can take weeks or even months to get a sense of whether they’re working. Often, the medications need to be adjusted or replaced, and that means further waiting. You can spend months trying to understand whether you’re feeling better or worse as your body adjusts to side effects.

Similarly, behavioral therapy is essential for making the kind of changes you want, but it also doesn’t offer immediate results. For people who are combating overwhelming symptoms, waiting a few weeks to make strides in therapy can seem impossible.

Lasting Results

Brain chemistry is fluid, which means that the medications that might work today might not work a few months from now. If you have treatment-resistant conditions, medications might not work very well to begin with, so they can lose all effectiveness quickly.

Interventional psychiatry strives to make structural changes to your brain so that any circuitry issues can be resolved. By targeting the root cause of the problem, these therapies help you achieve relief in a permanent manner.

That’s not to be expected from the first try, however. You will likely need a few sessions to start healing damaged pathways in the brain and stabilizing neurological chemistry. Some people may also never fully heal and could require ongoing treatment, but the results will generally be longer-lasting than those from just relying on medications.

Hope for the Future

Interventional psychiatry isn’t a magic potion that can fix all mental health conditions in one session, but it’s a field of psychiatry that offers hope to people who have struggled with treatment-resistant depression, OCD, and many other mental health concerns.

Trying medication after medication with no signs of improvement can leave you jaded and pessimistic. But even if you see minor improvements with these alternative therapies at first, you will be encouraged to keep trying. That alone can make a huge difference.

Choosing an Interventional Psychiatry Provider

If you’re ready to see if interventional psychiatry can provide the relief you need, the first step is to find a qualified therapist.

Look for Experience

Not all mental health providers offer interventional psychiatry, so you’ll want to start by ensuring that the person or clinic you’re considering has the services you want.

Just as you would any other healthcare provider, though, it’s not enough to see that they have the services if they’ve just started offering them. You also want expertise. Make sure a potential provider has ample experience in the specific therapy you’re interested in.

Read Client Reviews

Even if the provider has decades of experience, check past client reviews as well. Were clients treated with respect? Were they satisfied with their experience? Would they recommend the provider to someone else?

Consider Your Comfort Level

You need to feel comfortable when you speak with your potential interventional psychiatry care team. If you get a sense that they’re dismissive of your experiences or that they’re not fully engaged in trying to help you, it’s best to choose another provider.

Many of these treatments, including ketamine-assisted therapy, require you to be vulnerable in front of your therapist, so remember to listen to your gut.

Thinking Outside the Box With Interventional Psychiatry

Each person’s brain chemistry is unique, which sometimes makes treatment of mental health conditions a challenge. What might work for one person may not work for the next, and because the brain has neuroplasticity, medications can stop being effective in some people after a few months.

However, by working closely with therapists who provide interventional psychiatry, you can make effective changes to your brain’s structure even if you have a treatment-resistant condition. At Plus by APN, we offer a number of interventional psychiatry options to help address the challenges you’re facing.

Whether you have a substance use disorder or a mental health condition, we can help you get relief from your symptoms. Call or connect with us via live chat to speak with one of our experts to learn more about our services today.

References

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  • “Neurofeedback: An Emerging Mental Health Therapy.” AAFP, American Academy of Family Physicians, 12 Dec. 2022, www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/afp-community-blog/entry/neurofeedback-an-emerging-mental-health-therapy.html.
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