everything up until this point I think I saw doing TMS I've seen people complain like it's like a jackhammer on their head but I don't think I ever saw anyone who developed you know after three or four treatment treatments like straight up confusion yeah and when I got home I told my wife I was like you have to drive me I can't drive anymore it doesn't feel safe right I was losing my ability to multitask I feel like I learned this material really well I probably read like over 700 Pages worth of non-bias information from doctors that practice prolonged fast Joseph I did not eat for 23 days oh my God okay yeah we was that the Target or was that just when you like were kind of like had to be peeled off the floor you know so hi James thank you so much for coming on the podcast uh you're actually uh gonna be the first one that were that we've ever interviewed about a TMS injury it's kind of like this forgotten group of I guess uh I'm gonna say psychiatric system victims and um I've actually never spoken to anyone before and so I'm really excited to hear your story um and I think probably like a good way to kick it off is if you just talk to us about a little bit of the background how did you end up getting TMS and then and then just walk walk us uh through it from there yeah absolutely um thanks for having me on Joseph uh yeah um so I was a business professional um and at a big Corporation so it wasn't a very like warm and fuzzy kind of environment it was like a production environment um and I kind of worked my way up at this large company and um were you in banking at the time or was it uh doing okay yeah yeah yeah yeah I was in banking my whole career ended up being in banking which I maybe I'm lucky maybe I'm not but it was like uh it was like almost 15 years and um so so I worked for quite a while and um the stress eventually kind of built up and I really didn't know I figured you know just work as hard as you can for as long as you can but um the stress built up over the years I kind of repressed it and stuff and then I ended up having to go out of work because I kind of had this breakdown I just couldn't function and all the stress kind of poured into me at once and then a doctor took me out and he actually gave me Lexapro and I didn't there'll be these little recurrent themes of how things went wrong and I didn't recognize them at the time but when I first took Lex bro I actually had akathisha interaccathesia and I had no idea what it was so I was just constantly like panicking and freaking out just from taking this minimum dose of Lexapro and um so I like I kept calling my doctor and I mean you're probably familiar with how it goes with people going through this um you know I kept calling my doctor because I just couldn't sit still I couldn't I couldn't you know I couldn't let it go that something was horribly wrong and then um he's like he kept being like you can't just come into my office you know we'll stage an appointment for like three or four days from now or whatever and I was like I was like okay I'm just going down there so I just went down there and like I kind of I got accosted by the nurse but I was like no I need him now I was lucky he was a good doctor because he was actually like okay I can see it's really bad come in and see me I'll talk to you so I went and talked to him and he gave me this whole spiel about how well the drug had worked for certain family members of his and um and I believed in my trust in him but it was clear to me that that interaction like he's basically like just go home and calm down and I was like no like this isn't going to work so then I went and saw a psychiatrist because I thought their help would be more adequate right and they would know what they're doing as opposed to a GP that I had seen so that's how I landed in Psychiatry and um they actually they gave me abuse bar which mellowed me out and resolved the akathisha at that time and I continued on both but I was just a zombie like I would I'd never fallen asleep at work before never not even close and I literally would go into work and lay down my head for a second and wake up like 30 45 minutes later like at my desk um so and and this might be like a like a total stereotype of Bankers from just my experience in general Psychiatry but when all of this was happening were you were you on any stimulants like Adderall or were you smashing like 10 cups of coffee a day it just it seems to be a type I don't know if that was in the mix as well when this breakdown happened no that's a really good it's a oh okay so at that time I've I've always been pretty healthy guy I'm like hey if you want to feel good like just exercise and eat well and you'll be fine right and it's worked for me in the past but uh for a little while before that I had started drinking energy drinks and I drink like two monsters a day or like a couple Red Bull or whatever and then I was having these horrible crashes and I finally had given it up like maybe like a year or two before that so at the time I actually wasn't doing anything I was actually pretty clean and trying to be healthy but that depiction is not far off from where I was a few times all right yeah okay so so carry on so it sounds like so you're you're on abuse bar things seem to be settling down you're a bit sedated and I guess that was it for a while until you had your second run in or was there kind of more going on yeah um just an interesting side point so my Doc's like hey you might you're gonna have to be on this for at least like a year or more so just relax just take the stuff and like after a few months I was like I was like no um so and I was like he's gonna be pissed right because he was he was kind of a really controlling or guiding figure how you want to look at it and I don't I don't really go that way I was like I make my own decisions but I wasn't a desperate spot so I just I knew cold turkey was probably a bad idea so I think I was like having the pills for a while and then I was just done and um I went in to see him one day I was like hey I stopped taking this like a couple weeks ago you know and he was really pissed um but he let me go I started having brain lightning um so like I had the shocking Sensations in my brain and I was really tired for a few months but I had read online that it would go away and at the time I didn't I didn't know how significant it was I was like okay so about after at about the three month Mark I was like pretty much fine I was like I don't have the brain like anymore my Energy's returned I'm fine I think I carried an injury from that on because I went back to work not during that process and um and I had more stress you know I think I think I carried that injury but so that was my first run-in interesting I think interesting sidebar um but and then it was I think it was about seven years later um I had I had recurrent like um depressive anxious stuff I was anxious for so long I became depressive essentially as what it was um and I went to see a doc and I was I was trying to exercise and eat well you know and the doc I took the phq9 and um the doc was like Hey I see you're depressed you want to try to do something about that it was just a regular visit you know to regular checkup and I was like I I'm not interested in taking meds I did that it went really bad um not interested and he's he's like okay that's fine but there's this treatment called transcranial magnetic stimulation that it does it can't hurt you there's no possibility of harm but it for but it's a he was a Believer so he was like this treatment it doesn't harm anybody but it it permanently puts you in your depression in remission like it it Alters your brain in such a way to where you're yeah right you'll never be depressed again and I'm looking at him and I'm like I'm like that doesn't seem possible but he I also saw him as a really good doctor he was a do and not an MD he was very much into Physical Medicine and so like I paused and I was like maybe he knows something I don't know and um he was like I was like okay tell me more and so he's like look at these certain devices um they've been doing it at the VA forever you know he's giving me all he's saying all the right things to me so and he's like so if you if you're interested then you know we'll meet back in a week and then you tell me and we'll figure it out or whatever right so he go sends me home with all these all these um hit words like you know that I can go and look up these Search terms basically go look up online and I don't find anything bad I find these these great stories about it um and it's funny knowing what I know now and looking at that and and then remembering what I was looking at like it's telling you all these things about TMS but none of them are really descriptive right like nothing is really telling you what TMS is or how it really works it's just like they just pass a magnet through your head they say magnet they don't say electromagnet which is impossible right you have to have an electrical field with a magnetic field they say we use a strong magnet you know to to shift the neurons in your brain and to make them active again right and shocking neurons I think makes them active even though it damages them so like part of it's true but right and but but the lens I'm seeing it through is like wow this is like this really makes sense this is amazing like they just basically turn on this it was it was how it was taught to me as well you know it's this safe non-drug intervention is is really how they sell it absolutely so that's emphasized obviously and then like from uh like kind of functional perspective it made a lot of sense they're like this part of your brain's not functioning you're depressed right so it's just off right the happy party kind of and then then we stimulate it so it turns on and your neurons can fire there again so then you're happy and there's this part of me that was like wow this makes perfect sense like Technology's kind of catching up to to Medical Science and and what we know about the brain so we get to be on like this Cutting Edge of of resolving like really negative mental health or negative mental health ruts or you know or something and and if I think about like what I was told because because I've done TMS before like uh as a as a practitioner you know I've been in the room when my attending was doing it I think I did it for three months the only thing I remember him saying about it was that it can cause headaches I and that was the only thing I remember hearing and that it can be uncomfortable a little bit you know when you're actually receiving the treatment that that can cause some scalp discomfort which is time limited and temporary and I mean was that sort of similar in terms of like the how the risks were told to you at the time or did you get maybe I don't know more comprehensive explanation of what could happen no that's that's exactly what's out there and that's exactly what's kind of parroted and I went back and looked up like well after I was hurt I got really into informed consent I realized oh they didn't warn me about these harms I might be able to bring a suit or something so I went back and looked up my consent form and it said exactly it said even less than what you said I think I think it only said there's a small risk of like headache and that was the only thing on the consent form um scalp discomfort was the other one and um I think that's it um yeah really is all I remember so all right so tell us what what happened to you um because because you do a series of um TMS treatments I mean you might do like three to four a week for a period of time like like how many did you have when did you start having um problems I guess yeah yeah great question um and I mean again I always some people kind of focus on their own injury I tend to be like macroscopic and step back and see all these similarities I see so much in common with Med use and even my own Med use and um and other treatments when I was going through this TMS process so I went in and um of course the women the ladies in there they're fantastic they're like so kind and warm like they believed in the treatment they had gotten the treatment themselves right and like you go back into that that maybe that picture you had of like a banker maybe being like clever and like overactive and like hard working right so I'm going in them I'm asking them the whole time the workers I'm like it's just real like is this real like does this really work you know tell me what you really think like you know off the Record you know I was really trying to probe them to get more information out of the situation so I could make a good decision and um they really swore up and down like off the record on the record like it's great you can't get hurt like all this stuff so I know they really believed it and they were genuine people I don't have any reason to believe that they were being dishonest in any way um so yeah so so now I'm like I'm like man I did all my due diligence as much as I possibly could um so the only thing left to do is to do it and um and so I sit down I go in there see this kind of before jumping into it when you look when you look back at the stresses in your life like like I know you mentioned you know anxiety spills over into depression I mean I mean was there was there a lot of [ __ ] going on in your life at the time was it you know you're kind of like finding yourself in your career or a relational problems I mean you know you can only share as much as you want to but I always think it's you know you ended up in a position where they were putting like electromagnets you know on your brain and and doing this kind of stuff but I always wonder like did anyone ask about like hey James like what was going on that kind of put you in this anxious state where you eventually crashed into a depression and maybe we'll have a look at that I I mean was that part kind of looked into it all or brought up no it's a great question and I think it's really important to look at the solution what your potential solutions would have been to your problem right and and and again why why am I sitting in a chair and they're putting this big monstrous thing on the side of my head and turning it on and I'm going through this discomfort like why would I accept that as a reasonable alternative um and so for me my family's always been fantastic I'm I'm so lucky and that's I am not messing around like I I don't deserve my family um they're they're so rad and so supportive and even my wife was like I don't think this is a good idea it's too good to be true and because she couldn't really materialize an argument like we went ahead with it and she supported me but she felt uncomfortable um so being that my family's so rad I felt like I really needed to do my job and to work hard and to be successful at work um which I think a lot of people like that's that's a simple motive and it's simple enough but so my mistake was not like compromising uh my my professional Integrity I guess for the sake of like being a hard worker and really just trying to work through everything so after I was like well I'll just keep working harder you know if I feel like my environment's kind of unethical or it's not the greatest place to work then I just you know just keep working it'll be fine you know and then when you've been there for 10 years you know you're like I just now I've been here for so long I want to retire I want to move up like just keep going and that's kind of a trap too unfortunately the professional environment now is really not geared around careers anymore like you really have to jump around to maintain happiness to keep growing like there's all these negatives right but so for me my big my Achilles heel was work and there was always layoffs going on right if the economy was good and they're making a ton of money they're like well we need to make sure things are streamlined you know and they would lay people off then the economy is bad and they just start laying off even more people and um so you're just constantly under this high level of scrutiny and then at really big corporations there's this other phenomena where they there's so much management they really take away the ability of the individual to do a really good job because they're constantly like shifting you around and shifting your projects so that they can kind of look good and take credits for things and you can't take credit for it it's really it's really kind of disgusting but it's like just the status quo now in big corporations so I wasn't given credit for my work I was never paid adequately I wasn't even allowed to build up my skills too much before I was moved somewhere else because someone would be threatened or there'd be some issue and then they're constantly um laying people off like I started to get friends in HR after I had been there for a long time and like you'd reach out and they'd be like yeah your name's on a list I'm sorry you know you got three months to to get your name off a list or your toast you know and um and after you've been there for 10 years like this like the stress just adds up and then then you feel locked in and you've been there for a long time you're constantly there's pressure you're locked in so your stress just runs out and then like you said I end up like depressed and then I kind of hate my life I don't feel like I can move you know and the stuff's going on so that that was the call was right if I would have been like you know what enough is enough I go get a job at a smaller place where people care about each other you know and and we stick up for each other and we work together right things would have gone entirely differently I'm not were you at like it sounds like you're like an eye Banker at you know Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase or something are you an eye Banker was that the was that your background or a different kind yeah um no I mean you're close but yeah yeah sounds stressful yeah yeah but all the all the everyone gets hammered like at a place like that I I ended up being in technology after a while and um it was really cool I loved like coding and working with programmers and developers and stuff but we got we got put under the same kind of pressure like sure okay well interesting and interesting aside there okay so really work stress is kind of kind of boiled over and and yeah okay so let's uh take me back to it so you start getting your treatments what how does that unfold yeah but the interesting is like when you tell your doctor that right it becomes kind of this their excuse for like this unmitigatable like problem so then you go to Psychiatry right instead of them saying well maybe you can consider a new a profession like that's kind of appalling to ask someone right like why don't you just start your life over you know they tend to go I think it's easier for them in the Psychiatry group um so like the right was that the right response like hey James maybe this maybe this environment's not good for you and you'd probably Thrive more in another place that what you needed to hear or would that have been helpful yeah absolutely you know what the doctor might have been I've seen other people burn out before like this you know this is a bad Road you really should you know consider something else yeah I mean it would have been so much more productive if I would have listened and arguably maybe I wouldn't have listened but sure it's hard especially when you've been doing it for 10 years and you just yeah you kind of get locked in yeah exactly um so so I'm at at the clinic and um they start they do this mapping where they test your reflexes right it's called um what is it uh it's this twitch response they do to see I think your motor threshold they're testing your motor threshold to see if they're close to giving you a seizure or not you know they don't want your your fingers jumping when they start in it's kind of I see it's hilarious now but it's tragic right it's like all right you're sending electromagnetic waves that are harmless through my body and you're making my hand move involuntarily with them right like this is not indicative of something that's really benign um and then of course they don't tell you the seizure wrap that they're trying not to you know overstimulate your nervous system but but that and I don't even think the clinics really know that that's what it is they're just told they're by the manufacturer they're trying to find the sweet spot so they do that um arguably I didn't walk away from there feeling great but I felt reasonably fine during the mapping session you know and then after the mapping session they're like okay this will be your first session come back in two days and then everything worked out and um and then that'll be your first session another point of detail I did my phq-9 there with them and they're like this isn't really bad enough to um to justify Insurance they're like you you might want to change some of these scores if you want it to be easy to get through Insurance to have them pay for it right and I was like oh they're helping me out I looked at it as a way for them to help me out to make my situation easier right to get into the treatment so I actually changed I exaggerated my phq-9 scores a little bit um so that so that everything would go smoothly again me being a patient I didn't think that was like a big deal but after having learned what I had about medical fraud and insurance fraud and stuff like that it there's deeper issues there and then efficacy like right like how they're measuring efficacy for patients and stuff there's this other ethical issue there which I didn't understand at the time so I I go back two days later and it's so this this tapping people explain it as a tapping sensation on the side of your head if you had to and it sounds like you've seen this so maybe maybe you get it and tell me if you do but you the machine makes it clicking and you and you feel this tapping but when I and I kind of like oh they're telling me there's a tapping and there's this tapping going on but really when I'm thinking back it feels more than tapping It Feels Like The tapping's Happening inside your head which it is right like it's it's a sensation that's hard to describe but people really don't know what it is to feel something like pushing through you know an invisible force kind of pushing through your head into your brain and if I had to describe it it's something more than tapping you know a tap this is what a tap feels like but it felt like a pressure a pressurized kind of tap you know like something a little bit more invasive or a little bit more serious than that other people that I've talked to in my group they're like it felt like a jackhammer they're like it felt like someone was just chiseling through my skull um other people they scream they're like right off the bat like I have lots of few quite a few people have been like I was screaming in the first treatment and like they had to hold me down in the chair and I'm like I'm kind of taken back and I'm like wow and I'm listening to them and hearing like asking more proven questions that's realizing they're being totally authentic and then I hear the story repeated and I'm like you know it's pretty if certain people react that way like it's pretty invasive or it's a lot more heavy duty than you think um and maybe there's more to it you know so I go through this tapping and this kind of pressure feeling and to me um like I'm you know I work out I run I try to do all this stuff right that kind of physical context like not that bad it's easy for me to renew right it's not as bad as like having a torn muscle or pulling something or something right it's just this discomfort I'm just like I just stay here for 20 minutes it's fine um and I come away from it that first day and I'm like okay I feel a little funky um but whatever and I actually asked I don't know if I asked them on the first or second day but I was like you know I don't I feel a little off like a little fuzzy like is that normal um and they're like yeah that's normal it's fine like it once you've been doing the treatment for two weeks like that resolves and you'll and you'll be totally fine it's not it's not a big deal yeah and I was like okay you know and psych meds other things is the same thing like your body is adjusting to it psychologically you're kind of adjusting to it a little little off or goofy um so I go home come back the next day and this is every day for it's supposed to be every day there's like 45 treatments or something so it's every weekday for like two and a half months or something close to that I come back the next day I'm still feeling yeah so I'm feel still feeling a little bit fuzzy from the first day and this is when the rub kind of happened for me it was either the second or the third of course hard to remember but on the second or third day I was still feeling fuzzy and then they're like we need to turn up the intensity of the machine right um are you okay with that and I'm like wait you didn't mention a word about having to increase intensity or not having anything to do with anything it's just like it was supposed to be the simplistic treatment you just come in you sit down it does its thing and then you get better over time right and I think that's pretty normal because I I remember seeing that a lot and like when I was in the clinic it's like you start someone really low because like you said sometimes it feels like a jackhammer to some people hitting hitting them on the head and I saw that a lot I would say most people they were like it's like a mild discomfort but for some people it really was like this jackhammery type thing and so they'd start them on the low dose and then they wanted to like bump you up into the therapeutic threshold or whatever whatever that that was and and they kind of do it just depending on how much tolerance for whatever that that pain or the discomfort is and so it sounds like that caught you off guard when they were like hey we need to move you up to the therapeutic level exactly and for me I was already feeling a little fuzzy right so I'm then when they're talking about increasing it I was like now I'm getting kind of uncomfortable like feeling a little fuzzy after something I'm fine but feeling more and more fuzzy this is not quite right and I I think you nailed you worse and then they go oh we're going to turn up the volume right yeah exactly and I think you nailed something right there when you're talking about how people feel it differently in and they're and they're turning it up something I've thought about a lot is it seems really obvious something else is going on as something's taken place that we're not quantifying very well right the way people are feeling and why it's affecting some people instead of others this is It's presented in one way as being very simplistic and then when you get into the weeds and the details um there's there's there's something entirely different going on here you know people reacting differently there's this intensity thing some people are uncomfortable you know this like you were saying before like is this something any different than a slight headache and scalp discomfort maybe it's not easy to describe you know maybe it's um kind of an ethereal thing that's happening can't quantify it well but there is definitely something entirely different going on there's a whole different set of symptoms and experience that medical Sciences isn't good at describing which I think I think we'll get to cover when I look at my research on TMS but so that so that's what I'm experiencing it's not physical pain but I don't feel quite right there's this kind of thing going on for me so they say it won't turn up and then so I'm thinking about for a minute and I'm like well what am I going to say no and go home I'm like I don't even know what that means okay turn it up so they turn it up and I'm like okay that was a that was even more uncomfortable but I'm like I'm not in pain but I just feel more fuzzy you know and they're like well that's normal it's okay you'll get used to it we'll end up turning it up to like 150 or 120 percent of yeah um right and I'm like okay so so I go home I come back and they're like we'll go up in increments of like 10 or something 10 a day for like a couple weeks I'm like okay um come back go go home come back same thing they turn it up and they had done it like five percent the previous day they're like well do you want to try 10 and I'm like now I'm kind of a different perspective I'm like all right let's power through this and go I'm like okay turn it up to 10. they do 10 and again I cannot describe exactly how I felt except for saying fuzzy but now I feel I it was much more intense than I felt much much much much worse that was a moment when I was like I didn't have the cognitive ability to say this is bad or it's wrong but I had the cognitive ability to understand that it was serious and I would have to handle it differently so I remember driving home that day and I drove across town like you know like 30 minutes or something and it was difficult to get home like cars were driving around me and I was like I can't tell you why but I'm not as aware and I feel out of control and I don't know really what's going on around me like I'm focusing on where I'm going but my situational awareness is like zero like I so this I mean that's that's unusual everything up until this point I think I saw doing TMS I've seen people complain like it's like a jackhammer on their head and I've seen them like you say hey just hang in there like I know it's uncomfortable but we want to get you up and you kind of grit through it and they're okay but I didn't think I ever saw anyone who developed you know after three or four treatment treatments like straight up confusion and so that's to me that would have been really concerning I think if I started having someone who was just like hey Doc I had I feel like I'm losing my mind I couldn't really get home the other day so so this to me seems like when things are really starting to maybe Veer off the tracks a little bit yeah yeah and when I got home I told my wife I was like you have to drive me I can't drive anymore it doesn't feel safe right and what I understood later after I had a neuropsychological exam is that I was losing my ability to multitask like if I'm talking you straight like I am now like I can perform fairly well but if there's noise in the background or there's other things going around around me I lose my ability to really do anything I'm kind of like confused like you said right and then I can't focus and I'm just like I can't really do anything real well but at the time totally unaware of that so my wife's like okay you know and she was kind of concerned but we talked through it and stuff and we really believe the clinicians when they're like everything's gonna be fine in two weeks so I go back we turned it down to five percent instead of like keep going up 10 every time you know so it wasn't as dramatic but I still felt very confused and fuzzy um and my wife drove me so I wasn't driving anywhere at the time we got to the two-week mark and um I asked him I said hey is this this is not going away you know is it she's all and then she's like well some people it doesn't go away till the end of treatment and I'm like we didn't say that up front right and I'm like I'm like but what I was experiencing I really didn't expect it to go away because it was fairly intense but again I couldn't describe it very well um so I was just like I guess you know and now I know I was pretty seriously cognitively impaired at the time so I'm like I look back and I'm just like I don't know how I would have self-rescued out of that situation you know like I I was just like going with the flow and really really hoping and praying for the best like that you just get through this treatment and then everything will be fine like they say at the end like just stop don't worry about it just do it and um and that and that's what I did once I once I chose that path I really wasn't coming off of it because I really didn't have a lot of ability to think myself out of the situation um so that went on and then um it was somewhere I think it was somewhere around the one month Mark um man I don't think about this very often it like it crushes me when I talk about it but uh I was I was in bed and I I just jump out of bed because the fire alarm is on in my house and in the middle of the night like like three or four or something um and like I'm throwing the covers off and my wife is like she's like what are you doing and I'm like we gotta get the kids like that like the alarm's going off like something's going down right now like we got it you know and she's like she's like she kept trying to stop me she was saying something and I was like I'm like what no I'm like the fire alarm is going on I'm like how can you not hear this I'm like she must be out of it she's just groggy from sleep right and she's like she's like stop stop stop whatever and I'm like what she's like there's no fire alarm she's like there's nothing going off right now and I'm like what are you talking about you know I sat there in disbelief for a moment and um and I'm listening and I'm realizing what I'm hearing is not an alarm sound it's it's a screeching a screaming in my ears but it doesn't sound like the beeping of an of an alarm right and then I'm starting to realize this and she's like what I was like I hear this really really loud ringing in my ears and um she's like that you know I've never had ringing in your ears before and I'm like I'm like no like she's like have you ever been to a concert before I'm like yeah and she's like did your ears ring afterward and I'm like yeah but it went away in like an hour or whatever right she's like she's like that's what it is she's just ringing in your ears and like I am panicking right and um and because I've never outside of loud noise I've never experienced anything like that before and it's really temporary um and so she's like it's just ringing yours it's fine just relax I get it all the time apparently she does I didn't know that um I go back to bed I bring it up with the clinicians um and they're like we really don't have any reports of that or anything like it'll probably just resolve it's fine you know they didn't they didn't know what to make of it um I didn't know that that was that was assigned neurological injury or head injury or anything at the time um so I was like okay and still have it now I've found ways to cope with it but it just stuck with me the whole treatment um so that happened in the middle and so that was the only like big change that happened otherwise I got to the end of the treatment um and I was like I still feel really fuzzy I still can't drive and um the girls are like okay we'll talk with the doctor about it on the exit interview and um so I bring it up to the dock because the doc only saw me at the beginning to approve it and then at the end um didn't see me in the middle so at the end I'm like I'm like hey I have these issues I'm dealing with and they kept saying it's going to resolve like how long until it goes away and then he's like it'll be it'll go away within in two weeks you know it'll be fine and I'm like what if it doesn't and he's like and this is when I know I got got like this is when everything started to come into Focus for me one I wasn't really any better and then two I had the stuff going on but he's like it looks if if it doesn't go away after two weeks you've developed some other neurological problem during TMS that is separate and has nothing to do with TMS so you need to go see a neurologist and I kind of stared at him and I was like oh I was like there's nothing I can do now like I'm done with treatment I'm like whatever happened happened um like me freaking out right now or doing anything to show anger or disappointment or whatever I was like this is the last time I'm gonna see of any of these people so I just I I just I figured out some other way so I left you know one of the things I remember about TMS and which I didn't mention mention previously did they make you wear like earmuffs or earplugs during the treatment so yeah I'm pretty proficient with the inner ear plugs you need to twist them up and put them in there real good and I had that the whole time so okay yeah so interesting yeah so so tell me what what happened next yeah um so so I left there and then of course two weeks later four weeks later um you know nothing I actually I actually lost my job in that time period so um they saw I mean at work I mean I can't even really recall what I did at work during those times but I will tell you the one thing I do know is that I got an out of cycle raise just before like a couple months before I had TMS so in these kind of aggressive corporate environments like if you save the company a bunch of money if you do these really big things they'll because everyone fights for their end of the year review where you can get a raise right and most people don't get a raise they give it to something rep but if you if you really crush it like they'll give you an out of cycle raise and they'll give you title right they'll make you a vice president or assistant vice president or whatever so they had done that for me like a few months before TMS so I was under a lot of stress having issues but I by in all accounts I was I was doing really really good at my job um and then so I I don't know what I missed at work I don't know what happened but my it got rid of me like right after they started giving me more money not long before and um I did you know I think my my best guess is that I started performing badly and they got they let me go um I kind of there's no way for me to know for sure but so that had happened so I was kind of at home on Severance I really didn't know what to do and um after a few weeks I was like all right I need to try to find another doctor that can can look at the stuff a neurologist that would really know what's going on and um and I found a neurologist they were aware of what TMS was but they again they were under the same auspices that like you just wait and it'll just go away you'll be fun right um and they kind of admitted that they didn't even if it didn't like they didn't know what to do I mean I didn't even ask you did it help with your depression so again paralleling to like meds and other things it blunted me really hard like my cognition was really poor and low during this time right which at the time I didn't know I just felt fuzzy but looking looking back I was my cognition was blunted so I'd actually report that my depression was less and my anxiety was less and even though I was going even though I got let go of my job like it should have skyrocketed right but I was reporting that I was better and it was because I didn't have the mental bandwidth to ruminate on stressful stuff I didn't have the mental bandwidth to ruminate on the negative um so did I feel different no I didn't feel any different right but I did report that I felt different and there was there was a change yeah I mean it's it reminds me of something that there's a kind of a I guess a famous psychiatrist in this space called Peter bregen and he used to talk about ECT um being like a minor traumatic brain injury and the parallels between that and other minor traumatic brain injuries and how you could almost you know that yeah there is a blunting but sometimes there's also a slight euphoria that goes along with with brain damage which is terrible to think about um and I mean that's that's kind of what what he said and I sort of kind of remember that um and so maybe yeah maybe TMS especially when it's having this very negative effect like it was having on you uh one you've it's kind of wiping everything out I mean it's wiping out your cognition and your executive functioning but maybe it's taking away some of those faculties that were leading to your depression and anxiety it's um kind of all together and so maybe you feel better but you don't realize that you've been brain damaged essentially and it's really hard to I mean that's the other thing that again you know talking about Peter bregan that he would go on go on about was the inability of patients who were on psychiatric medications or who had received treatments to realize the degree of the the their altered cognition and their mood because it's hard to self-observe when it's happened to your brain you know people around you might be able to tell and see that but the ability of the actual person is it's skewed you know because because they're yeah so I don't know if you relate to that no um actually one of the first things I ended up reading were these papers that I got from bragan on anagosia I don't even know how agnosis like that's the technical term for exactly what you're mentioning right like you lose this self-awareness of what you're going through and the harm that's it's exactly like how I classify what I was going through and and bragan did a really really good job at looking at now you don't you see all really good research in these studies and stuff and they really don't address that too much I mean it's not of a huge consequence like after you get hurt but it is import really important I think for people to know that when it's actively happening that's what's going on and then um some of the research that I did afterwards on electrical harms of some of the experts that I talked to were saying that your endocrine system kind of like turns on when you're going through the brain trauma and you actually exactly what you said you could feel a little bit better you know and then so here's the next part that I was going to go to I was seeing these neurologists and kind of messing around with things for about three months and then um I developed this really severe lower back injury I developed extreme anxiety and panic that was happening like all every time I would go out into public I would panic and this wasn't because I was stressed and I didn't understand it it would just be like it would be like hitting getting hit in the face of the bucket of water the and I mean that because like I'm not expecting it like I'm not stressed to go out but when I go out my brain just starts panicking and I'm literally like observing my Consciousness is observing myself Panic so I'm literally like calm and then all of a sudden I just feel like Panic just flood my body like physiologically and and I'm just want to scream and run and I'm literally sitting there and I'm like why am I experiencing this right now I don't understand but my body's freaking out but my mind's like this is weird um and it's a really unique experience and at first I just thought oh well that's me panicking it's just different now or whatever but then I started to understand and then I had this extreme depression and fatigue that showed up but it was the it was the delayed injury you get an ECT you get it with repetitive electrical exposure is that your endocrine system kind of like hangs in there for so long and it delays like this physiological response in your body and then there's this breaking point where all of a sudden the real symptoms that were kind of being masked or however the delayed injury Works start to Onset and then so in that period of a few months I actually started looking for other jobs I was like kind of being proactive and doing these things I tried to go back to work I got another job back at the bank at the same company and um it was exceptionally difficult I you know and I knew I couldn't do it because my cognition was bad but I hadn't experienced like the full brunt of what would happen and um after it was writing that three to six month time frame these really really horrendous symptoms started coming on that um at first I thought I was stressed I thought I was being depressive about my life sucking and my problems with cognition and stuff but the more time went on I realized that my thinking patterns were kind of normal even though they were like slower and blunted but I was experienced this like extremely tired and extremely depressed and I was anxious all of a sudden really anxious a traumatic brain injury you know like because that's what happens with a traumatic brain injury people are incredibly sleepy you know abnormally so that's probably the most prominent sign um and I'd wake up in the morning exhausted yeah yeah and you know the other thing that comes to mind is um you know you talk about the parallels between I guess coming off ECT or recovering after ECT and psychiatric drugs you know the people who are on multiple medications when you start to peel away the drugs sometimes yeah I mean the anxiety spikes because of there's withdrawal but also there it's like their brain is coming back online and Parts you know they they couldn't really realize the level of disability or the level of impairment before but when you start to peel back the level the layers they start to notice it and that's really stressful as well you know being there when they're kind of almost Awakening again yeah um I was in a really a haze for a really long time I mean number of years and just recently hopefully we can talk about a little bit about what I've been doing to recover at the end here but um as I've started to recover a little bit I've had a lot of those moments where like I've been super stressed out just because like I'm feeling more and like I'm more aware of what's going on and what I'm experiencing where in the past I was in such a haze sometimes I was really thankful for it because I'd wake up each morning and I wouldn't remember anything that I had been through the previous day and it may have been really horrendous and but like I got to start over and some people look at that as a negative right but lately I've been thinking about I'm like maybe that's a really important mechanism of protection like I really couldn't be as traumatized from the repetitive horrible days as I should have been just because my cognition just like every day I wake up it's like like Groundhog Day like for years like for me um and so you know the other thing that I'm imagining you're going to tell me in your story and I'll be surprised if it doesn't turn up is doctors diagnosing your depression is worsening you know when you start complaining about these things I I mean is that does that make an appearance in this story as well um actually ironically well on the paperwork um it did yeah sorry I'm on real enough um and then uh but what happened was so in that time I said I was laid off from work I was studying this stuff and I started meeting up with other people that had TMS injury and it took me quite a while to find them and to figure it out but um but I did and then I started I started reading there was um I couldn't read very well actually I couldn't read it all at first I could read one sentence before my brain kind of started to hurt and um but I had I had Robert Whittaker's book anatomy of an epidemic and Peter gauche's book [Music] um uh deadly medicine and organized crime yeah someone had recommended him to me and I was and it was like this missing piece of the puzzle and I had the book but I hadn't read it yet and I was like I'm gonna finish this book if I have to read one sentence a day I will and um it speaks and I mean I'm sure you have an anecdote for this where you've seen it that the brain really is amazing and can heal into his incredible stuff I had no idea what I was doing but I was retraining my brain I read one sentence I put the book away for the day the next day I try to get up get going I read like a sentence or two and then I after three months I realized my reading level was almost normal like I'd read you know like 20 Pages a day you know and it'd be fine and then before I knew it I had completed the books um but as I was going through this I got really lucky because some of the people that I ran into that have been harmed by TMS they're really keyed into the problems with Psychiatry so when I went to see doctors I was like I wasn't overtly aggro but on the inside I was like do not try to pull any [ __ ] on me like don't just like don't do it right like I'm just I'm not going for it so they would kind of like hint at that stuff and trying to like kind of like psychiatrase me more and I'd be like I'd be like nope like I had a brain injury from TMS that's what we're treating we don't need to treat anything else um and they would offer me stuff and I would be like no I'm just like no I'm not doing it um and I think they picked up on that to their credit and they they didn't really try to to do that too much and I ended up with a really really good neurologist he was he was a little bit younger I mean he was maybe 40 but probably in his late 30s and he was really interested in cognition and um when I started explaining it to him right um he knew it was a brain injury he knew exactly like the way and he and he kind of illuminated a lot of things that I was experiencing that I didn't understand yet and so again I got really like he's like he's like none of these class of drugs are going to help you he's like I don't I don't want he's like if you want me to prescribe them I will he said but I won't I think it's gonna you know embellish your brain injury and cause more problems because like he deals with a big time right that that's pretty much it did did he did he liken it to a traumatic brain injury and kind of the prognosis and the time to Improvement so yeah I mean I'm sure you get this right he's kind of like I can only write down so much because I don't it's not this is not classical so this is what we're gonna do and he started telling me like he had other patients that were like pro athletes like hockey players and stuff and he's like this is what I'm doing with them you know he's like he's like there's nothing he's just time he's all you eat well you're as active as you can be you know all these good behaviors and he said and then it's just like we just have we just wait and we just I try to I stick in there with you over time and we we pull up and we talk and we discuss options we do this stuff and it was it was really fantastic it feels really like you're not like your hands are tied because you're just kind of pulling up and trying to think of things and you know there's all these things you know that are bad idea right but not much that you can actually do like to heal your brain except for to just give it this environment where it can go so so different than the classical like doctor-patient interaction right where you go in and they feel obligated to give you a script and yeah he wasn't like the the treatment for recovery from a traumatic brain injury is like you know don't make it worse by throwing drugs on it unless like unless the person is so disorganized that they're having crazy agitation which is harmful to others I mean you have to leave it alone and just like he did with you it's like sleep as much as you can you know eat great food and let's just see kind of where things look you know in in the course of months to to unfortunately sometimes years you know yeah he's exactly um I really lucked out but again um I don't think it gets talked about a lot but handling your doctor is so important you know like your doctor your doctor works for you you don't work for him you don't have to go in there and make him happy you know like if you know what you don't want to do like just be up front and if your doctor's trying to do something that you don't think is appropriate you shouldn't see them anymore just try to go see someone else I know it's maybe an oversimplica simplification and a lot of people are in really rough spots where they gotta they have to put up with stuff in order to like you said withdraw and make sure they have what they need to do that and stuff but um there's there's so much stigma there's so much bad stuff around this old classical idea of just going and just doing what your doctor tells you and I remember that had a as a part to how I was raised and it took me a while I was over it psychologically but emotionally I wasn't quite like I was scared every time I went into the doctor being like all right I'm gonna leave if if this happens or I'm not going to let them like do this or that or I'm gonna have to say no like it was really I was really stressed about it but yeah I mean how scary is that I mean after you read Peter gacha's book book you're just like oh my God you know that like this is I mean I'm I'm in a dangerous place um it's lucky you found someone so good um you know James something I'm I'm interested in is um just tell me about the trajectory of your improvement like what was like the date and month that you finished um uh I guess TMS and then talk to us about like the milestones and Improvement I mean maybe you're fully recovered now maybe you're not but just kind of how it progressed over months to years I think that's really important uh for people to know yeah I really want to cover that um so I for a long time I I figured out I tried to figure out what happened to me I tried to get lawyers to help me out I focused on all these things um you know that I thought were really important after my injury and I think it's because I didn't know how to recover um I did I like I went to therapy like twice a week you know I ate well I tried to be as active as I could I did all these things hoping it would just work out and I know those were really good decisions but I really I didn't I didn't know and maybe I still don't know in a lot of ways like how how difficult it is to really recover from from a really really serious brain injury so so this this is how it went for me um and I and but in trying to figure it out I think I was people get really really caught up like oh I'll take these supplements same thing with me I'll take these supplements I'll find I'll find any treatments that'll work and and and then I'll just and I'll get there and I have friends that that are still on that path and they still do the same thing but after a couple years I was like the same supplements do not work for anybody right like and the people that did you work for I'm not I'm not real sure you know how how really life-changing it was you know like small little improvements and stuff I you know it's just it's just arguable it's not as good of a situation I thought same thing with treatments um different you know rehabs and stuff have you know some better results and they're more there's there's less danger involved you know there's less blowback involved so they're safer that's better um obviously medications are really problematic and dangerous um the alternative treatments some can be the same for that kind of stuff and so what I realized that fairly early on was like there's a lot of BS in here there is a lot of BS in here um so I need to be really careful and really pay attention so over the years I really and I didn't have a lot of money because I lost my job right I have virtually no money um so I was like I can't afford like some people are like they're paying 10 20 grand at a time on these crazy treatment stuff I'm like even if I wanted to I couldn't do it like maybe I could beg a relative or something to pay for something if I was sure it would work but I never walked away with that Assurance even from the people that said they benefited I was like it's not life-changing I mean a small jump I don't know you know so so over the years I was I was healthy I was as active as I could be I ate as well as I could I went through these really strict diet things um I try to be as positive as I could and I mean I made a really really small progress I'm saying looking back on on a year at a time it's been five years almost exactly right now um but for the first two years I mean for the first year I went backwards I things got worse for the first year um around the second year I think things stabilized about when I was about year about a year and a half out things stopped getting worse and I think they started to stabilize around that time I really wanted to buckle down to see how significant diet was in in um in my recovery and I did the um a Candida diet where I cut out like all offending things and I actually had some good improvement from that but the diet it was really hardcore and I would I'd go through these periods of die off where I'd feel way worse and then after I did like the first 90 days of being really strict I felt a lot better after that um I was still in really bad shape but I saw these improvements and I actually had these moments I remember they came out like five minutes at a time where I would feel clear I'd actually feel like I could think well and um that that blew my mind and so I stuck with that for the next next next about two years I wasn't perfect with it I would relapse and kind of eat stuff I wasn't supposed to and then kind of get real strict again and stuff and but my progress was really marginal um I mean like a couple like if you had to look in terms of healing 100 like a couple percent a year I'm looking back and I'm like am I better I'm like I can't really tell and really my wife would be like you know what I I feel like you're remembering a little bit more you know I feel like your attitude's a little bit better it should be like I feel like you you definitely improved this year even though it's small and then I'd be like okay you know like I don't I don't feel much improved but when I really think about it I'm a little bit improved I can go along with that okay you know um and it gave me some hope too that I was progressively maybe improving slowly so I mean come up to about the four year mark um I don't know how and when I ran into it and again I'll give this warning to anybody because it worked for me just like any other thing I don't I don't know if it'll work for everybody else but I started listening to podcasts and I got some information about fasting and um there was this gal in my group that came into the group um a while before that it was really interesting because she's like she was pretty hurt pretty bad and then one day she just made a post in the group I mean I don't know if it's true or not I wasn't able to verify it through her because at the time I was in bad shape and I didn't follow up with her but she just posted she said I read my Bible and I fasted and I'm better and I I'm gonna I'm gonna leave the group because it's kind of depressing being in here right and so half of me was like okay whatever and the other half was like and there's no way for me to tell if that's true or not I don't know so I just kind of was like this is interesting but whatever um but then these um I started hearing me up fasting some more and there was these podcasts and different things that started popping up and uh I had always remembered that she had said that and I was like Hmm this is interesting it's natural right like you don't have to fast any more than you want to so you can control the risk with it and um I always thought historically our ancestors had to go through famines like they went through times without food like it seems reasonable to me that if you can't survive without food for a little bit like it's you know you got to be able to do it so so I started reading and researching it a bit more and I was super impressed with the things that I was seeing and it really seemed to be coming from people that had like this functional lived experience with it and it wasn't like just studies where people were really far removed and you know it didn't really translate very well so I started doing these small fasts like I'd fast for a day and then I'd feel like horrible that day and then the next day I would kind of come back online and I'd be like uh okay whatever but then like a day or two after that I realized I was feeling much better than my average day and um so I give myself a break for a little bit and I'd be like okay maybe I'll fast for two days I fasted for two days same thing except for it was a little bit exaggerated um so I didn't feel good when I was fasting just kind of miserable um came back online didn't feel great for the day after but I was glad to eat and then like the second third fourth day I started feeling really really good and then I would kind of taper off back into kind of feeling normal um so what ended up happening was then once I realized it was doing something really really positive for me I so I did like four five six of those like two or three day fasts and I actually was I was planning fast around doing stuff with my family so I could actually enjoy like the stuff they were doing instead of going to be miserable all the time and um and I was like this this is working like it worked and um I started looking about looking at stuff about prolonged water fasts prolonged water only fasts and um the science I thought was really provocative they did a lot like back before the Magic Bullet before the the medicalized pill medication right in the 30s and stuff they would fast people for all kinds of ailments and stuff and and longer and I read some books on that stuff super provocative stuff to me it was really really stimulating and it rang really really true to the experience that I had and this kind of historical perspective that I had that like well we didn't always have food so there has to be this fasting mechanism in your body that works like for humans to be able to survive like it just kind of made sense where supplements and all these other things like it didn't make great sense to me I mean I'm so curious so like what's a prolonged fast like like what how do you define that is that I guess it's two days prolonged I mean that sounds pretty long to me like how like what what is a prolonged fast you're ready to have your mind blown right now yeah yeah so a prolonged fast is considered anything longer than a week so okay we're talking something longer than five to seven days so I'm reading all this material and like there's these clinics that do prolong fast and all this stuff right and like I don't have the money you're really the means to do that so I've been I've been sick for like four years like four and a half years four years yeah and um I'm just like I'm like I don't care like I feel like I learned this material really well I probably read like over 700 Pages worth of like kind of clinical like reports and really non-biased information from doctors that practice prolonged fast so I'm like I'm gonna I'm gonna do this at home and I'm gonna have everything I need I have I had a concierge doctor at this point which we're always kind of flipping doctors crap but there's great doctors out there like you and my concierge doctor I was like I don't have the money to pay you so he's like I don't care I'll see you for free right so he sees me whenever I want just walk into his office set up an appointment whatever he does his best for me excellent excellent dude you know um so but I have him on my pocket so I text him I'm like I'm thinking about doing this prolonged water fast I really need some sort of supervision someone to be able to do my blood work if I need it and if I'm not feeling well or whatever to kind of help me out and he's like no problem he's like I did juice fast for like 30 days a long time ago it was fantastic for me like I'm yeah and he says I think you're I think you're well enough I don't see any reason you can't do this so I'm like I'm like okay Joseph I did not eat for 23 days oh my God okay yeah we was that the Target or was that just when you like were kind of like had to be peeled off the floor you know no no that's a great question I read there was this study done at a fasting Clinic with this lady who had she had had a brain injury from an accident and um she had had a headache for 12 years for 12 years she went to neurologists she said on a scale of one to ten it was an eight so she had a level eight headache is what she said for 12 years and I think she's kind of debating on maybe like ending your life or just like kind of giving up on life and just going from Doctor to doctor you know like really bad but she ended up going to the fasting Clinic um because there's these neurological benefits she did a 40-day fast and on I think it was around the 30th day her headache went away this is what she reported and then it came back like a few days later but that's the first time in 12 years she had ever caught a break from it so in in the paper that they wrote up she she then she after 40 days she you kind of had I think this emotional breakdown point and like where you just can't really go any faster and 40 days is the longest they've ever really recorded any kind of benefit from fasting so they say Beyond 40 days like you're just not benefiting anymore so 40 days comes she talks to the doctor's like you're not you're not doing so hot anymore you know the headaches back we should stop she stops they refeed and go through this big process of eating again which is a really big deal it's it's because you have to do that carefully right you can't just uh have people start eating again it's like slowly reintroducing things because what you have like metabolic abnormalities that are really severe if you overdo it right absolutely so yeah I wasn't particularly afraid of fasting for 23 days for as long as I I really did as long as I could but on the day when I started eating again I was scared to death I had not eaten for so long I was so scared that somehow I was going to hurt myself eating again and I I had read all the literature I knew exactly how to do it I was extremely careful and it worked perfectly for me um but I was scared to death which is weird right it's like not eating seems scary but then eating again is much more was much more scary to me um so this gal sheet 40 days she refeeds and the and she's like she was she was so encouraged by the fact that her headache had relented she talked to the doctor clinic she's like when can I come back and fast again it's just wild right and the doc says well you have to you have to eat for six months like yep six months healthy eating um and then we could try it again if you want she comes back she does it again headache goes away she's fine after that Ellie says she reported you know in the paper that they wrote up and stuff so based on this I had read this because I had reached out and there's a there's a water fasting group on Facebook um finding things about TBI that are specific to head injury with prolonged water fasting is hard because it's already kind of a niche thing there's a lot of evidence on there from earlier on in history and there's um True North Clinic does it in California now and um Alan goldhammer runs it and you can get some interviews with him they have some good information out there but um I found this article that was specific to TBI because someone I had made a post in the water fasting group I was like hey does anyone ever heard about water fasting for a brain injury you know all you everyone in here is water fasting for some other reason most of them are trying to lose weight you know and one person a few people responded without much help and then one person was like I read an article about a lady who did 240-day fasts and she found she found relief for shield from a head injury and then he didn't know where it was though so I had to go find it but I found it so when I was fast the one you told us about right the headache that got better yeah exactly yeah same thing um so when I did it I was really I my goal was to hit the 40-day mark um but I knew that was like it's like totally insane and the more you read about it it's very clear in the literature and then if you hear testimonials it's very clear that like you only fast until you need to stop like when your body's sending you signals that you need to stop or you go into starvation instead of fasting because the physiologically there's a difference in how your body handles it like it goes it's feeding on its reserves until there's no reserves and then you start seeing these really unpleasant things that we associate with starvation but really you don't get them in fasting but what's the difference if you could just boil it down quickly for me between uh fasting and starvation like physiologically how it feels like what what do you look for to know when you've tipped too far yeah um I I wish I knew what starvation feels like because I don't um but it's just what I read when I was fasting though you um it's really odd and people tend to think you're Bonkers but you the the first week of fasting you really feel unpleasant you're really bored because you don't have meals to kind of sync up your day and you're really agitated not to mention like you feel really really hungry like there's all these unpleasant Sensations and you might even get pains and stuff transient pains in different parts of your body but then the weird thing is after that first week or so and this is what happened to me like I totally relaxed I didn't want food anymore um I was relatively happy which was kind of odd for me right um because I was dealing with these ups and downs of physiological like anxiety and depression um and after that first week I was like I just I just hang around and rest and that's it and you really feel very normalized and um you drink you have to drink plenty of water right and that's how it felt now when you slip into starvation um you start you're supposed to when your hunger comebacks it comes back as opposed to one of the biggest signs when you get you'll all of a sudden get really really hungry and that's supposed to be a sign that you're coming up on starvation but then like you start having other physiological problems to start to manifest I think you start to get really really weak you get weak when you're fasting like you can't get up quickly right you have to get up slower and do these different things but I never lost my strength really like I slowly kind of was more tired more a little bit more lethargic it was kind of like at this steady Cadence though but when you hit starvation I think that that drops off like you lose all your strength you stop getting out of bed um you know and and you're extremely hungry and agitated different things like that um and there's supposed to be this big turnover point with for it and yeah yeah so tell us what I mean I'm I'm aching to know what what happened uh uh for you therapeutically because of this yeah it was it was totally it was totally nuts so the really interesting thing that I want to mention is that after that first week I I started getting interested in things like since my injury like I've cognitively cognitively just like kind of screwy every day and fuzzy really don't take an interest in anything my only interest is kind of like getting through my day right and like doing what's what's in front of me after the first week of fasting like I got out this journal and I started writing recipes that I wanted to make for the food that I wanted to eat but then I was done fasting which is um you see some people might think like oh that's normal you're like fantasizing about food while you're fasting that seems standard but like I don't really cook like I really don't have any interest in food except for eating it but all of a sudden I became like really interested in like what it takes to cook and to bake and to make meals and all the different ingredients and all this stuff um I started like reading more and taking more interest in things and when I reflect back on it I feel like my brain became really plastic during that period and that all all the negative rumination and stuff that I had before that point they were all entirely gone like when I would wake up I'd be like what do I want to do today I wasn't like I hate my life I'm miserable like I don't want to get out of bed like that's kind of my standard for a while um so how many days into it did it kick in where you were just like oh [ __ ] it's gone like I'm interested in things again and I feel good like like what day did that kick in about the seven to ten day Mark if I remember right it was like about after the first week somewhere in there yeah it's like it's not a small sacrifice like yeah really just like check that right be like there's no doubting your toes into this yeah yeah and and here's the other thing I want to know how like what did your wife think about this when you're just like hey sweetheart I'm gonna go for 40 days I'm not gonna eat you know I would have I probably would have forgot to bring that up but it's excellent no yeah she's like no you're not she's like this is stupid you're not doing it I had to work I was kind of convinced that I wanted to fast about probably at least like two or three months before I actually did it and I knew that if I was going to do it I had to work on my wife that was my that was my hurdle like she was not gonna let me do it I had to work on her every day and start showing her the evidence like usually you know when you try to convince your wife of something you're sitting by other you're like okay just talk to him a little bit get him familiar with the idea and eventually it'll cave right no it was like I had to like pull the excerpts out of the books like I had to get the research I had to like give her I had to leave no question in her mind that it would be okay and then I had to get my doctor on board like there's this backup plan you know all this stuff because yeah she's like she's like you're stupid like she's like no way there's no that's not happening like how long like no she's like you can fast for a couple days full of this lady like in the 40s you know maybe in like some European country somewhere you know who did it for 40 yeah 43 days yeah she was not having it yeah okay but I did I got her over yeah I got her over the hurdle with the caveat that we're just doing this day by day and as much as I wanted to make it 40 days I had to do the same thing it's like if you don't feel right on a certain day you have to stop and that is eventually what happened on day 23 I woke up I felt a lot more confused I started panicking which I hadn't experienced at once during the fast and I and I started worrying about all this stuff that I hadn't worried about before and um and I and I got I started getting really upset thinking that I was gonna break my fast before I wanted I wanted to try to make it to day 30 is what it was um because that was I just saw that as like such a far Mark um but like think just that morning like it was just Anarchy and it was completely different than every other day on my fast and I was I was getting more and more upset I didn't feel right I felt confused and I was like and I was really scared about eating again too was another thing I was like I've gone so long without eating I don't know how to eat I knew on paper exactly what routine I needed to go through but so that was how I ended up breaking I was like all right you just need to ingest something besides water and slowly started doing that um and then to go into what happened after I can talk about that if you want yeah yeah yeah tell me about that I'm noticing that um that I'm pushing up five minutes here I'll have to probably have to get you on again to finish to finish this properly but if you can in the next five minutes tell me what what happened with you mentally uh I guess coming out of this yeah so this is this is where things get really really as as if the fast wasn't crazy enough these things if you got incredible I started eating again and when I started eating again everyone will tell you this right they're like food tastes so good right it's like okay yeah you haven't eaten that long food tastes so good but for us people that have had severe agitation or changes to their emotional state because of the physiological changes of like a drug or electrical treatment or something right experiencing that was like having this huge flood of neuronal activity emotional activity all this stuff that we're really devoid of and really hard up to get you get this big rush of it and when I started eating Joseph I hadn't been happy for a while before I got TMS and then this is like four and a half years after TMS like the most happiness I've ever had is like a three on a scale of like one to ten it was like my best day right yeah I was like it skyrocketed to like an eight or a nine like I was so yeah I can't imagine what was going on in my brain from that you know it's like it just felt so happy so healthy and so good I felt it through my whole body like I could feel the happiness like from my head my toe my body felt like positive and good and everything just seemed to kind of come back online um and it's just deposit I I was so freaked out I actually got a few days of this I got scared because I felt so good all the time like I had so much positive emotion I'm like I feel like some sort of weird happiness robot like it's being forced down my throat almost because I was so used to like feeling negative and um and then one night I don't know why I was laying in bed one night um watching like a cartoon sometimes I watch cards with my kids or something you know and um I was I was at like a 10 like on my happiness gal I was like I've never as far back as I can remember to being a kid and like sitting outside and like eating a Popsicle or something and like staring off into creation and being like life is awesome and you're just a kid doing whatever you want that's how I relate it like at that moment that's how good I felt and um after that the more I ate I started I ate some stuff I wasn't supposed to I did a few things and things kind of equalized for me and I didn't feel as good all the time um but I still but I did I had this healthier range but I could still get really happy like if cool things were going on right but other days maybe I didn't feel great right if I ate bad for a few days in a row I mean I do stupid stuff like well I need pizza and hamburgers and ice cream and stuff it's just like for people for us like that are harmed like that just can have really bad consequences you know I'd feel like crap for like a day after that you know and so I I went up and down for a while after that like kind of binging and then like trying to be healthy again and stuff and then um just so that lasted for a couple months and then just recently I went like Whole Food vegan because I'm just trying to keep it as clean as simple as possible and that's what they recommend at the fasting clinic and so I started feeling a lot more balanced and a lot more positive on a lot on just a really consistent basis but I really have to keep my food locked in really really really well and um but this is still world's better than what I was at going into the fast so things materially changed in a dramatic way after you're fast I mean you had stepped up to a new level of I guess cognitive functioning and and and mood right like that like the the level seems to have lifted yeah well you excellent question this is where I should have naturally on to you next so this isn't really an emotional perspective um yeah I've had I think I've had some cognitive improvements right I think my memory is working a little bit better there's some stuff going on but I do know that a lot of my impairments that I had in the past are still there like it's it's I have muscle fasciculations right like I have pain and stuff and a lot of this stuff really seemed to improve sorry alarm um a lot of stuff really seemed to improve after my fast but then I kind of fell back in and so I'm still I'm still struggling a lot from the symptomology that I had before so I had this really big kind of miraculous change right and like emotionally like I mean just a lot better footing than I used to be but when you're talking about in the earlier you ask me like ask me about your recovery or you fully recovered whatever like I am I am not fully recovered something really cool happened I've learned a lot as of late but I'm still really really working at it and I still have like some really big hurdles you know in front of me but okay so James here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna stop the recording now I'm going to get you sell and I'm going to like find a time to do the second half of this because I need to ask you about the TMS groups and everything like that and I'm sorry no no no no no hi so um you know you were just talking to me about the fast that you were going through and and one thing that kind of stuck out to me was you know when you're fasting you're you're kind of burning ketones and I was thinking about like the ketogenic diet did you have any thoughts about doing like a ketogenic diet after you had all these these real like improvements in your mood following this massive fasted state yeah um yeah those are excellent thoughts and or that stuff has been really stimulating to me when I've looked at it and thought about it um I have this I've had I developed this weird kind of complex about stuff since um since I got hurt by TMS and I started looking at all these different treatments and all these diets and all this stuff and there was a point a little while ago where I like certain aspects of each diet that I was doing seemed to help and then other ones didn't and um I at one point I came down to just thinking like geez it seems that everything that everything that's working for me or that is positive is just stuff that our ancestors used to eat like like if you eat fruits and vegetables like just and that's it like just Whole Foods like I seem to do a little bit better um okay with so with keto like I kind of considered it and then I started kind of getting into the weeds I'm like what to eat and like what not to eat and stuff and then I just kind of Let It Go and I was like I'm just gonna go with this whole foods thing for now and um and eat I think the way that I think we're genetically predisposed to handle the best you know I got this weird thing ideologically like if it doesn't make sense like I have a hard time grabbing onto it and with that like it was ideologically this makes the most sense to me so I was going with it [Music] um I've been really interested in ketones and I've seen stuff about it and like on The Fast and different things I could feel a shift in my mental attitude when supposedly I'm pretty much just utilizing ketones like to uh to exist or to keep myself going um and it was it was really interesting but um yeah because I've seen like you know Chris pay uh sorry no Chris um Chris Palma um uh the brain energy guy talks a lot about it and you know I've seen some of his his presentations and in some of the really hardcore ketogenic diets like like they're they're using like MTC Oil like it's it's not just like cutting out like carbs and eating high fat foods like he's actually supplementing with additional like oils and things like that which I thought was like I mean it really starts to look like more of like a medical treatment like I'm gonna force you into ketosis now um and that's like I guess I think that's how they do it for epilepsy or really severe you know cases of epilepsy yeah yeah wow that's really interesting um and I'm super most things like I kind of look at and disregard now I'm like I you know I've I've been here I've seen that like now that's something I'm very interested in and I've continued to Monitor and I talk to people that do it see how they're doing but for instance like MCT oil before I had done my fast I haven't tried it after my fast but um it actually it was I I kind of had some energy from it a little bit which is good but then on the second or third day that I was doing it I developed interactasia which since yeah since I've been injured when I try supplements or I've tried like certain medications that's what will happen like I'll I might be able my body might accept it for a few days and then I start having this extreme reaction and I usually don't sleep for at least a few days sometimes like a week you know um so because of that like some again some of the language in there some of the things that they're pushing I'm like I know I haven't reacted well to this um or I have some reason to kind of like for a little bit of disbelief and then so I kind of tailor my own stuff to it and I try to look at what's back what's the backstop for it right like I feel like part of it's like just eating Whole Foods and what you're meant to eat like maybe genetically you're from a different region like of the planet so you respond better some stuff than others um maybe not but I feel like that's what's behind it and then we kind of get really scientific and start pushing this really angular kind of stuff like you said and getting strict and then I think that's the part where medicine right we keep trying to apply the same answer to everybody instead of accepting that like we need a different answer for everybody but we can use the guiding principles yeah that makes sense to me um and um so the other I mean the other thing that struck me as well it was like talking to you you said you know I'm not all the way uh better yet but you know your mood Has Lifted um and this is frustrating I know this is frustrating for people with probably the TMS injuries and other folks is when I talk to you I wouldn't know that you haven't had a disability you know or that you had um you know a traumatic brain injury from it and that's the case with like a lot of the people who have the benzo injuries who I talk to a lot you know they can put on a brave face maybe they're a little depressed and and such but no way does their outwards appearance kind of reflect how they're feeling on the inside so I was hoping you could kind of catch me up now you know here you are five years after what what do you think of as like your main the main deficits that you experience on like an ongoing basis today yeah um you bring up a really good point which early on I realized the sidebar for a sec on what you said but it was really really interesting I realized that I felt a lot better when I was interacting with people like human communication and Community like it does something for your mental health like it is really temporary because you can't like always be in community or it kind of wears off if you interact with some people too much or maybe more difficult right like but exchanging ideas and doing this stuff is a really positive stimulus for the brain and I've been really interested in that um and I think that goes a lot to what you're saying a lot of people seem really fine but for me um so I ran into this stuff called you I'm sure you're aware of it like brain training a while ago and these ideas that go along with neuroplasticity of you know we have these thoughts that we really dig out in our mind and we tend to go back there and um and get stuck there and then when we're in there like that's what creates extreme anxiety and depression if it's um based on your thoughts it's not a physiological thing is because you keep returning to these thoughts they get really cyclical and then they're so well trained in you that all you have to do is start to think about it and then you might just think that one thing for like a week you know and be totally depressed about your life sucking or whatever right um so what I realized with the the TMS injury and stuff is that you know there's all this time where you're not engaging people and you have to think about your own problems and solve your own stuff and my cognition was limited for for a time and I had to deal with all these really like kind of traumatic and difficult things in my life and and just figure a way to cope with them and then I realized that waking up and feeling exhausted every day and then getting up and doing things and then like if the light's too bright or whatever then I start panicking and I'm extremely anxious for a while right and then then I calm back down all this stuff it built in these patterns where I was now expecting these things to happen so right so even though I was likely getting better over time I was still experiencing these symptoms because I was expecting to experience them and before TMS if you told me that I'd be like okay you know like that that happens to people but it's not as bad or there's some way to kind of realize that hey that you know I'm fine but I'm just emotionally attached to these kind of stimuli and that instigates things you know but and that might be true for someone for the injury but when you've been injured that severely like those your reactions are a lot more severe and you get stuck in the fight or flight and it all becomes this really like really intense like severe circle like of symptoms so for myself I realize that man I like my mental my emotional reactions cause a physiological reaction that is really tight and really closely woven together so that it's really really hard for me to tell that just having some thoughts and believing that I'm gonna Panic will make me panic and um I think around the four year mark I was starting to realize that that had it that was playing a big role like I know that I had healed a little bit but I was starting to I had these moments you know of like like these small moments of clarity or you know I would go out and interact and I felt really normal for a few hours and then I would go home and all of a sudden the moment I got home I would feel terrible right and um I started kind of like scanning my body and be like am I really in as much pain as I think I'm really experiencing these really negative symptoms as bad as I was and it turned out that I really wasn't um or at least when I calm myself down for long enough like I didn't feel as bad as I thought that I was doing um and so since then I've been kind of rethinking those things and trying and the fasting I think helped that process but um so now I feel yeah so I was going to say you bring up an interesting point which is that sometimes it it can be unclear because you know when you go through something like this it's like you said you learn new patterns um and you get in certain routines and even routines in the way you you're thinking and then I think what a lot of people don't realize about this type of thing as well is that almost this is my opinion you know I think almost everyone develops PTSD when they've gone through a severe drug injury and so on top of the cognitive injury and the I guess the brain damage that happens it's like their emotional system is it's like on edge there's so many triggers that throw you back into that place all the time and then it's like untangled like how do you untangle that okay so you have a new kind of psychological disorder PTSD you know and then we've got this resolving kind of brain injury and then also I guess these new patterns and maybe these new anchors of things around the house that kind of throw you back into to Dark Places and yeah it can be it can be really tricky to to know what's what's what absolutely like you nailed it dealing with all those and I've always been like kind of a skeptic my my whole life and thought like Well it can't really be like problems can't really get that bad right like you'll always like people come maybe complain too much or you know there's always a way through things but what you're saying is absolutely true and those things are so tightly woven and they're so hard like it feels entirely real like after you go something through that go through something that traumatic you know like peeling back those layers in unwinding that stuff is it feels virtually impossible like it it completely controls you you know let me ask you this are you are you are you able to work or are you still I I don't know what happened when you stopped working whether you went on disability or or whatnot what was you know what what's your situation now I guess yeah I ended up on disability um and so I when thinking about going back to work I kind of measure for myself um you know could you deal with a regular work environment um and sometimes you know my family different people have stuff that I've always can help out with if I want to sometimes I'm like you know I'm feeling well so I stay home whatever but so I don't always feel great obviously everyone kind of deals with that I think even when they recover like maybe their bad days a little bit worse than they used to be so there's that but then like every once in a while I'll be like okay I'm gonna go like for instance um one of my family members needed something like bolted and put it up in their garage right it was like a few hour task um so I was like you know what I know I can do this like I'll do it on my own time my own pace no rush just go do it it'll be a little experiment to see how well you would do maybe in the workplace or if you had like City work and I go in there and I start unboxing this stuff that I've already done this exact same job before on like for other people and um I I wish I knew better and maybe I should think about it more but like I don't know whether I was because I was in a foreign environment or whatever I'm doing but I'm unboxing this box and like my brain just starts panicking and screaming like something's wrong you know and I'm like oh I need to get out of here you know it's almost like someone just fired a gun like right next to me or something and I became into moral danger and like I I sat I just I turn around I sat down for like five minutes and I'm like everything's fine like it's all good like you've done this before like just reassuring myself and again I was working myself out of that mental training that like my life's ruined it's never you know it's never I can't do this stuff like I'm just gonna keep panicking freaking out you know and after like five ten minutes I was like started calming down a little bit I was like all right I'm just going to get up and do the same things that I've done so many times in the past like you know get the screws out like start with setting this up I know I can be successful at it start doing it and then I started feeling good once I started doing the things that I was used to doing right and then the second I got to another turn in the project where I wasn't sure what to do I freaking lost it again right and then I had to go through the same process and calm myself down but I was like man in the workplace this would be I think it would be more detrimental for me right now to go back and try again rather than to keep doing stuff like this or try to work up to a place where you know that's that's the way you go to do it and I actually a lot of the staff that I work with in my practice of uh drug injured people because you know we have coaches who we use to support people who are going through the same thing and and some of the coaches go through the exact same thing it's like this is this this may be their first kind of job back since being injured and um and I'll get calls and they're in a panic and it's like I can't do this you know you people are going to be relying on me and I just don't think I can be there for them I don't think I can perform at the level I want to and then we have to kind of it's okay take a deep breath you know I know that this is kind of your situation and don't worry we have the capacity to handle it and it's almost just by like kind of talking through that like the next day they're fine but it's it almost is like a trauma reaction it's like you know I've been disabled for so long you know and and now kind of returning to this it's like oh my God you know am I going to be able to do this and and they're doing great now but it's like this kind of process of picking up more and more responsibility and and doing more of it but I kind of see that from the other side now which is sounds similar to that that story that you just told yeah um I can't thank you enough for doing what you're doing and I'm like Curious where you got your patience and understanding from because that's like the exact same things like so much of my career before I had like zero tolerance for that kind of stuff like as soon as anyone like shows any weakness or any inability it's kind of like immediately like oh I gotta do your work now too like everyone gets frustrated you know and groans about it and I don't I don't think at all that's the way human beings were meant to be and to socialize like I've seen so much success I've had been on a few teams where we had that attitude that you have or like if someone was sick or if anything got dropped everyone was kind of rushing to help them out right we're like we're such a tight-knit team we relied on each other so much for ideas and work we're like man if someone stumbles we're all so close like we're just gonna have each other's backs and I saw the evidence in our work like we were so much more effective and capable when we gave each other zip space if you need to take time off we took time off people were so much more willing to help each other out that this energy was just off the charts and um I think that's really the direction that the workplace needs to go because people like you are really really really rare but it's so helpful um and I mean that's exactly that's exactly what it is you I'm kind of training myself out of a physiology about a physiological response and a mental response but you have to have the practical application right like I have to have the good experiences with that like to move forward because if you just keep dealing with failure in that realm like because it's devastational for people like us I mean well I think you say that lightly because another thought I had before was um you struck me just in in your upbringing and how how you kind of described your work habit that you would be a man that was very uh driven to accomplish you know to the point where you would spend a lot of time at work probably working and achieving and and all of that was like you know like I mean a lot of men are like this but I imagine particularly for you just what I described that was probably a really important part of who you were so having that taken away from you kind of right what sounds like it at a point in your career where you really could have kind of you know burst through into to a high level I mean and then going through that trauma of being betrayed by the medical system in a way we had this injury and you know this High achieving person probably identifying a lot with hey I'm here to succeed I'm here to provide for my family and it's just I can't imagine like what kind of hell that would have been like finding yourself on the other side of it I don't know if you could kind of you know speak to that but I think for especially High achieving men like yourself who kind of went through that that uh you mean I thought about putting myself in that position and I mean it kind of brought me to tears I couldn't think about how challenging that would have been um I don't know can you can you speak to that at all because I imagine that was really full-on you know you nailed it and in our conversation as we as we talk about like peeling back like the trauma like the mental trauma and the physiological trauma that you're throwing me back to like the first year like when I lost my job and I lost so I was dealing with an injury and then whether it was then or it was going to happen later I mean I was going to lose my job right so then I lost my job and trying to figure both out at the same time like I'm still trying to unpack unpack that and understand like the role it had um every time I start failing at something like I start panicking right and I was just doing something today I forget earlier on the day and I was like starting to panic I'm like hey it's okay to like fail at things you know like you gotta let yourself in on it but the first year I spent I mean I I feel like everyone should go through it because everyone should understand what it's like to lose everything because so many people have lost everything and it's our lack of understanding of that process that disables us from from having compassion for each other right but like that first year I was like okay I'm gonna lose my house I'm gonna lose I'm gonna lose everything that I have right like so and the days that I spent were like how are you going how is this going to unfold for you like how are you going to deal with this stuff I was and then unfortunately like for us we're kind of like am I going to end my life over it or or am I just gonna try to keep going and hope that there's some improvement or I hope and pray that like I'll just be able to Bear the load that's coming down on me um you know like because you're thinking about my injury and then I'm thinking about the psychological strain of what I'm going through and I'm like it feels just Everything feels impossible you're like I can't go through this kind of before I add TM the TMS injury I didn't think I could go through this kind of psychological strain someone being like hey I'm going to take all away your stuff you can't work anymore you're not gonna have a place to live and all this stuff I was like I can't I couldn't deal with that like good good luck kind of I guess providing for your family the way that you did before as well you're gonna have to figure that one out as well and all of these all of these types of things I mean I cannot even like well I mean tell us I mean how do you build yourself back up from that place I mean because I mean like you said people become suicidal and they're there and I bet people have taken their life when they've been in that position like how do you because you're right I mean you kind of lost everything and in sort of like the most invasive way ever because there's something about like you could lose your job you could lose your car and you could lose your home if you you know made a bad business venture or you went all in on something and you thought it was going to work but losing it because you've had like a like a traumatic brain injury and it's just like oh [ __ ] it's going to be hard for me to build this back up from here I I just have to kind of sit and wait until it recovers like um yeah yeah it's different right that's different that's like a whole like like I'm gonna be waiting until I can kind of get back up you know back online and recover from it so it's like how do you um and this is probably important for people who find themselves in a similar place like what what words have like strength do you have for someone else who's kind of walking this path and who also you know like you kind of lost everything and I mean you'll hear five years later I know you're not improved but it's certainly looking like you're going through the motions to start to think about returning to work and everything like what do you say to someone who's who's one year in who's just lost everything yeah great question um so it was um I kind of had this cookie cutter life in a lot of ways but in other ways I haven't I was raised it was kind of like hippy-dippy parents and experience that they're kind of trying to teach me to be wise about things like when I was younger and I kind of turned my back on that stuff and like moved into the City and like did all this professional stuff because I was over flooded with that kind of mentality growing up so I didn't find it very appealing um but when this stuff happened I when I started learning about the trick that Psychiatry had pulled on me and then I realized that my job was kind of responsible for me getting in this situation I had these these moments pretty early on where I was like I just got screwed by everyone and everybody that I ever put my trust in as an adult right and I was like I was like you're not do it was like and then and then on top of it I was like and you're probably gonna die soon and so I was like what am I gonna do at the time I have left and I was like well I'm I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do anything dishonest right I'm not going to engage in any Behavior or any thoughts with anybody that's slightly dishonest I'm not going to deceive myself again whether that's with a psychiatrist or we're trying to work a job that I can't work or whatever you know I'm like I'm gonna be a hundred percent honest with myself and everyone I meet all the time I'll never I'll never be dishonest you know and then then I'll just deal with the Fallout from there because that's how I want to die essentially unfortunately we don't talk about that a lot but almost all of us are in that situation every day we feel like we're gonna die so I just was like I'm just gonna be honest with myself and I had those conversations with my family and everyone that was important to me and then I started having this is I'll get kind of functional so that's kind of the inspiration I offer to people and once that happened my trajectory actually changed a lot so um so I had remembered these phone calls that I had taken or these situations that I had been in when I was working at the bank where like you call like there might be a collection situation or something or someone like I was there during the bubble to collapse people couldn't pay their mortgages right and um like you talk to customers or be in a situation and lots of times you'd just be trying to negotiate away but the thing was during the collapse like people didn't have a way they were they didn't have the income to pay they couldn't do anything and the people that I respected the most are the people that left the biggest imprint on my mind were people that were like I can't pay you and I and I'm not paying you there's nothing to be done like why are you calling me right and I was like why am I calling them like you know this is dumb so in this situation like I had bills to pay and stuff so I was like I'm gonna call them and be like hey I can't pay you like hey I got nothing this is why I would start sharing my story with people I there's so many laymen and like just people out there that know TMS is harmful because I call them up and be like hey I can't pay and they'd be like why and I'd be like I got hurt by TMS and I'd start telling them my story I wouldn't like go nuts but I'd just start talking to them about it and I say so so I'm in a bad spot and they might ask me some questions right so I'd tell them more whatever they want to know but it became a way for me to spread the honesty of what I was going through but then also I had this tremendous relief of my burden where people were able to help me that could help me and other ones were just like hey I understand man like you know we'll see where we're at in a month I can give you a month or whatever and the craziest thing was that while my whole life doctors didn't show up for me in the way that I needed you know my job didn't show up for me in the way that I needed when as soon as I changed and I was totally honest about everything people started showing up for me and I can't explain and how and why but like my family really showed up some of my family members were like they were they just called me like hey I heard you're in a spot I'm just going to give you I'm gonna give you money every month until I can't anymore this is what I can do and I'm like wow thank you like that's a huge deal some of the like some of the creditors were like were like okay like you can't pay us you can't pay us okay fine you know and then when I was honest about my disability and stuff too I'm sure I got a little bit more sympathy you know they're just like oh man if that happened to me like I get it so they would they would lay off it like wasn't a big it became a human exchange instead of a what can you do for me exchange kind of thing right um and then I went I did the the hard things that people can't do like I had to file bankruptcy like I had to I had to go uh get get on uh Medicaid and like get food stamps like everything that I could do to try to make it through this period that I never thought I'd have to do in my life but through this process I met people that understood like going to the welfare office and talking to the lady she's like I was where you were I had a great job and all this stuff and we just I got laid off one day I couldn't feed my kids and I didn't know what to do and my daughter her daughter went to the welfare office for her because they didn't have any food in their house and so she's telling me the story right of like the situation and all that like there's this term um pain shared is pain divided and Joy shared is Joy multiplied so even though I was going through this horrible thing there was these moments where even though they didn't sustain me for a long time they I think they serve to change my mind and change my perspective and allow me to just get a little bit further down the road and a part of it was like oh there's this part of humanity that's really fantastic and there's all these people out there that are very quiet but they know exactly what's going on they're trying to help everybody out as much as they can and there's just really wonderful stuff in my whole life like I like for the 15 years that I was working I never once ran into someone and I was like man that person's wonderful I'm so glad that I met them today and talked to them never once did I ever say that right but after my injury I can tell you I said that like at least once a month on average maybe like two three four five times a month I'm meeting people that are honest helpful and that they want to be there in her which is crazy cool and it changes you you know and I think that's a part of responsible partly for my healing too um I just never I had too much pride right like I would always take care of all my stuff and do my own stuff I never relied on anybody and then when I had to start relying on people it just it shifted things and it took a burden off me psychologically that was huge in terms of healing and like moving in the right direction because there was a point where it felt impossible I was sure it was impossible and now the Outlook I had today is entirely different yeah I think you're touching partly on like some of the I mean this is crazy to say but the I guess the psychological growth that people go through when they are in bouts of extreme suffering I mean one of the one of the stuff I work with is Chris Page who had I think one of the most horrific benzodiazepine injuries I've heard of you know I mean he would say crazy things like you know he pays for several years non-stop had a gun in his mouth several times he was so uncomfortable um and you talk to him now and you know the Gratitude he has for every single day it's it's almost like a monk-like sense of peace and when I asked him about it he just says after going through what I've gone through and the amount of pain you know it's it's it's like almost I mean he just feels like like blessed for every single day and it's not fake and there's nothing phony about it and you can see it in his face like he's fundamentally Changed by essentially being stuck in a place of torture for several years and now that he's out of it he's just you know he just like emanates love really it's crazy yeah it's we focus so much on the pain because the pain is it's beyond words that we all go through right and but I've seen that and I've experienced that to a large extent and if we get through the pain and work through this we become like some of the most blessed people on the planet because for exactly what you just said you're if you come through that like I mean now that I've been through what I've been through even now people would say you know hey would you would you walk across you know run across run you know 3000 miles across the country or something like that and I'd be like sure like you know like you know no big deal like some massive fee it was super hard like it's no different than living your day you do live your day one day at a time like minute by minute and you appreciate it and every minute you're not in searing pain or having agathasia is is a really wonderful minute of your life and it adds this incredible Vibrance and color and not to mention the things like I just mentioned you're talking about like this wisdom like understanding what it is to be human and seeing that in other people it's just it's it's life-changing in a positive way to me there's no doubt about that um it really just sucks that the the price you pay to get there right is just is is really the focus everybody has because it's it's so it's such a high price but yeah and so you know I'm gonna shift gears now because there's so much I want to talk to you about and you know I could talk to you for a million years but talk to me about talk talk to me about the group uh say the name of the group and then tell me like was it you who made it or did you find it like how many people are in there what have you and what your experiences have been like just hearing from other TMS injured injured folks I'd love to hear about that yeah absolutely so the group is called victims of TMS Action Group vtag why I gave it that name and I it was a long time ago when I was in the midst of a lot of stuff um but it kind of fitted I wanted it to be a group where we weren't focused so much on injury but what we could do about it and that's kind of what we ended up throwing together um I created the book The the group in Facebook and so I'm the Creator technically but there was like I told you at the beginning um I was totally alone like with these symptoms and the things that I was going through and I and like doctors were no help I didn't have any indication that hurt anybody so in the months afterwards I was gonna say what's it like when you start like a group and you're like the only guy in there like did you know like someone else or did they just kind of like trickle in over like a year or something then it was like like what would the early days like when it's just like you start the group like where do the members come from this is a really good question um that's actually the kind of the coolest part of the journey every time I think about how far I've come I think about the early days with that because there was there was nobody and nothing anywhere I searched I searched the internet for weeks and I couldn't find a single bad word about TMS and then eventually I came to this forum I think it was called TMS and you and it had been started a long time ago and people were talking about their experiences with TMS well I found a small section that people were talking about the negative side effects that they had and um I got in there one day and I was like holy crap I found somebody just one person that was complaining about memory issues and I looked up and it matched my stuff exactly and then I was kind of pouring over that stuff and there's a few other people that had chimed in and like I I created a login so quick and just started corresponding I was like please like just one of you guys like give me your email so we can just talk and start trying to figure this stuff out together and it's funny like you try to sync up with someone on a forum or someone on the internet like they're not going to give you their email or nothing but everybody that was in this yeah everybody that was on this thread like we instantly all shared our emails right we were going through like such desperation like trying to figure this stuff out on our own and in a very short period we had all shared our symptoms we created a spreadsheet and we were trying to just like get all the data together that kind of helped us understand what was going on and then our idea was to give it over to some lawyers which we started doing really early on um but this group really shortly thereafter we were all sending emails back and forth to each other all the time we're like man someone should just start you know a group where we need to find a better way to communicate so I got on and I was one of the I think because of my business background like doing this kind of stuff was just second nature to me it wasn't really difficult everyone else was so harmed it was like just trying to do that was like this big pain but I was like I've created like communication groups so many times like I'll just get on and do it and I'll just add people you know just second nature so I did that I started the group um and then man it was just there was only like 10 12 15 of us for like six seven months or something and then that first year I think there was like year year and a half there was oh there was like under 300 people and it was really small just one at a time people were trickling in and we were telling other people on Facebook and some people were just finding us because they had been searching Facebook for TMS like side effects for a long time and that popped up and then there was a point I think when we were under a thousand members like it still seemed kind of small and we would all almost communicate on a daily basis we'd make a Facebook post and just share something or talk you know very friendly and then after that first year and a half or so it just skyrocketed and now we have like 3 300 members and um you know a lot of the dialogue in there is I mean a lot of people I don't know if people are just sharing their stories and trying to help each other and communicate back and forth but um it just it really took off and then of course for me at the beginning it was very therapeutic to discuss my symptoms with people and get confirmation and things but it was around the third year I realized I actually started getting I had this another bout where I developed akathace interactivacia and I hadn't had it at the beginning and it was around three and a half years I think so it was like it's like a year and a half ago I had it and I think it part of it was I watched people in the group report these Horrors and these harms over and over and over again when the group started getting bigger and I was watching people in the very worst bits of what I have it and it's in some people even worse and I kept reading the stories and I kept reading every single story that came through and um and I just like I think I just broke like it I had a dream a really horrific dream that I woke up and I was having akathacea when I woke up um interact with Asia and uh I was just it was it was a million times worse than the worst nightmare I'd ever had even though there was nothing scary about my dream in particular but I couldn't I couldn't sit still I got out of bed and I was just walking around and I couldn't stop moving because the level of anxiety and fear that I was experiencing I had been through extreme anxiety and panic and all these things and this was something that was I kept telling my wife is like this is a million times worse I mean literally a million times worse than anything I've ever experienced and I've experienced like really really bad stuff and um I had just been it really immersed in the group and so many people were reporting all this bad stuff that it just broke me and then after that um it took me a while to figure out what it really was because once I had the activation then it was recurrent and it kept coming on like almost daily but definitely at least several times a week and I realized there's these stress triggers for it and it was being in the group like in watching these horror stories over and over again I mean that's like a really interesting point and I'm gonna ask you a question here do you think that you ever would have experienced akathisia like had you not read what it was like so many times like do you think there's like a psychological contagion aspect to it as well like maybe like yeah you're in states of anxiety and Terror and and previously you're just like I'm in a state of Terror and anxiety but once you know that like hey there are some people that when they get into these states like it just boils over and they have to start like pacing like like do you think it was like like once you knew that like it almost like infected you in some way like psychologically like I I know that sounds like crazy but I like what do you yeah what do you think of that yeah I you're explaining in kind of the your own terms which I I completely agree with the way I ex the way I've come to kind of explain things and understand things for myself because I look at how stressed out I got during work and the anxiety and stress and panic I had at work was really extreme it was really equivalent to a lot of the things I experienced after TMS and some things I experienced on psychiatric drugs and I related it to like there's a certain like level of neurological harm that your body can kind of hold on hold right and then like so if it's extreme chronic stress from work like it just builds until your nervous system is just like that that's it we're we broke we used all of our energy trying to hold on to this situation it's over and then that can manifest I think I think that's when people become susceptible like to have chronic fatigue syndrome and lots of these other really extreme mystery illnesses but to me what from what I've seen it's always been in this neurological break that they've had they've just overextended themselves so far it just breaks and um I mean you could call that in this situation you could call it like a psychological contagion right like I was constantly reading these stories I could not read the stories because I just couldn't look away because it was so related to my own stuff I couldn't turn my back on these people and and not respond to them or not tell them hey I understand like I've been there too this is everything that I've learned like I just wanted to share it with you right and I feel that I I my nervous system was just the horror that I was reading in there it just kept building up and and then it was a it was a breaking point and I just and it just broke and it just broke me and they the one I saw this this movie called quiet explosions it's about a lot of it is about service members that get out of the military and have TBI and how misdiagnosed they are and everything because this is invisible injury well there was this part of the movie when they're talking about psychological trauma can cause a TBI they're like it manifests a real physiological TBI like women that were they would interview this woman that had been raped several times in the military and they're like she has all the manifestation of TBI like so we that's how we treat her and then she's had an improvement right and so that's how I came to look at it if it's if it's true or not and I'm always trying to evaluate that but it really seems a close fit to me that I read these stories so much and was being traumatized and traumatized and traumatized by them and I believe every single one and I just held so much of it in I honestly think I got a physiological TBI from over exposing myself to that stuff every single day for for years on end and then you're not alone like some people have to detox from the groups this and this is not just what probably the TMS stuff but with in all of the groups because they're um you know you you hear the worst stories in the groups you know there's a bias there's like a retention bias where the people who are the sickest you know they they stick around you for obvious reasons right and then it like you can't help but think when you read those stories oh my God am I going to be here five years later am I going to be here yeah you know with this gun in my mouth like all this you know wishing I would die you know all of these things and and so they just they they leave and then they say oh I felt better you know it was nice to kind of have like a little reset from you know from that and so I don't think you're alone with that but let me ask you this so you're probably like I'm going to say one of the world leading experts in TV in intraumatic brain injury like injury because sorry in TMS brain injury because I don't think probably anyone else has as much exposure to the actual sufferers of this condition like I doubt there's any academics that are pouring over this and you know talking to as many people as you've talked to so given that I have this opportunity with you I would like to ask you to to kind of sketch out roughly like what you think the prognosis is for this on average from what you see like after this happens to someone hey some people it's three months some people it's like you know I've heard stories up to 10 years this is roughly where I think it falls like this is roughly kind of the symptoms that I think people have like sketch it out diagnostically so if there's any Physicians or any people out there who who would want to like learn from your experience talking to so many people with this like you know just just go for it because I I think you've you've got a wealth of knowledge having just kind of sat in this space for so long yeah absolutely I'm glad to um yeah it is a really unique position because as we know like clinicians don't really expose themselves to to the harms like the long lasting harms and stuff and just try to analyze that quantify it um which is really important work is just so important but it's not really getting done especially and then with the new treatment like TMS it's not it's good with it we piggyback kind of on the um the neurological breakage like situation that I was seeing what I've seen is so a lot of people don't report any harm from TMS right and um the way I've come to understand it is that the nervous system like they may have been in a bad spot but it wasn't ready to break right you can same thing with like ECT and stuff people can get Juiced up with ECT and meds like a ton and then they just they just cold turkey or whatever they walk away and they're just like oh that was a close call but you know what I'm fine I'm good to go and keep going I worry about those people a lot because I think they've predisposed them to themselves to a future injury and I think they walked away clean in their mind but really they should be even more cautious like to preserve what they have left um but arguably right like some people wouldn't believe me on that plenty of people that think they've had improvement from TMS or are okay or like totally fine but I'd argue otherwise so it's true it seems like the majority of of people walk away in that scenario like they're okay um a much a smaller group but really really significant I mean I mean if I had to guess like around like 10 ish maybe seemed to have like immediately like manifested this harm from the electromagnetic fields given off by TMS which which are really really intense when when I did the math on the intensity of the fields the intensity of the fields were actually more intense than ECT ECT has direct current but the amperage isn't as high as what's generated from the coils in TMS so there's this field there so it's just really a lot of energy um and so I think the people that are harmed they're predisposed to this injury um they're neurologically anyways they were kind of in this place where their nervous system was ready to snap for me I had been under chronic stress at work for like I mean seven eight nine ten years and then plus I had a previous psychiatric injury at the time I did TMS um I hadn't taken any meds I had just been eating and being healthy for years you know so I didn't have any I couldn't blame anything else there was nothing else except for just the TMS really at the time that overloaded me aside from chronic stress from work um and so we've had a very small handful of people like literally that were hurt by TMS they manifested moderate to severe symptoms of electrical injury that we kind of all share and then within a month or two I would say within three months they really walked away clean they were like you know what I felt really bad for three months I'm okay now like I really feel like I'm okay I'd check back in with them you know and they'd be like yeah you know I'm fine it's great I mean we're talking out of like a few thousand people I mean because there's other there's like family members and friends in my group I wouldn't say it's 3 300 people that were harmed you know but probably a few thousand of them now are I mean you're talking about a handful of people in that group the the very vast majority of people in there unfortunately are still experiencing like a high level of harm like or symptom manifestation at we're talking two three four years later and they're and they're still trucking at it and I think they're and then there's and again another so I mean you could look at it like in 80 10 10 like 10 of the people that are harmed seem to walk or actually it's probably less than 10 I mean like one percent seem to be like walking away early on free the vast majority seemed to stay harmed and then there's a really small group of us which I'd include myself in that seemed as they're starting to improve after several years they're having some level of improvement um and we're hoping to be okay one day um I really can't think of anyone yet that's been like hey I'm totally good like I was I was hurt for like three years and I'm totally good now you know everything's fine we have a few members that are like they went back to work and they're managing to work they have like kind of occasional symptomology but overall their their quality of life is pretty good which leaves us with the group in the middle and that group in the middle they had this this neurological trauma and um it really seems that removing the additional neurological trauma that they're experiencing on a daily basis is very very very difficult they're under extreme levels of stress from their crap life situation and what they have to deal with now after TMS um most people unfortunately were psychiatrized before TMS and now they've continued a heavy duty psychiatric drug use through their injury and then after their injury right trying to ask someone to withdraw from drugs or say that's a good decision like after they're already dealing with like severe neurological injury it's just it's just so hard you know to add a withdrawal on top of that like I talk to people about how the impact of the nervous system but I just you know I can't tell people or say have any expectation or them to even try that I mean I really understand it's a hard spot um but then they have the family stress right they have Financial stress they have all these stresses on top of them on top of you know pretty much laying around a house all day you know and then they're kind of depriving their nervous system of stimulation because if they go out they're over stimulated right if they stay in they're under stimulated you know if you're just constantly laying there you need some level activity but it's just got to be really really really small and you've got to kind of work up to it as probably the best ideal thing so let me ask some clarifying questions okay so in your group it sounds like less than 10 of the people they come in they're miserable but they recover fairly quickly yeah and then and then they leave and then there's another group of around 10 who they've been hurt for like three to five years and they're making very very slow recovery did I understand that right yeah approximately yeah and what about that group in the middle that that 80 of these and let's let's consider like the clean patients the ones because and that's probably not a lot right because by the time you get TMS you're unusual Because by the time most people get TMS they're on a mood stabilizer they're on an antidepressant and they may even be on an antipsychotic it's kind of like the step before you would go to something like ECT like you're you're clutching at straws by the time you're trying TMS typically and so usually that's them but for someone else who's like maybe a more clean like you are you seeing people like it's really bad hey this was really bad for like the first year but then by like 18 months like oh my God I'm like I think I'm like 70 better and then buy like the two and a half year mark they're like I'm returning to work is is that is that it or is it kind of like either you get better quickly or like you got it and then like you're you're kind of in it for for several years and it's a grind yeah it's definitely it's definitely a grind and it really sucks even though I was stuck in a bad spot I was really hoping other people would just recover a lot better than me but it's an absolute grind there is a there's some people after a year or two they seem to get used to it you know and they're like and we're kind of you know it gets better it improves but again like kind of like me it was when I was telling you I was like one or two percent progress a year maybe five percent you know it's like it's almost hard to tell like how much you're getting better over that long period of time but that for that large group in the middle that's really what it is a few people are like you know they get through two years and then they're like you know what it's not so bad anymore and then we talk about what they're dealing with and it's a ton but they've really just come to terms with the fact that you know it's really difficult it's going to be a really long slow you know way out it's a good point and that's another big similarity I see in the other spaces with the other drugs that like when you've been in like the hell like if you at least like leave the hell even though you're still having pretty substantial symptoms people are so grateful for what they have and they're just like and they're like it's like are you recovered like no not for not fully but like I'm good enough that I can like have a life and and and so they're like I'm recovered you know and yeah I'm still having like these problems and these zaps and these bouts of fatigue and I still have I'm not able to do the things that I want to be able to do and anyone else would be like hey that's pretty substantial but in their mind they're just like my life is Meaningful and I'm able to do things that I want to do and it's like so they're they're just like I'm good you know yeah it brings up this topic of disability right before um I thought disability was like this big overt thing that like if you're disabled you can't walk in this stuff right and then once I become disabled I'm like I change my perspective to like we're all really disabled it's just a matter of how much and how much it gets in your way right so like I knew after I was disabled I was like I was working with a lot of people that were technically disabled they were just like I'm not you know I'm just not acknowledging it just keep working anyways right and then like the Survivor Community like we become disabled and then like it's not like you're just not disabled one day right it's like you're just dealing with a little bit less or you have this great appreciation to focus on the positive so you know so many people we talk to I'm sure you get this in your practice as well like like how you doing you're like oh I'm doing pretty good and you're like how do you feel you know what's going on they name off all these egregious like horrible things they're dealing with right and then you're like okay like but if you're only thinking about the positive right and you're grateful for that on my staff Nicole lamberson and she um you know she's just like man this year has been like so much better for me you know uh in some ways you know maybe I'm turning a corner and then like I talked to her and I and I go how do you feel and she goes sometimes it feels like there's like you know there's like a rusty rod with barbed wire being shoved up my spine and like twisted around and I'm like how do these two things like exist at the same at the same time you know yeah yeah but you mentioned you hear egregious things I remember hearing that I'm just like Jesus Christ like that sounds just I mean I could not think of a worse form of like daughter to go through it's it's crazy oh yeah and she's like I think I'm getting a little better this year that's great yeah yeah yeah exactly that in that perspective it's a good it's it's a double-edged sword but it ends up tell me this so uh okay so it sounds like it's something that really improves slowly it's quite persistent for the majority of people talk to me about the clinical course so when I say that I mean what are the most common symptoms and how do they emerge following TMS just just from your experience like hearing so many stories what what is the most typical uh story of someone who has a TMS injury yeah um so when when you're in the office getting the treatments um typically you'll experience some sort of you know side effect um for me it was uh cognition problems right that's a big sign of a neurological complication um a lot of people were experienced well what I didn't get but the wrap your time I'd like oh you have increased anxiety or you have increased depression right which is really our nervous system shouting out like hey I'm way too excited or hey I'm I've been slowed down like way too much um or they'll have unfortunately like tinnitus like ringing in the ears um I mean almost a lot of this stuff is like kind of textbook TBI stuff um and then generally so you have some sort of symptomology like that when you're in there and it's usually not too bad it's usually an exaggeration of things that have already been going on maybe or or an exaggeration of regular like kind of human function that catches people's needs some people um a good friend of mine developed epilepsy right so she had a seizure in there and then she continues to have seizures um sometimes there'll be a big event like that is really rare um even like some people that were like screaming in the chair or it felt like a jackhammer on their head that's pretty rare stuff but obviously it's an indicator for for injury and then the typically what happens and this is really really uniform and it's also what makes it so so difficult to deal with and puts us in such a precarious situation is that really nothing changes for two weeks three weeks four weeks um two months three months and then all of a sudden our nervous systems collapse or we have or the endocrine system stops kind of being able to support the the trauma that's going on or whatever it is and then we have this big collapse where now we're dealing with like extreme fatigue like then all of a sudden you can't get out of bed and you're exhausted when you get up you go to do things and you're exhausted um you have over stimulation is a huge one so extreme sensitivity to light to sound um senses and and that sort of thing and then of course that results in a cognitive like problems usually like you just you can't think straight um that sorts of stuff and then we have all kinds of other things other manifestations of electrical injury like people's muscles will start twitching they'll have extreme cramps and pain like maybe in their neck or their lower back or in an extremities a little bit less common it usually seems to manifest along kind of like the spinal cord like either from up here down um eye injuries are they're not really frequent but they're they're they bother me when I hear them I remember them um eye injuries can happen during treatment or they can kind of materialize slowly after treatments as well we have some detached retinas and stuff like that which is like kind of a high form of trauma um and then from that people experience in that time afterwards like a lot of anxiety and depression and panic um and what I've noticed one thing I don't know if you're interested in but it really lines up really closely with chronic fatigue syndrome and we always think of chronic fatigue syndrome as like just being exhausted all the time but they're experiencing um these huge bouts of anxiety and then they crash from it and they become exhausted and they have these two extremes they're usually bouncing between with other things like muscle cramping and different things like that too I'm not entirely sure I actually got diagnosed with chronic fatigue by that one of my good doctors that I had and at the time I was like what does that have to do with anything but I went into the chronic fatigue community and looked and I was like wow they're experiencing the same things that we are they just have a different kind of instigating Factor in there but um it's all all this stuff is like textbook like broken nervous system um delayed onset from some stuff let me ask you something so um you know when I think about like a like a traumatic brain injury that someone might have from a car a car accident or something like that where they you know they might fracture their skull you know and they have this this real strong hit um right afterwards it's it's fairly common for people to be really sleepy and sedated does do you see that happen some is that sometimes described right after the TMS treatment or is that sleepiness usually the thing that like hits them like after whatever that Euphoria is or that Rush of like endocrine hormones has has worn off like you know two months later like oh yeah I was wondering if you could talk about that because uh yeah like sleepiness heavy sedation and where that kind of fits into it I mean if it does I mean I'm just thinking about traumatic brain injuries yeah that's really that's really interesting and I could see getting that as a clinical experience like I don't know if you've seen that in patients before like face to face for me I don't I've never equated the two because I'm always talking to someone I'm not really or I look at them face to face for a few minutes or for like an hour like we talk on Zoom or something but um so really they're just reporting things to me so it's usually verbally or it's written and um they're talking about extreme excitation and like not being able to sleep or being so wound up they can't calm down and or like they talk about being exhausted or fatigued I never really heard them refer to it as like sleepy but um because they usually associate I've also noticed that people associate fatigue and depression almost synonymously like almost like exactly the same thing like I'll actually probe people and say now are you depressed like emotionally or are you exhausted all the time and then a lot of them will change and be like well I just have no energy so like I'm just depressed and like exhausted and I because I would describe it as depression as well but really it's I think it's a neurological exhaustion which I really never heard someone say sleepy but it would not surprise me if that's exactly yeah maybe yeah yeah because that like that that seems to be something that happens at least when you have a physical injury to the brain and I saw this up close actually my daughter um she fell out of the window at our home um onto a concrete driveway and had a dramatic brain injury and was I guess seriously injured and very confused and um for about a period of a week um and this is crazy she was three at the time um and she was heavily she was so sleepy um you know she went from being awake all the time to being awake like four hours a day and and so I saw what that looked like real time just that kind of you know that you know that damaged brain kind of thing going on where she just wanted to sleep all the time she would you know we'd have her little friends come over and she would play with them for a little bit and then she'd say Hey you know Mommy like I think you know I think so and so needs to go home and we could tell like she just needed to go back to sleep and that kind of went on for about we were really lucky that went on for about two weeks afterwards this kind of heavy sedation before before it kind of went away and um also in my clinical practice you know I talk to people who've had traumatic brain injuries and they describe kind of the similar thing of this fatigue now this this sleepiness this may not be the case with um traumatic with um TMS type injuries this might be more of like a physical thing like a physical brain injury thing but it kind of struck me as like that seems to be something that the brain does when um you know when you shake it around in the skull really hard or you heard it really badly um that that it just it gets you just get really tired and and and and lethargic and then also there's these other things there's like the irritability that goes along with the traumatic brain injury and all that kind it's very prevalent yeah yeah um so yeah um next time we talk you'll tell them you'll tell me about it you know if you start if you start is seeing seeing stories like that but I think that's yeah and primarily with TMS there's a lot of rapidly I mean almost everyone's consent um convinced they have like bipolar at some point because it alternates really rapidly like they get really anxious and then they crash from like being hyper Vigilant and then they're exhausted and then they're going back into like a really anxious State because of all the stuff they're going through and it alternates really quickly like lots of times in the day which is really really common it almost like seems like a Hallmark of the injury which I think is a bit different than what you're describing which might be a manifestation of the difference in the like the insult right like an electromagnet being like well and the other thing that comes to mind is the like I think it's CTE was chronic traumatic the encephalopathy the the foot what happens to the football players and the boxes and things like that do you see an overlap between I mean that kind of chronic traumatic brain injuries in in those in in those athletes and how they describe it to what you see in the TMS group because I know people once they develop that those athletes like that can last like just as long as this this TMS stuff if not longer I mean once that happens to you it's almost like having you know they describe it as a type of dementia I think is is and and you do hear a lot of this like severe depression like kind of anxiety like irritability and you know with cognitive them and it's it's that kind of picture I was wondering if you've ever put the two side by side or kind of looked at the differences and similarities between the TMS injured folks and and that population yeah absolutely I have that was something that there was the early part where I thought it was just a traumatic brain injury and I looked at CTE and Ben amalu has done a bunch of stuff like that I looked at some of his work and whatnot it was really Illuminating they're they're very close overlay and um like a lot of everyone manifests a little bit differently you know and some of the things I was seeing were slightly different than that but the vast majority completely overlapped and then I started looking at um ECT and um people that have been exposed to repetitive electrical injury and I saw even more overlap um a lot of muscle twitches like dehydration problems so processing their electrolytes it seems like like different symptomologies of like becoming dehydrated have or having like frequent or less urination and then um and and muscle issues really is coming on like like my calves they've faciculated ever since TMS every day I look down at them and they're just twitching I'm just like like wow you know and that seems to be kind of unique I have heard of some people with chronic fatigue having similar things like that um which was a surprise to me but with the in the ECT group we see almost an exact overlay with that stuff also even with the gulf um you give this country kind of crazy but Havana syndrome or Gulf War syndrome they're yeah those people have been exposed to either chemical toxicity or a lot of electromagnetic like high intensity stuff and they seem to have high instances of like the muscle twitches and a lot of the same stuff as well but with CTE it definitely seems to focus on like the depression and slowdown and the irritability like over time and that's I think a lot with my doctor had dealt with and he saw it as the same injury just a slightly different like um yeah insole you know kind of thing are there any core differences that you see between the ECT injured and the TMS injured populations yeah that's a great question so much of it was such a close overlay it's it's almost been hard to like separate them but um ECT it they have this phenomena of the loss of like autobiographical memory where they're like I don't remember my 20s like it's just completely gone and I've talked to some of those folks they literally that I think it's still in there somewhere but their access to those memories is completely severed like it's just a clean clean cut there's there's nothing they can do to access those memories and that seems to be it's kind of rare but not too rare there's plenty of instances of it out there with TMS we don't see that kind of thing really at all memory problems cognition problems but when we talk about memory problems with TMS it's primarily um functional memory like I can't multitask anymore I have problems remembering stuff but it's probably because I'm either irritable upset or there's a lot of other stimuli going on if I sit down and think about something concentrated I can usually remember it which is way a way more effort than any other person would have to go through but it's a different but ECT they have all those same memory problems as well like the functional memory problems but in addition they seem to have lost like that and then um unfortunately with ect2 they have more more motor issues more severe um muscular like issues and and twitches and disability with that kind of stuff with some of the higher use people we definitely have those manifestations like muscle issues and uh like cramping and twitching that's going on and problems using Limbs and stuff but it's fairly rare and it doesn't seem as intense yeah I mean that it may be something to do with the electrode placement or the what kind of like it's the space of disruption because I know with TMS I mean it's all um frontal prefrontal cortex stuff right it's it's kind of like here and here right that yeah like those yeah one side or the other um and then I guess you know with with um with ECT um sometimes you can have bilateral and so I think it could just go straight through your temporal lobes on both sides I know that's one way and I think I also see it done kind of like this as well with ECT and and I guess there's a current that goes probably straight through everything that's in there um to pass from one electrode to the other and so I wonder if it's maybe that it's hitting like deeper structures in some way that are more disruptive to those areas that you described like the autobiographical memory may be going through more of the areas that control mode you know the motor cortex you know coordination Tremors um but that's really interesting I I love to hear your um your perspectives on that because I'm going to be talking to a lot of people with ECT injuries uh very soon yeah yeah I heard about that that's fantastic um there's so much that we can learn from them there's so much they've been through with ECT the physics are a little bit for each of us um depending on your brain matter and your water content and all that stuff the electricity will take the path of least resistance so it can jump around it can jump anywhere from your head all the way down to the bottom of your spinal cord into any nerve in your body people report they have problems with their feet after um ECT and I've seen some of that in TMS you know it can jump anywhere but um the direct current is a little bit of a more concentrated did Beast so it can cause a more specific kind of injury depending on where the current actually flows because like you said it's going from one side to the other and then there's also heat buildup that occurs with a direct current because it's concentrated as well which is is a whole nother um kind of manifestation of injury and stuff with TMS it's very diffuse so it's very spread out and then um that electrical field actually pull alternates so quickly it pulls cells apart so when it's done in a diffuse nature as opposed to a direct nature you know along a line of current I'm sure that's that's a little bit different and it explains some things it's a perfect perfect segue into what I wanted to ask you about how does the injury occur on a I guess a anatomic level or uh you know like what if because I know you've looked into it deeply what do you think is happening that's damaging the the neurons with with TMS I know you sort of talked about it a little bit but I'm going to take you up to give a full answer yeah absolutely um I I mean I don't it's funny if you talk to doctors about it they're they're not physicists so they'll give you kind of a like an answer the way they understand it but if you like so if you're like is is three Tesla electromagnetic you know feel dangerous you know a doctor will say no like they're in MRIs and all this stuff it's fine you talk to a physicist or an electrophysicist and they're like it's extremely dangerous like it it destroys human cells you know it depends on your proximity to it but there you should take extreme precautions when dealing with that kind of energy right so our our understanding of it is definitely skewed based on kind of these terms that we see thrown around for instance in an MRI you maintain a certain proximity from that coil in the machine I mean it doesn't seem like much but maybe there's just a foot or like a half a foot in between your body and your face and that coil and that machine but in terms of how electromagnetic field diffuses and diffuses its energy that's a huge distance and it has tons of time and space to become weaker over that field right but TMS it's you you've you've seen it right like it's millimeters off your skull it does not have the time to diffuse in that way both of them are dangerous like we don't admit the dangers at MRI because they're a lot less and a lot less frequent but exposing yourself to that kind of energy like it is if we did also if we did MRIs every single day for 45 days right we would see a little bit different um consequence emerging there so with with TMS or with electromagnetic energy um there's there's so there's a coil that's that's running electricity and it builds this field up and that field is alternating electrons like very very quickly and it like super quick and um all yourselves have a polarity as well right and there's electrons in the atoms and those cells well they're all flowing in a certain way that's natural right but when you introduce another electrical field that is alternating very quickly and those electrons are now interacting right so then the fields in your cells are now alternating very quickly so it's pulling the atoms apart essentially is the way I understand it and so it starts to pull the cells apart and they actually they get these small tears in them extremely small tears in them as it goes on and then eventually when you keep doing it like for it's an extended time or they're repeatedly exposed to it eventually the cell walls break and then you have cell death right so those electrical fields are present in both electrical current like an ECT but the electrical fields are also present in TMS because they're so close and um they're so intense and so that's so with with TMS that's how the injury occurs but also electricity can be transmitted wirelessly as well so there's also actual current that gets generated inside your head from that electromagnetic field kind of like if you've seen like a Tesla coil right like it's invisible right there's a coil but it's it's rapidly moving um electrical Fields so quickly that then that electricity will actually jump and be conducted somewhere else right like this is the same thing with TMS at first I thought it was just a field but after looking to it more I saw some studies the research of the shows that actually like current actually gets generated inside your head based on the interaction with the field so that but I think it's really minor like the current would be a lot smaller than ECT because they're running like a full strength current through you this one is generating a wireless current um so primarily I think the damage is coming from the field porating those cells and pulling those cells apart which happens probably in a field based pattern but there can be some current transmitted as well where ECT it's just going in one side and going out the other like you said and interesting yeah yeah um another question probably one that I don't know if you've thought about this at all what what do you think is responsible for I guess the therapeutic effect you know so for the people out there who do TMS who have improvements in their depression or anxiety I don't know if you've read any of that literature when you've been looking at the stuff on risks like what are your thoughts about why it has this um positive effect on mood or anxiety and at least temporarily for some individuals that do this yeah um I was going to start out by giving like kind of a humble statement about doubting myself or saying this is my opinion but you know maybe it's different than the way I see it but I'm not I'm not convinced that I'm wrong at all and part of that is based on efficacy like some of the manufacturer studies trials have shown very high efficacy of like 80 percent but all the independent trials I've seen like trials done by the VA and stuff it's extremely low if not negligible and they don't show any efficacy which it's been what I've seen right all the people that I've talked even the people I talked to that reported Improvement they had a really hard time quantifying exactly how they felt better and then I have to ask them some probing questions some of them are actually seem like their quality of life was worse afterwards um so but what what accounts for that I think it has to do with that endocrine effect that we talked about earlier but even for me I related reporting better results afterwards and I think it's really I think it's I think it's the same game with Psychiatry like you take meds you become blunted right and then you're like oh I'm not anxious I'm not depressed anymore I'm going to report that like then you're like my life's a lot better because it's not so horrible doesn't mean your life is good or you're feeling well you're just not feeling horrible so you're like this is this is way better right for me I was cognitively blunted I had these cognitive problems that I later got diagnosed as mild cognitive impairment and she showed me all the deficit deficits I had in cognition right but I could no longer ruminate on negative stuff I couldn't ruminate on my anxious thoughts so I had a friend I was going through this and uh my wife was telling a friend of ours like what had happened to me she's trying to explain it and she's saying he can't think straight you know he's fuzzy whatever and she said and he goes I bet his depression is gone too because he can't think about all that negative stuff anymore and I was like right yeah and it kind of clicked at me in that moment it was earlier on I was like man I think this is what people reporting as a positive effect when really it it's it's hard in studies I'm like is this a positive effect or is it just a change yeah yeah because um it reminds me of the title I think that this must be a Peter bregen book or something he said but the the word brain disabling like um treatments I think something like that like you say yeah um brain disabling treatments and Psychiatry and and that's that was his that was his essential thesis for the whole thing was just like that the drugs to to any extent that they're the therapeutic it's because they're disabling the the way the brain is functioning in a way that you know might make someone feel better in the moment but you know you have to take a broader perspective and I wonder with like TMS right like if you cause a degree of cognitive impairment emotional blunting because you've disrupted the way the neurons are functioning in there uh that yeah you know that scale that measures depression and anxiety May improve but if you interviewed that person or if you spent a bit more time with them or you talk to their spouse you might actually find deficits moving in the other direction she might be like you know what James is normally very thoughtful James normally asked me how I'm doing when he comes back from work he doesn't give a [ __ ] anymore you know like he's just comes home sits on the couch you know yeah he looks like he's doing okay but you know our relationship's not doing great oh you felt a little bit better but you know James is not he doesn't even realize that he you know that maybe some of that anxiety that used to drive him to perform at a high level with his work and and things like that now that's gone like are you really better is that really a therapeutic effect if like it moves some kind of scale measuring your subjective experience of anxiety and depression down but in the other facets of your life you know the ones that people actually care about you've totally messed them up you know so I I don't think that's therapeutic I that so kind of from earlier on you know when I initially had my running with Psychiatry and meds and then to my TMs I've had my own experiences and then I've talked to so many people afterwards and that is the root of everything I've been kind of trying to prove myself wrong and find like where are these people that are having like the positive effect you know I I'm just not getting it um and so what you just described is just makes up the very very very vast majority of everyone I've talked to I actually run and ran into one person it was one of my neighbors and um he had he made a joke about starting to take Prozac because he was he was like the CFO somewhere or whatever um he had just got like a new job at a small place and um he's like I feel like I'm 110 of myself like I'm fantastic and all this stuff and I'm like I'm like are you serious and I'm looking at him and he looks like kind of exuberant almost you know and I'm like I'm like really and that's and that's from the Prozac and he's like yeah he's explaining to me how kind of great he feels and how he can perform like way better than he used to be able to and like I really questioned him for a bit because I had never run into that before and um I had talked to so many people so that seemed like a huge anomaly to me but it was really really interesting or most people that you've run into did they get that bluntly blunting like kind of change but not really for the positive type thing or do you see other people that like genuinely have like a positive like effect in their life yeah I mean there's certainly a group of people out there that that have a really positive experience well I don't know they have a therapeutic experience with it enough that they want to keep on taking it and their families are supportive of it so you know if we want to talk about the ssris yeah they're mood constrictors you know they turn down the volume on on your emotion and for some people who are having really really severe pervasive anxiety that gives them a sense of well-being you know yeah sure it blunts like the positive end of the spectrum as well you know so everything kind of shrinks down but for them you know if they're if they mostly live in the negative realm with high peaks of anxiety and Terror then or obsessive thoughts they see that as a as as a benefit um and it's so individual you know like for for everyone it would be different you know maybe for someone someone that's not in a relationship like it's it's going to be more positive but as soon as you add another person in there there's a lot more space for you to have a negative experience with ssris because yeah with some of that emotional blunting comes a lack of empathy for the other person you also get things such as like a um um you know there's a sexual dysfunction in there as well which can make things challenging and so it becomes a lot more complicated if your life is more complicated and involves people uh but yeah there's people out there who have the positive effects and then also the the the the the the rare but not so rare effect with the with some of the stimulating and well some of the ssris they can be uh disinhibiting and mood elevating for some people that's a less common effect but it's frequent enough that it happens and he may feel exuberant when he sees you he's like I'm on top of the world but he could go home and talk to his spouse and she says something to him and he just flies off the rails and he's more irritable because it's you know once you're kind of at that like level of energy and things like that like it's it's really easy to for that to to tip over and to uh uncharacteristic irritability which is damaging um and and these people like that that's that's why there's All These Warnings on the drugs about Mania because that's that's the start of becoming manic on one of these drugs and so many people get on these antidepressants and they become more irritable and the doctors they just go oh you know it's uncovered a bipolar disorder and then so they get they get put on um they get put on a mood stabilizer or an antipsychotic and you know it's just unfortunately for a lot of people it's it's the beginning of the end and you know and then they just start accumulating drugs and it's just a nightmare so it's so it's crazy you know it is so easy [Music] um for things to get out of hands with these meds the majority of people I talk to like they think more about like what kind of like phone plan they're going to buy than than looking at the risk of like an antidepressant something that's like a chemical affecting your brain you know that can have all of these effects people don't even think about it these days it's it's sold to them as if everyone has depression it's okay it's no big deal yeah and it's just I couldn't think of something that's like much more like it's so complicated right and we hand these drugs over to our family doctors who have five minutes to monitor these things in their visits and while we're talking about a drug that's changing how you behave and your mood and it's changing the way you're going to behave at work and in your relationships and and all of these all of these things and and I mean they're not monitoring it they don't have time they don't have the training to do it it's just it's so dangerous and if you want to you know I don't understand we're going to throw out all of the treatments but if you wanted to be done right man you've got to be good and it's just not and you've got to pay attention because you it's high stakes what you're doing and that is just not the way that they're they're used or thought about these days even among psychiatrists like there's a lot of really like shoddy just kind of just pillow and going on yeah that's a that's a really good candid assessment I I hadn't even come to really that conclusion from what I've seen you know like some people like it helps and they gotta acknowledge that but everyone kind of ends up in a bad spot with it but yeah you mean make a really good point like it it is it's a high stakes game and people don't acknowledge that like that's like the core of it right it's a super high stakes game and then you've got that other aspect onto it that these drugs will cause dependence and you develop tolerance and we don't know when you're going to develop tolerance and when that happens you're going to feel you're going to feel bad but you're still on a drug with side effects you know when any of them cause weight gain and diabetes and things like that and so you're left with the decision do I go higher or do I come off and believe me when you come off these drugs you're going to feel worse than you did originally you know and everything that was there that led to you getting on them in the first place is still there but now you've got a withdrawal syndrome on top of that that's going to last several months and and so yeah there's that whole like dependence part of it as well which really I mean don't like like I rarely put people on these medications because it's it's really hard to actually find like a use scenario where it's like oh this could genuinely be beneficial as an everyday thing like otherwise it's just like it's like a bomb wedding to grow off and a lot of the doctors that start these medications there's they're nowhere near that you know that that like when when it goes off like they're not going to be able to help you yeah it's so precarious yeah um but you know James would probably have to rap for now just so my wife kind of stick her head in here looking for me but um This was um this was great to talk to you I mean we've gone for three hours now um and so I I think this was this was just awesome yeah let's let's stay in touch and I'd like to hear from you like in a year or sooner if anything comes up just to see how you're going with with your own recovery and different things that you've learned in the TMS space the other thing I'd like to have you do is just if you know anyone in the group that also wants to share their story just have them reach out to me it's um interviews that would during psychiatry.com and um I'd like to have more people on just like you who could talk about the experience of of having this absolutely yeah I can definitely I'm sure there's a few people that would want to would want to do it that's that's a fantastic idea and thank you Joseph for for putting this on and getting this all together and so many voices out there that I've seen and you're making this huge evidence space for for the reality of what's going on out there I can't thank you enough for that yeah no worries all right I'm gonna I'm gonna stop it all right [Music]