Interventional Psychiatry: A Modern Approach to Complex Mental Health Conditions
When traditional psychiatric treatments such as prescription medications coupled with counseling just aren’t providing a patient with adequate relief from severe symptoms of mental health maladies, interventional psychiatry offers modern treatment options with proven success rates.
So what is interventional psychiatry?
Simply stated, it’s a subspecialty that utilizes advanced, hands-on neurotechnologies procedures and targeted medications to provide options for conditions such as treatment-resistant depression and acute bipolar disorder.
Timothy Jeider, M.D., a double board-certified psychiatrist and cofounder of Nevada Mental Health, which is leading the way in this kind of treatment, explains further, noting that interventional psychiatry utilizes treatment modalities where a patient has to physically be at a doctor’s office or clinic.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Reboots the Brain
“Science has come a long way since the terrible old-school days of lobotomies, leaches and even older technology like Electroconvulsive Therapy, or ECT, which delivers an electrical current that causes your whole brain to seize,” Jeider said. “One advancement is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, or TMS, which is a drug-free, non-invasive alternative that uses magnets to create and electrical field that will basically send a reset signal to a very specific part of your brain that controls things like depression or OCD. It can even help with smoking cessation.”
He said this treatment—which is offered at Nevada Mental Health and involves sitting in a chair wearing a helmet for 20 or 30 minutes—has been demonstrated to be effective for those who have not improved sufficiently from medication or psychotherapy, with the majority of patients experiencing relief after treatment.
Ketamine Therapy on the Rise
Strides in interventional psychiatry also include advancements in the use of ketamine treatment, which Nevada Mental Health offers its patients. This includes esketamine, sold under the brand name Spravato, which is a prescription-only nasal spray which has been approved by the FDA for adults with treatment-resistant depression. It works by targeting glutamate, a brain chemical, to help cells communicate and form new pathways, and can offer rapid reduction of symptoms.
“We’ve all heard of ketamine, but just because a medication can be abused doesn’t mean it doesn’t have positive benefits and effects when used in the right amounts and in the right scenarios,” Jeider said, adding that ketamine can also be administered as an intramuscular or intravenous injection. “Nevada Mental Health also offers therapy-assisted ketamine treatment, including Spravato, where the medication is given and then the patient receives a talk-therapy session while in a dissociative state, which allows them to kind of disconnect from whatever is bothering them and look at it from a more objective standpoint. But this is not something that you just sit on your sink and use every day. You have to do it in a facility where you’re monitored and interacting with mental health staff to actually guide the treatment process.”
See a Specialist for Interventional Psychiatry
To that end, Jeider cautions that these treatments aren’t akin to services like Botox which are offered at med spas. Just because they are injections doesn’t mean just anyone can or should administer them.
“Nevada Mental Health is large enough that we have specialized care and dedicated programs that patients can enroll in,” he said. “We also have ketamine treatment specialists who will screen you, assess you and make sure you’re a good fit. It’s a very detailed approach, and we’ve developed treatment protocols and the appropriate guidelines so it’s done effectively.”
