It is entirely without exaggeration when I tell you that Owen saved my life.
He is, unfortunately, a suicide expert.
This is a brain magnet. It’s working. / Fermata Health // Brooklyn, NY /// March 2024
I have had treatment-resistant depression since 2011, with episodes pretty much every year. Each year, my ‘depression era’ got worse and lasted longer. It didn’t really matter if I was on SSRI’s or not, was in New York or on a tropical Indonesian island, was happy with my home life or not, had roommates or lived alone, was exercising or not, was making art or not, etc. etc. etc.
In 2022, I got a psychiatry appointment with David Carreon at Acacia, and he prescribed TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation — say that 5 times fast!), to be administered at Fermata’s office in Brooklyn. This is the office of my dear friend, Dr. Owen Muir, adult and child psychiatrist, writer, genius, fellow manic-depressive. He even administered treatments himself, on a few days when his TMS technician was unavailable.
Dr. Carreon and Dr. Muir are true physicians. They are deeply-caring and compassionate people. They genuinely want people to get better, as quickly as possible — not for riches or prestige, but because they actually want to help alleviate as much suffering as possible.
It is really hard to be a human, and they know that.
I will tell the whole story one soon day, because I (at Owen’s gentle insistence) recorded an audio diary entry each day for my 10 days of treatment. I’m thinking of making a podcast about it. Not just about TMS, but about all of the things that have worked for people to get un-depressed, because most people I know didn’t know about TMS and don’t have an Owen Muir in their lives.
But you can now.
Around Day 7 of TMS, I stopped thinking that it would be better if I didn’t exist.
A week after the end of the treatment, I had some energy.
A month after treatment, I was up at 3am crafting and writing, feeling happy and creative and full of a life I wanted to live.
Dr. Carreon said that I was in a cohort of late responders, for whom it can take about a month to go into full remission. I enjoyed remission for 6 1/2 months.
There were no side effects except for some sleepiness and a slight headache.
Before TMS it took a Herculean effort to leave the apartment (and most days I didn’t manage it). After TMS I had the strength to re-enroll in acting classes, host events, and move myself cross-country to Los Angeles for the winter.
The audio diary consists of one entry recorded the day before TMS, one entry recorded between sessions 9 & 10 of each full accelerated treatment day (the SAINT protocol, read all about it on Owen’s Substack), one entry recorded one a week later, and one recorded a month later, around 3am. You can actually hear me get better over the course of these recordings.
I do not say this lightly: TMS saved my life. Owen saved my life.
I did not know what else to do. I did not really believe anything would ever actually work, but I was willing to try, and Dr. Muir made that possible. I am profoundly, enormously grateful.
It felt — and still feels — like an absolute fucking miracle to me.
This is what TMS looks like. It’s not to be confused with electro-shock therapy, which is a whole different thing. TMS can be a little uncomfortable, like a tiny woodpecker with a flat mallet beak woodpeckering your cranium over and over, but it did not hurt me. Samia reports that it was painful for her, but worth it. / Fermata Health // Brooklyn, NY /// March 2024
What follows is a guest post. It is something Owen wrote approximately one hour after I called him on the phone to tell him that my dearest friend’s sister died by suicide. Owen has an unfortunate amount of experience with this subject, so I called him to ask how I can best help my friend.
“What can I do for him,” I asked, “Besides listen, be present, and make food?”
“That’s pretty much it,” Owen said on the phone. Then he wrote this:
Be One Increment More Kind
Advice to those who lost someone to suicide.
Jan 07, 2025
I got a phone call last night from a very good friend. The number was listed as unlisted on my phone. This was not a choice my friend had made. She lost someone in her life to suicide today. Or maybe it was overdose? In 2025, it's hard to know the difference. It is harder to know if it matters.
As a psychiatrist who works with suicidal patients, I spend time, regularly, almost every day, with people who are thinking of ending their life. That is my actual job.
I can usually do something about it— I'm a physician with access to extra extraordinary tools. Most people thinking about suicide don't complete suicide. Most people who attempt suicide don't die by suicide. That having been said, death by suicide is going up.
Fittingly, when I looked up a statistics for my readers, I got a study from Rochester New York, I went to medical school:
This observational retrospective-prospective cohort study using the Rochester Epidemiology Project identified 1,490 (555 males/935 females) Olmsted County residents making index suicide attempts (first lifetime attempts reaching medical attention) between 01-01-1986 and 12-31-2007
And in this cohort, which includes people right up to the year I started medical school, the following was discovered:
At 5.4%, completed suicide prevalence in this community cohort of suicide attempters was almost 59% higher than previously reported.1
Having to cope with the inexplicable loss of somebody, often before their time, it's not something we're adequately prepared to handle. I'm not going to solve that problem for you, now. I am going to provide only limited advice.
Nothing about this is supposed to feel normal. You're going to feel all sorts of fucked up. It matters how close you were to the person who died by suicide, but it might not matter as much as you think. You may never have met them, and it can still mess you up. You may know them intimately, and feel inexplicably numb.
These feelings will change, and they decay, over time, like the bodies of the dead. Everything gradually changes, including your feelings about unimaginable loss.
You're gonna ask yourself questions. What could you have done differently? What did I miss? Could I have stopped it? Why didn't I say I love you the last time we spoke?
These questions are not particularly useful. There are not answers, waiting, around the corner, to deliver you from grief.
It will be more questions than you imagined. There will be anger. There will be more sorrow, still. Your Sleep is likely to be disturbed. Your heart is likely to feel heavy.
You can make food for your loved ones, and share it. You can do something together. This is not a race. You can do one little thing, and then another. But check-in, with those left behind. Check in for some multiple or even an exponent of the amount of time that makes “sense.” You don't have to say much, and the more you do a little check-in, the less you have to say each time.
Be one iota kinder in every interaction in which are mindful enough to do so, for as long as you can remember to do it. You don't have to be unbearably kind, you don't have to be a unicorn, or a beautiful special snowflake, or a rainbow. You can just be one little bit kinder than you might have otherwise been.
This is in memory, of the person who didn't get to be kind, because of whatever took their life away. It probably wasn't them, in the end. It was probably their brain.
I'm sorry that you're left, alone, without the person who left us all too early.
Thank you for sharing your experience, Lila. More people need to know about TMS, especially as more and more insurance companies are beginning to cover it. It also helped me. I did a 12-week regimen of daily treatments (weekdays only) last August through October. It helped me get off of Adderall (which I'd been on for five years and which I'm certain was harming my heart and worsening my insomnia) and did wonders for my ADHD, anxiety, and mild to moderate depression. I have felt like myself in the four months since finishing the treatment in a way I haven't in years. I will add one thing - for some people, it does hurt. It was very painful for me at first, and eventually I got used to it and it didn't hurt so much as slightly suck. But it's bearable, doesn't last long, and it's WORTH it.
this hits. Thanks Lila