Aug 01, 2026
Regan Odysseus was scared. She’d tried Prozac before, but the medication made her <a href="https://lumeamara.online/?p=5059" title="Economic woes take toll on mental health | The Express Tribune”>mental health worse, leaving her unsure if further treatment would help or hurt. But between her full-time job as an ICU nurse, her full-time job as a mom, and the hormone shifts from her second pregnancy, the pressure on her mental health was becoming unsustainable
When perinatal psychiatrist Rana Jawish, MD, started a conversation about how Odysseus was doing, she broke down. “It was very enlightening,” Odysseus says. “I didn’t realize I was not in a good place until someone else asked me.”
Researcher clinicians at U of U Health are working with patients to test non-pharmaceutical treatments for depression and anxiety. Clinical trials give pregnant people more options, grant new hope for mental health conditions, and improve health care for the future
Jawish was leading a clinical trial to help treat depression and anxiety in pregnant people. When Odysseus learned of the opportunity to participate, she was nervous but determined to try again. “If any time, now is the time,” she recalls thinking, “and I owe it to my children to try to be better for them and feel my best so I can be my best. It was kind of a sense of relief, like, ‘OK, I’m finally going to get this addressed, not just feel like I have to cope with it on my own all the time.’”
Unlike Odysseus’s previous negative experiences, the clinical trial involved no medication. Instead, the trial used a combination of two strategies: a kind of talk therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), combined with regular sessions of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which powerful magnetic fields stimulate regions of the brain involved in mood control
The FDA approved TMS for treatment-resistant depression in non-pregnant populations in 2009. While small pilot studies suggest that TMS could work as a non-pharmacological intervention for depression during pregnancy, it’s still understudied in this population.
Despite being in use for more than a decade, the therapy is still off-label for pregnant people—a population for which non-pharmaceutical mental health treatments are urgently needed, Jawish says
“Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2023, maternal mental health conditions, including depression and substance use disorder, are the most common cause of maternal mortality,” Jawish says. And despite the severity of this issue, treatment options for pregnant people are limited. “A lot of antidepressants have very limited safety data for use while pregnant or breastfeeding,” Jawish adds.
TMS could be an alternative option that wouldn’t involve introducing medications into a pregnant person’s body
Odysseus’s first TMS appointment was “a little scary,” she recalls. “The magnetic pulse feels like a buzzing sensation in your brain. It’s really weird.” But she says that the comprehensive support of the research team made a big difference. “I felt very supported. They had a whole team there with me, talking me through everything, and I felt really well informed about what to expect from the treatment.”
Odysseus received TMS multiple times a week for six weeks, and she says she noticed real improvements to her mental health. By the end of the trial, “everything became a lot lighter and more tolerable and manageable,” she says. “I felt like a better employee, a better nurse, a better leader, and a better mother.”
While TMS appeared to help Odysseus, the overall efficacy of the therapy for pregnant populations is still unknown. Jawish’s study was designed to test if TMS combined with CBT is doable for patients and to identify any barriers to completing treatment; with 20 patients, it’s too early to say whether TMS works for most pregnant people. Jawish hopes to start larger clinical studies soon to determine if the treatment is effective.
“I had better outcomes myself, but then to be able to maybe contribute to other women having better access to better support and better outcomes was meaningful to me. It felt like an important study to participate in.”
