This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Madhukar Trivedi, MD: Hello. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Madhukar Trivedi. I'm professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern and the founding director of the Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care. Today it gives me great pleasure to introduce my colleague and friend, Dr Jonathan Downar, who is the world's leading expert in treatment for depression with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and many other treatments for treatment-resistant depression. He has been working with TMS for a long time, since the early 2000s, and is the associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Welcome, Jonathan.
Jonathan Downar, MD, PhD: Hi, Madhukar. Thanks so much for inviting me. It's great to be here.
Trivedi: We are going to address the issue of the role of TMS in major depressive disorder and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), but primarily TMS. What exactly does TMS do when you put the stimulator on the scalp?
Downar:That's a great place to start. TMS was originally developed quite a while ago, back in the 1980s, originally as a tool for stimulating the brain noninvasively by neurophysiologists and neurologists who wanted to study the functions of the brain's motor cortex.
