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These Innovative Mental Health Treatments Offer Alternatives to Conventional Therapy
For many, traditional front-line treatments like talk therapy and medications are effective. But for others, alternative options—like EMDR and even psychedelics—have been limited until recently.
An estimated 60 million Americans experienced a mental-health related illness in the past year, and some researchers believe roughly half of the U.S. population will encounter one at least some time in their life.
For many, traditional front-line treatments like talk therapy and medications such as antidepressants—which have been found to help roughly two-thirds of the population—are effective. But for others, alternative options have been limited until recently.
Some treatments are newer than others. Psychedelics, for example, are ancient but remain taboo in many circles. Much like the brain itself, many are just starting to be understood.
“We can take pictures and try to measure some things, but the brain is a little harder to study than other areas of the body, because it’s obviously inside of our skull and it’s hard to access,” says Trish Carlson, a psychiatrist at Sheppard Pratt.
The following innovative treatments, practiced and researched locally, show promise to help meet the challenge.
TRUST THE PROCESS
Eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, can calm the brain to help you make sense of trauma, anxiety, and stress.
A black plastic bar, about to be illuminated with green dots, rests on a tripod a few feet away. You’re handed a pair of mouse-sized buzzers, told to think of your distressing thought and follow a speck of light as it moves from left to right and back again. The buzzers occasionally stimulate your hands.
The sequence moves quickly. It can be difficult to keep up. After 10 seconds or so, a clinician pauses everything, asks you to briefly share what you’re thinking now, if you’re still stressed at a level 10. Repeat. Again. For up to an hour, or maybe even another session, until you report you’re feeling closer to zero—calm—while thinking of what’s been bothering you.
This is what eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, looks like at Bolton Therapy & Wellness in Bolton Hill, one place you can find the mental health treatment technique that can help heal trauma or other troubling experiences.
The process, which can include tapping opposite sides of the body or listening to sounds, mimics natural dual attention (or bilateral) stimulation in the body thought to help the brain properly store and process distressing memories.
The eye movement and other stimuli are “calming the right brain that’s feeling the anxiousness and bringing onboard the left brain that’s reasonable,” says Lisa Robinson, the practice director at Bolton. “At the end, you don’t have the same agitation, physical sensations, or arousal due to the memory, and you can move on.”
Developed in the late 1980s by New York-based psychologist Dr. Francine Shapiro, who found that walking paired with moving her eyes back and forth eased her distress, EMDR has since been found to help people cope with PTSD, anxiety, stress, phobias, addiction, and to rewire memory networks in adults and children.
“It’s changed my practice,” says Dr. Desyree Dixon, who founded Bolton in 2013, got trained in EMDR in 2019, and now teaches others to use the method. “Sometimes I want to reach out to some of my earlier clients and say, ‘Come back, let’s work on some of these things using this new tool.’”
IT’S ELECTRIC
Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a non-invasive, in-office potential solution for treatment-resistant depression.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, can be a relatively simple, life-changing choice for those with treatment-resistant depression. (Patients who qualify have tried at least two antidepressants that have not proven effective.)
Transcranial means across or through the skull. With TMS, a magnetic coil is positioned over the head that delivers electrical pulses one to two centimeters deep, usually to stimulate a part of the left side of the brain (the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex) that’s been found to be underactive in people with depression.
So long as patients don’t have epilepsy or seizure disorder or metal in the head or neck, the treatment is considered safe and delivered under the guidance of a doctor, nurse, or trained technician. Patients sit in a chair for roughly 20 minutes a day, five days a week, for five or six weeks, and let the machine work. There’s a three-minute protocol that’s also effective.
“What it’s thought to do, in the same way that we think oral medications work, is change the neurotransmitter balance in the brain,” says Trish Carlson, a psychiatrist and service chief of the TMS program at Sheppard Pratt in Towson.
She notes that everything in our brain works off electrical energy. “TMS is focusing directly on the area of the brain we think needs to be rebalanced.”
The noninvasive procedure is thought to rebalance neurotransmitters in the brain like serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine, that help to regulate mood, and increase blood flow in the targeted area.
The FDA approved TMS as a major depression treatment in 2008 and Carlson says the majority of people will see some improvement. Research shows that roughly one in four patients experience full remission and about half enjoy partial relief, with about two-thirds still feeling better a year later.
Most insurances cover TMS use for depression. In 2018, the FDA also approved it for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder by way of targeting a circuit across both sides of the brain while a patient is asked to think of, or be exposed to, what makes them anxious. More research is being done relative to cognitive disorders, addiction, and PTSD.
REALITY SHIFT
Psychedelics still have limited legal use for mental health, but that could be changing.
You don’t need to travel far to realize Baltimore is an epicenter of psychedelic research. Johns Hopkins Hospital has a research center that’s been dedicated to psychedelics for the last two decades and at Sheppard Pratt, the Institute for psilocybin has been exploring uses since 2022. And beyond those institutions, there’s a local community exploring the potential mental health benefits of psychedelics’ mind-altering power.
David Jun Selleh, a psychotherapist and licensed clinical professional counselor at Inner Path Wellness in Mt. Washington, for instance, is a part of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s task force—established in 2024 as the seventh of its kind in the U.S.—due to deliver policy recommendations for psychedelics from mushrooms and plants to state legislators by the end of July.
“Generally, all psychedelics induce neuroplasticity in the brain,” Selleh explains, “the growth of new cells—which allows for new ways of thinking and new perspectives. When you combine that with [talk] therapy, it breaks everything open to possibilities.”
He’s sitting on a couch at Inner Path, alongside University of Maryland, Baltimore alumna Lauren Going, who co-founded the city’s first psychedelic-assisted therapy center in 2022.
Here patients are given an eye mask, headphones, a mat, and a private room to sustain them on their travels, and as soon as four minutes after receiving a supervised injection of the psychedelic drug ketamine, they usually experience the peak of what’s typically a 45 minute to hour-long “journey,” says Selleh.
It’s a hallucinogenic trip often described as an out-of-body experience. Ketamine, primarily a synthetic drug used legally for decades as a general anesthetic, creates a surge of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain. At Inner Path, ketamine is used off-label for treatment-resistant depression, suicidality, or other mental health disorders.
With a low psycholytic dose, people can think and speak clearly while they’re under the influence. With a higher dose, after patients return to reality, a second hour of talk therapy follows, the idea being the trip can spur more lasting change.
Times and tastes have changed since the heyday of the Grateful Dead and in the roughly 50 years since most psychedelics were outlawed by President Richard Nixon in what became known as the War on Drugs. Names like “magic mushrooms,” (psilocybin), LSD, or MDMA still get a bad reputation. Ketamine is also still known as the “Special K” party drug.
But psychedelics, which some archeologists say humans may have experienced tens of thousands of years ago, delivered in a supervised clinical setting have shown great promise.
In 2019, the FDA approved a ketamine nasal spray for major depression. The Department of Defense is funding psychedelic research for veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Additional legal pathways for uses could be coming. The 19-member state task force of which Selleh is a part won’t directly change the regulatory status of any psychedelics, but their recommendations could be a catalyst.
“There is rising support,” Selleh says. “People are hearing enough to know there’s something to this.”