---
title: 'I''m ... cured?'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=HNtpEimk8DU'
video_id: 'HNtpEimk8DU'
date: 2026-10-02
duration_sec: 1160
channel: 'Adam Ragusea'
---

# I'm ... cured?

> Source: [I'm ... cured?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=HNtpEimk8DU)

## Summary

Adam Ragusea shares his personal experience with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) as a treatment for major depressive disorder. He explains the science behind TMS, his journey from skepticism to recovery, and the broader implications for understanding depression as a brain problem.

### Key Points

- **The Waffle Iron Metaphor** [00:00] — Adam uses the metaphor of touching a hot waffle iron to describe how he initially doubted his depression was real, only to realize it was when it got severe.
- **Skepticism of Perceptions** [01:13] — He explains the power of expectation and the placebo effect, noting that knowing about them makes it logical to be skeptical of your own perceptions.
- **Focus on Big Changes** [01:56] — Adam emphasizes focusing on changes that make big differences, as small tweaks are within the margin of error of perception.
- **Stable vs. Better** [03:04] — He describes being 'stable' on medication but realizing that stable does not equal 'all the way better.'
- **Not an Ad** [03:28] — Adam clarifies that the video is not an ad for any specific treatment, but encourages viewers to keep looking for solutions to their mental health challenges.
- **Genetic Testing for Meds** [03:54] — He mentions genetic tests that can help determine how you metabolize certain medicines, speeding up the process of finding the right medication.
- **How TMS Works** [05:51] — Adam explains that TMS uses an oscillating magnetic field to induce electrical currents in the brain, targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
- **Squishy Evidence** [08:30] — He notes that the evidence for TMS efficacy is 'squishy' compared to civil engineering standards, but that's because mental health is inherently hard to measure.
- **Test Results** [10:32] — Adam shares his test results showing a downward trend in depression and anxiety scores after 36 sessions of TMS.
- **Placebo Possibility** [11:38] — He acknowledges the possibility that the improvement could be due to the placebo effect or the routine of daily sessions, but notes TMS generally outperforms placebo in studies.
- **Cravings Vanished** [13:01] — Adam describes how his cravings for drugs, alcohol, and unhealthy food nearly vanished after about 20-25 sessions, without conscious effort.
- **Brain vs. Life Problems** [15:35] — He reflects on how financial security allowed him to realize his depression was a brain problem, not just a life problem, and argues for fairer wealth distribution.

### Conclusion

Adam Ragusea shares his personal experience with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) as a treatment for major depressive disorder, emphasizing that while evidence is 'squishy,' the treatment worked for him. He encourages others to keep trying different treatments, as what works for one person may not work for another.

## Transcript

Hey, it's your COVID-era internet home cooking obsession, Adam Ragusea here. Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You take out some kind of device for getting things hot. You plug it in, you turn it on, and then you're not sure if it's actually getting hot.
So, you touch it, and you're like, Is this getting hot? Is this getting hot? It feels like it might be getting hot, but I might just be making that up. Like, maybe my hand is just heating up the metal. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, no, it's definitely hot.
Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. Well, that's really what it was like for me a few years ago when I experienced a major depressive episode. I talked about it a bit on this channel at the time. I was like, am I depressed, or am I just dealing with the basic normal discomforts of being alive,
and I just need to toughen up and get through it? Am I depressed? I'm not sure. Oh, wait, oh, oh, oh, oh, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is real. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. It had to get really bad really fast for me to actually believe that it was real.
which I suppose is understandable. In fact, it's logical. When you know about things like the placebo effect, you know how powerful the mind is to make you experience something simply because you believe you are experiencing it.
It is right and proper to be skeptical of your own perceptions. I made these cookies last night, and I tweaked my process a little bit. And I'm sure that if I taste this right now,
it's going to taste a little different to me, because I know that I did something a little bit different. I'm expecting there to be a difference, so I'm probably going to taste a difference, even if that little tweak in my process did not actually make any objective difference in the final product.
I'm still going to taste it because I believe it's there. And there is great power in knowing that about yourself. I know that I know that I know. So when I'm trying to perfect a recipe, I try to focus on changes I can make that will result in big differences in taste,
Things that I know are beyond the natural margin of error of my perceptual system. Lots of cooking content says, do this and it'll just make it just a little bit better.
I've fallen into that trap myself, and I think it's bad. Focus on things that make a big difference, because at least you know those are real. And I recently made a big difference in my mental health that I want to tell you about.
I was like acutely sick for a couple of years. and then I was like chronically sick for a couple of years, and now I think I am cured? That's why I'm uncharacteristically wearing white.
I am reborn in the light! My major depressive disorder had been under control for quite some time thanks to medication, but the medication was never like the waffle iron in reverse. There was never a moment where I was like, is this working, is this working?
Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is working. It was never like that. It was just that, like, I looked around one day, and I was like, oh, I guess I haven't had any really bad days in a while. Okay, well, I guess I'm stable. But then after a while, I realized that, like, stable does not equal all the way better, right?
And I needed to put some more work into trying to get all the way better, or as all the way as I could reasonably expect to get better. I did not expect what I ended up getting, which is, like, pretty much all the way better. It's not that I feel happy all the time now.
I'm not walking around like, woo-woo-woo. I just feel, like, normal. I feel appropriately good or bad depending on the particulars of the situation. Now, let's be very clear, this video is not an ad for any particular treatment.
I'm not even advocating for any particular treatment, because the treatment that very obviously worked for me may not be the one that works for you. I am going to tell you what I did, but if I'm advocating for anything here, it's for
you to keep looking for things to address the particular mental health challenges that you may or may not have. There are so many options these days. There's even genetic tests that you can take that will tell you how you metabolize certain medicines
and so you can more quickly zoom in on the right medications for you. And everything you try is going to fail until something succeeds, just like Dan Savage always says about relationships. Every single relationship you have is going to end in a breakup until one of them doesn't.
There's certainly no guarantee that you're going to find your cure or the love of your life, but you want to keep trying because there's a good chance that you actually might. that is something that I needed to be told, and it's something that I'm trying to tell you in case you need to be told that.
So no, this video is not sponsored by any particular treatment or doctor that I'm going to talk about. This video is sponsored by ZocDoc. A big reason I didn't get help sooner is that I just didn't feel like I knew who to call. Like, I needed to talk to a psychiatric nurse or a psychiatrist about my meds specifically,
and I just had no confidence in my own ability to like find the right person just by going straight to the internet You need a place to start and ZocDoc lets you compare local in doctors physicians dentists you name it More than 150 providers
across 200 plus specialties in every state in the United States. Plus, there's lots of reviews on ZocDoc from real patients, reviews about specific providers that you can read. See appointment
openings and click to immediately book one. You can usually get one in 24 to 72 hours. ZocDoc is free for you to use, but do me a solid and let them know that I sent you. Go to ZocDoc.com slash Adam. Your physical and mental health matters. Take the first step toward feeling
better. I wish I had done it sooner. ZocDoc.com slash Adam. Thank you, ZocDoc. Anyway, I kept trying to do things for my stupid, broken brain until I finally found
this one thing that really, really, really worked. What did I do? Well, I basically put my head down on an induction stove top. I mean, not literally. Do not do that. That is a bad idea.
I was just making a technological metaphor. A metaphor what? Transcranial magnetic stimulation. TMS. Big-ass magnets that they beam into your head every weekday for a couple of months or
something. An induction stove uses an oscillating magnetic field to induce a magnetic current in the bottom of your pan. The metal resists the current and you get heat. A TMS machine is an
oscillating magnet that they put up against your skull, usually right above the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And this is not the sound that it makes. That's my neighbor mowing his lawn.
The sound that it makes is more like... The oscillating magnetic field induces electrical current in your brain. Your brain is basically an electrical appliance, right?
And no, TMS does not heat up your cranium. The currents aren't that strong. The waveforms are different. It can hurt a little if they put it like right over a nerve or something. It might hurt just a little bit, but the target area is actually pretty big.
So if you ask them to move it a little bit because it hurts, they can generally do that. It really shouldn't hurt. And how does this make anyone actually feel better? Nobody knows. I mean, there are hypotheses that you can read about, but if your brain is basically an electrical appliance, right,
if all of my feelings are essentially electrochemical in nature, then it just kind of does make intuitive sense that, like, pumping some different current in there would kind of shake things loose.
Indeed, TMS grew out of electroshock therapy. Doctors hate that name. They think it's pejorative. They call it ECT, but I'm going to say electroshock therapy because that's what everybody knows. Electroshock has been a systematic therapy used in medicine for like 100 years
and is amazingly effective at treating lots of different mental illnesses. It just went through a period there where it was maybe being overused, maybe being abused a little bit. It could be dangerous. It could be painful. and then they made One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the 70s
and that has this one scene where, well, you can watch the movie. ECT still exists as a legitimate therapy used today. It's much safer than it used to be. It's more comfortable than it used to be. But TMS, the thing with the magnets that I got,
grew out of an effort to try to replace electroshock with something that was safer and more comfortable. So this English medical engineer named Anthony Barker invented TMS in the 80s and it went through its first clinical trials about 20 years ago.
The evidence on the efficacy of TMS is a little squishy. I mean, squishy by like a normal person's standard of evidence. Keep in mind, I am not a psychologist or any kind of mental health professional.
I'm just a science literate person who reads too much. And from reading the literature, it's kind of my opinion, I guess, that the evidence supporting most mental health treatments
is kind of squishy compared to the evidence on what kind of bridge you need to build that won't fall down when a truck rolls over it. Civil engineering can be really, really cut and dry by comparison.
That's one reason why engineering classes can feel way more rigorous because it's much easier to say if you got it right or if you got it wrong as opposed to like a creative writing class. What's much harder to say if you got it right
or if you got it wrong. That doesn't mean that writing is easier than engineering. It absolutely is not easier than engineering But if you going to try to skate by in a class you might have a better chance skating by in a creative writing class than you would in an engineering class because it just kind of harder to measure how good writing is as opposed to how good engineering is
Though that does not stop some professors from trying to make very, very hard creative writing classes. There are hard writing classes out there, don't get me wrong. The point is, many of the most important things in life are very hard to measure.
That doesn't mean they're fake. That doesn't mean they don't matter. There are many of the most important things in life, like happiness. Happiness is not impossible to measure, but it's pretty hard. Sometimes we have to settle for really imprecise measurements just because that's the best that we can do.
It's hard to measure mental health. It's particularly hard to measure depression. And I think that's one reason why the evidence for the efficacy of depression treatments tends to be kind of squishy compared to the evidence for certain other things in life.
So here's my test results. my test results for my 36th session run of TMS, which concluded this very morning. Depression is on top, anxiety is on the bottom.
My anxiety seems to be a symptom of my depression rather than being its own thing. You can see the obvious downward trend, and the numbers start off pretty low already, because remember, I've been doing meds and therapy for like a long time,
so I was already like a lot better by the time I started doing this. Anyway, charts and graphs make things look very scientific, But these scores are just me filling out forms, answering questions about how I felt that day.
I mean, there were also questions about my behavior, which was maybe slightly more objective, like what was I actually doing in the last week, that kind of stuff. But it's still just, like, self-assessment, self-reporting, so it's very susceptible to the placebo effect, among other things.
But what else are you going to do? I mean, there are more rigorous ways to measure depression and happiness and stuff like that, but none that are really practical in this kind of clinical context. So you're just going to end up with squishier measurements
than if you were measuring the tensile strength of steel cable. So there is a chance that the reason I feel better right now is not the madness. It's maybe that I went to this nice, comfortable room every day for quite some time,
and I sat in front of a light box while this nice man named Terry took care of me and talked to me, and I focused on my well-being for, you know, 20 minutes at a time, every single day for some weeks.
It's kind of logical to think that doing that would make you feel better, regardless of the magnets, and it's possible that it wasn't the magnets at all. That's a possibility that I have to acknowledge, and it's one that you have to acknowledge if you're going to listen to what I'm saying here.
But TMS does generally perform better than placebo in studies, And in some people, it seems to send them into, like, near-complete remission. And, like, permanently or semi-permanently, some people come in every now and then for a top-off.
And here's one reason why I think I'm one of those people. I mean, look at my depression scores here. They're basically flat for the first month. That's normal. People usually don't feel anything for the first few weeks. and then I got to this place
like maybe halfway through or a little bit after halfway through which is still kind of early like I may be a particularly good responder but I got there like 20-25 sessions in to this place where all of a sudden
my drug and alcohol hunger like nearly vanished as did my desire for desserts and really crappy food
like that desire plummeted I mean, I still like a glass of wine with dinner, but I'm drinking maybe half of it and I'm being done, sincerely done, without exerting any willpower at all,
as opposed to before when I might have been speaking off to get an extra glass when no one is looking. We buzzed my brain and my baseline behavior changed dramatically without me consciously doing anything at all.
Like, it just happened. I was self-medicating this whole time, my whole life. I knew I didn't feel right. I used what things were available to me to make myself feel a little bit better,
or at least I tried to make myself feel a little bit better with those things, and sometimes it really did work. But fundamentally, the problem was not that I wanted those things, it's that I felt bad. And now I just don't feel bad anymore, or I do feel bad,
but like normally, in the way that is appropriate for the situation. I do regret not doing this treatment earlier, but, you know, such is life. The bigger tragedy I think is all of the people who are out there who have much more challenging lives than I have and a lot of them probably assume that the bad feelings they feel are entirely because of the challenges that they face in their life And for some people that probably true
It really is their crappy job, or their money troubles, or their abusive home, or whatever it is that's making them feel bad. That's definitely true for some people. And it's definitely true that for other people, those things would make them feel bad, but it may be the case that on
top of those real life things that are making them feel bad, their brain electricity is just off. The waves need to be recalibrated. That's not what recalibrated means. But anyway, it's certainly also the case that bad things happening in your life can throw
off your brain, and so it could be the cause of a brain problem. And you might not be able to fix the problems in your life overnight, or even over the course of a 36-session treatment, but it may be possible to dramatically improve the situation in your brain,
which could significantly improve your life. And I just think a lot of people don't even know that that's a possibility because they just assume that their problems up here are because of their problems out here because they have a lot of problems out here.
I did not realize the extent to which I had a real brain problem until I had suddenly reached, thanks to you, a level of financial security that took money troubles off my daily plate.
It wasn't until then that I realized, oh, something is actually wrong up here. And that is one of many reasons why I think that most people should be able to share more fairly in the wealth that they help create.
At least that is my political opinion. I saw an Atlantic headline the other day where the writer was asking, why do rich kids like socialism? Well, here's my answer to that. I think those of us who are fortunate enough to grow up in situations where our basic needs are reliably met,
we experience how much people can self-actualize in that context, how much people can reach their full potential when their basic needs and worries are pretty much attended to,
when we want other people to have that same opportunity. In my recent case, I was able to more closely fulfill my potential by realizing that I had a depression problem that was just in my brain that required a brain solution.
So I pursued it, I did it, and I pretty much fixed it. I think that maybe this is one reason why we think of depression as being like a rich person's disease. It's not that it only affects rich people. It absolutely does not only affect rich people.
It's just that maybe rich people who are more likely to notice that it's a brain problem and not a life problem, and of course it's rich people who are more able to pursue treatment and diagnosis. By the way, I'm not a socialist. I think that we should use capitalism for the things capitalism is good for
and we should use socialism for the things that socialism is good for, which is what every single rich country on the planet already does, including the one that I'm in right now. It's just a question of how we balance those two things.
And good faith debates about how we balance those two things are good. That's what politics is supposed to be. So I have, like, a whole lot more to say about TMS and the meds that I'm on, ADHD meds in particular.
I talked about them on the episode of Wholesome that we recorded today. Wholesome is the Patreon-only podcast that I make with my friends, Ben and Adam. The main reason that we do it on Patreon is so that we can be a little bit more honest and open.
I mean, it's all still public, but, like, if it's behind the paywall, it's less likely to break containment and go viral, and then a whole bunch of people suddenly are listening to something that they don't have very much context for hearing,
or they don't know us, and so things might be taken not the best way. People rest. Why does Adam need my money? Well, I don't, and I don't get your money. That $5 a month goes to the people who actually produce the show,
which is not me. I'm just on the show. Anyway, wholesome on Patreon with Adam, Ben, and Adam. It's a Ben sandwich. We recorded that episode about TMS today. It won't be up there immediately. it'll be there in a few weeks, but subscribe, listen to the old episodes. I talk more about
my depression there too, if you're curious about that. Anyway, good luck on your mental health journey. Remember that what works for me may not be what works for you, but you know what definitely won't work? Nothing. Try stuff. Something really might work. So brain magnets worked for me. Oh,
and if you're interested in TMS specifically, and if you live in my area, which is Knoxville, Tennessee. I am going to include a link in the description to the specific health care provider that I went to. Would absolutely go to them again. Had a great experience. So see if your insurance
will pay for it. That can be a challenge, but they're really, really good at helping you with that. Thanks so much to Terry and the gang down there. Really changed my life. Thank you so much.