Regan Odysseus was running on empty. Between her shifts as an ICU nurse, caring for her young daughter, and the hormone shifts from her second pregnancy, her mental health was spiraling. She'd tried Prozac before, but the medication made things worse, leaving her afraid to try again. Then a psychiatrist named Rana Jawish asked how she was really doing—and Odysseus broke down.
"I didn't realize I was not in a good place until someone else asked me," Odysseus said.
Jawish, a perinatal psychiatrist at University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City, was leading a clinical trial testing a treatment that could change how doctors help struggling expectant mothers. Instead of medication, the study combined two approaches: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a type of talk therapy that helps people change negative thought patterns, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)—regular sessions where gentle magnetic pulses stimulate parts of the brain that control mood.
The FDA first approved TMS for treatment-resistant depression in people who weren't pregnant back in 2009. Small earlier studies suggested it might help pregnant people too, but the treatment remains off-label for this group—meaning doctors can't officially prescribe it yet.
That gap matters. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, maternal mental health conditions including depression are the most common cause of death for new and expecting mothers in the United States. Yet most antidepressants have limited safety data for use during pregnancy or breastfeeding, leaving patients and doctors with few good options.
"A lot of antidepressants have very limited safety data for use while pregnant or breastfeeding," Jawish said. TMS could offer an alternative that introduces no medications into a pregnant person's body.
Odysseus decided to join the trial. "If any time, now is the time," she recalled thinking. "I owe it to my children to try to be better for them."
Her first TMS session felt strange—a buzzing sensation in her brain, she said—but the research team walked her through everything. She received treatments multiple times a week for six weeks. By the end, she noticed a real shift. "Everything became a lot lighter and more tolerable and manageable," Odysseus said. "I felt like a better employee, a better nurse, a better leader, and a better mother."
The trial was small—just 20 patients—and was designed mainly to test whether combining TMS with CBT was feasible for pregnant people, not whether it definitively worked. Jawish hopes to launch larger studies soon to find out.
For now, Odysseus is grateful someone finally took her struggles seriously. "It was kind of a sense of relief," she said. "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."