Post and Courier22%
Magnetic stimulation could be the answer for mothers suffering postpartum depression 11%
By Tom Corwin19%
7/27/2026, 2:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 10.7% saturation with 114 hits. Analysis detected 894 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,066 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 21.8% and a BS Rank of 11% (25,246 of 28,332 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 89.10% of the article peer group.
It was the Facebook ad that caught Molly Snyder’s attention.
It featured a new mother who had been battling postpartum depression who had received noninvasive transcranial magnetic stimulation and found relief.
The new mother said she felt as if she “had a genuine smile for the first time since experiencing postpartum depression,” Snyder said.
And she thought, “That would be nice, you know?”
Snyder, from Albany, N.Y., received the intensive weeklong SAINT transcranial stimulation at the Medical University of South Carolina as a follow-up to taking part in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial that includes three other sites.
She took part in the clinical trial at Mount Sinai in New York City, and in addition to MUSC the other sites are in Worcester, Mass., and Austin, Texas.
Convinced she received the placebo, Snyder traveled to Charleston to receive the actual therapy itself, which is an option for study participants.
For Snyder, it is her second child and her second bout of postpartum depression, though she didn’t know that’s what she was suffering with her first child years earlier.
At least one in 10 and as many as one in five mothers experience postpartum depression.
Far more than just a common sadness that can come after birth, known as the “baby blues,” it is a deep plunge into unhappiness, anxiety and fatigue that can drain new mothers and undermine their lives.
But it can be difficult for new mothers to recognize and know what is happening to them, said Dr.
Connie Guille, director of the Women’s Reproductive Behavioral Health Division at MUSC and site principal investigator for the clinical trial.
“It is such a common experience, and it’s so unfortunate because people go through a pretty rough time, and then in retrospect realize, ‘Oh my gosh, that was what was going on,’ ” she said.
“It’s really a missed opportunity for them to get help.”
The problem is the feelings are internal and it is easy to pass them off as something else — a lack of sleep, the chaos around a new child, financial worries — and then almost adapt to them, Guille said.
“It just becomes almost normal,” she said.
“They think, this is just how I’m going to feel during this time.”
But it is not harmless — women with postpartum depression are at elevated risk for suicide, and that in turn is a leading cause of maternal mortality, according to the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health.
It was only in hindsight that Snyder could see what postpartum depression cost her with the first child.
“It was really bad,” she said.
She canceled the Meal Train support, meals that friends and neighbors can sign up for to provide for new mothers.
She didn’t go to the Mommy and Me group sessions for new mothers and their babies.
She didn’t do much of anything.
When those feelings hit again a month after having her second child, “I knew that I needed to find some sort of solution for it,” Snyder said.
That’s what drew her to the ad and led her to the multi-site clinical trial for electromagnetic stimulation.
Called the Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy, or SAINT, system, it is an intensive series of repeated stimulations at a specific spot in the brain.
It was first envisioned at MUSC by then-medical residents Drs.
Nolan Williams and Brandon Bentzley building on work begun by transcranial magnetic stimulation pioneer Dr.
Mark George.
Their idea was to make it more focused and more intense to provide more urgent and faster treatment.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation has been approved for major depression since 2008 and for other conditions, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and smoking cessation, since then.
Williams and Bentzley theorized that they could enhance the treatment by using sophisticated brain imaging to find the exact spot on the left side of the brain in an area called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which seems to be at the heart of the problem.
It is an area of the brain shown to be less active in depression and it is normally part of a system for emotional regulation and connected to deeper parts of the brain where emotions can arise.
“I could either stop breastfeeding before I wanted to or I could try to find something else, and this is something else,” she said as she sat outside the treatment room at MUSC’s Institute of Psychiatry.
“That was another factor for me,” she said.
She had looked into medication and her doctor had told there would likely be some transfer of the medication into her breast milk, although it is very low for the postpartum drug zuranolone.
Still, it posed a problem for Snyder.
The intensive treatment — with a week of 10-hour days — does pose some logistical challenges for new mothers.
Synder had to find someone to help watch her children and she had to pump breastmilk for the first time and convince her son to feed from a bottle.
The therapy itself isn’t painful — Snyder called it “a little twitchy buzzing.”
In the therapy room, she sat in a chair similar to that at a dentist office with a figure-eight coil just off the left side of her head.
She wore a device on the right side of her head that the Magnus Medical system used as a reference point to map out her head and help position her correctly.
Research coordinator Dalton Bontempo helped get her settled in and ran the machine through its mapping and setup, waiting until it was the precise time to begin the treatment, which is for exactly 10 minutes every hour.
Once it starts, the therapy is a two-second burst of electromagnetic energy every 10 seconds for the duration of the session.
It sounded like a staccato of short buzzes as the electromagnetic energy flowed from the coil across the skin and skull and into her brain.
But the only outward sign was her left eyebrow jumped in sync with the noise.
Two weeks after treatment, Snyder was back at home.
Figuring out the logistics of five days of 10-hour treatments was “difficult,” she said, but she has noticed a difference.
“I feel like my mind is clearer and (I am) able to have more concise thoughts and decisions,” Snyder said.
“I would recommend it to anyone postpartum.”
Speakers
2speakers28%attributed speech772writer words
Selected voice
95%flagged-word coverageMolly Snyder
169 attributed words57% of attributed speech41% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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