DR. JASON FRIDAY OF REDEMPTION PSYCHIATRY

My name is Dr. Jason Friday, I’m a psychiatrist. 

I’m board certified in general psychiatry and child adolescent psychiatry. I decided when I got out of training that I wanted to make a big change in my community and a big change for psychiatry in general. A big part of what I wanted to change was to bring the most advanced treatments, the most cutting edge and effective treatments that we can bring to this community and certainly a lot of what I’ve found to be lacking was the lack of progress that a lot of psychiatrists just weren’t daring enough, I’d say, to try some of the newer technologies. And so it was not growing as much as maybe other major educational centers like you might find in New York or Chicago or something like that. I wanted to have doctors that were going to be able to learn about some of these new technologies in a way that was going to further our treatments and compliment everything that the psychiatrist’s medicate with medication treatments and therapies and help to get the best outcomes possible. Where is Redemption Psychiatry located? Over the last five years as we’ve been growing we’ve opened up many different locations. We started out in Gilbert, Arizona and then we moved to Chandler and Central Phoenix and then opened in Glendale and a West Phoenix area as well so we have five location. When did you first hear about TMS, how did you hear about it and when did you decide it would be a right fit for Redemption Psychiatry? There is very little training in TMS in residency which I think is a really sad state of affairs right now. Residents coming out should know the most about the most advanced treatments and be up on the research so it was really disappointing that we didn’t get very much in residency, but it’s not uncommon. It wasn’t until I founded Redemption Psychiatry that we were really trying to look at those advanced treatments, things that are really going to help people to get beyond medication and therapy. As we were looking at all these different treatments, my doctors brought the idea of doing TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) to me and they were really passionate about it. I have to be honest, I was kind of sceptical about TMS because I hadn’t had any patients that had actually tried it and actually had any improvements, so I think some healthy scepticism is normal. But we were also looking to the future, looking to say, let’s give things a try, let’s look at the research and let’s try to bring that research to our patients and to find out how effective that can be and I’m glad that we did. When we started doing TMS in 2015 we took our most difficult, most challenging patients that we were constantly making medication changes for, trying and failing several different treatments, all sorts of therapies and frankly the patients that we were the most concerned about. In between visits, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Were they going to end up in hospital? Were they going to going to have a suicide attempt? Were they going to have a severe side effects from medication? And so being able to take those patients as we started it and challenge the effectiveness of TMS and seeing that it can be so effective in ‘treatment resistant depression’. We said, “okay, that’s fine , we’ve got plenty of treatment resistant patients that we are kind of finding we’re reaching a dead end on, that we don’t know what to do next” and I can’t say enough about how astonished I was, how pleased I was to see the response to these patients. I can honestly say, I’ve never had any treatment that I’ve prescribed to anybody, whether it was a medication or recommending a course of therapy or sending to any kind of program, to have the same response that I’ve seen with TMS. To have those patients come back after the first month of treatment and walk in the door, have a regular medication follow up, TMS follow up and have them leap up from the chair, give me a big hug with tears in their eyes saying, “I can’t believe I’m better” and I’ve never had that. And so I was immediately sold on TMS after the first few patients that we had treated. From that point on we have really been so much more interested to see where we can take that. What else can we do with TMS because to see how much better patients can get with that treatment resistant depression and to see all of the research that’s going on, it’s exploding. It’s very hard to keep up with all the different article and publications that are coming out with so many different uses and trying to see how different groups are replicating those studies and when we can bring that to bear, when can we start those kinds of treatments for people. 

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