Utah Veteran Says Magnetic Brain Treatment Eased PTSD That Therapy and Medication Could Not

Paul Peters retired from the Army National Guard in July 2025, but he says the military did not let go of him. For years, even before he left service, he lay awake at night with nightmares and racing thoughts. In Midway, Utah, the retired brigadier general now describes what finally changed that: a course of magnetic pulses applied to his head.

Peters joined the National Guard in the 1990s at age 19 and became a 1st lieutenant in 1997. Over the next 25 years he rose through the ranks and served five overseas deployments, to Kuwait, Afghanistan, Djibouti, Bahrain and Iraq. He made brigadier general in 2022, the same year he deployed to Iraq. After one more year abroad he came home and served in North Carolina and Virginia before retiring, 32 years after he started.

The toll, he says, went beyond the sleepless nights. Managing his anger got harder as his career went on, and he could go from fine to "quite upset" in a moment. He was hypervigilant everywhere, on vacation and on weekends alike. "High vigilance, high stress, high anxiety," Peters said, adding that it affected about every interaction he had.

His experience is far from unusual. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about 6% of servicemen and 13% of servicewomen are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Across the country, roughly 13 million Americans were diagnosed with PTSD in 2020. The Mayo Clinic describes post-traumatic stress as a response to experiencing or witnessing a terrifying event, with intrusive memories, avoidance and negative changes in mood and behavior. When symptoms last beyond a month and interfere with functioning, a diagnosis of PTSD can be made. Peters recalled that in the early 2000s the expectation was to "suck it up, buttercup" and drive on, and said that as understanding of PTSD grew, his own eyes opened to it.

Therapy and medication can treat PTSD, but the brain's response to trauma can be hard to overcome. The treatment Peters turned to is transcranial magnetic stimulation. Dr. Thomas Trevort, a nurse practitioner with Optimal TMS who studied neuroscience during his doctorate, says magnetic waves have been used medically since the 1980s. He explains that stress can damage dendritic spines, the parts of nerve cells that receive electrical impulses from other cells, making it harder for signals to travel between brain regions. TMS pulses magnetic waves into targeted areas, and Trevort says testing has shown this helps the spines regrow, letting damaged cells return to full function.

The FDA approved TMS for medication-resistant depression in 2008 and for obsessive-compulsive disorder ten years later. Research cited in the report puts the chance of improvement for those conditions at 80% when medication and other treatments have failed, and the Mayo Clinic says the risks are very low. The traditional course runs 36 days, five days a week, with a coil placed against the scalp and pulses delivered in sessions of 10 to 30 minutes. Newer methods can compress that to a single day-long session.

Peters says he was skeptical. Right after treatment he asked himself whether anything had changed. That night he fell asleep and, in his words, "really, truly" slept for the first time in years. His wife and his therapist both noticed an immediate difference in his behavior, and he says he became much more himself than he had been in a long time. "Things still frustrate me, but I don't get upset when they frustrate me," he said, adding that he is still driven but no longer carries lingering anxiety about how or how quickly things get done.

Peters and Trevort, who has also undergone the treatment, now want other veterans to know it exists. "I want people to know about the treatment more than anything else," Trevort said, "because knowledge gets people to start looking." Note that the FDA approvals described are for depression and OCD, and the account of PTSD relief rests on one man's report.