⚠️ WARNING — Please read this before choosing a TMS provider. I hope this helps at least one person.
As someone who compared multiple providers through experience, I recommend choosing a different (and perhaps smaller) clinic.
If you are swayed by all these 5 star reviews, proceed with caution, look out for red flags, and simultaneously do an intake at a different clinic to compare the quality both of admin and the doctors. You don’t know great quality until you experience it — and you often don’t recognize poor quality without a comparison. Also, beware the 5 star ratings seem suspicious, and some 5-star reviews were initially negative but then updated to positive.
My experience with SeattleNTC was a mess. My outside doctor said his other patients also reported poor experiences with SeattleNTC. Because of that poor experience, I found a better provider — and discovered what good care actually looks like
NTC Problems:
1. Once you are in their system, they rarely answer the phone. For example, I called three times in one business day, couldn’t reach a human, and never got a call back.
There seems to be plenty of staff to funnel people in and for billing, but no support where it actually matters. They never returned my calls AND they were unreachable. 🚩🚩🚩 This made them functionally nonexistent and left me entirely reliant on them to reach out to me. 🚩🚩🚩
2. Each intake step took unreasonable time. They took weeks to submit my pre-authorization, even as I called for updates. It took a full month between my intake and receiving a phone call to schedule my next appointment!
3. You are just a number in a treatment mill. There is no personal accountability, no continuity, no ownership of your care.
4. There is no person to contact, even once you are a patient. It’s a classic call-center setup, which means issues become “not my department.”
They also only have a general info@ email address.
They claimed they didn’t receive any of my messages and had no record of my calls to them. Will that be fixed? Who knows. It’s a mill. Regardless, the delays and lack of contact were unacceptable.
5. After I went to a different provider, I realized how comparatively little I learned from my appointment with SeattleNTC. Though this could be just a matter of which intake assistant and which doctor I got. I can’t speak to the quality of all the doctors. My call with the SeattleNTC doctor wasn’t abysmal, but only about 50% as informative as with a different clinic.
Education matters because understanding how treatment works will help you to get the most out of it.
******What truly opened my eyes:******
I went to another provider, and the difference was night and day. I wish I went with them from the beginning.
The better provider:
* Answered the phone after a couple rings and had a real live human at the front desk, and I could call back and reach that same human instead of a random call-center worker.
* Scheduled me promptly
* Submitted my pre-authorization immediately
* Expedited my intake due to understand my frustration with the delays caused by SeattleNTC
* Explained the entire TMS process clearly — success rates, the mechanics, what to expect, treatment options and alternatives, pros/cons — everything
* Proactively warned me about potential insurance issues to anticipate so that I’d have a seamless treatment experience
Bottom line:
*****After comparing two providers side-by-side, I found that SeattleNTC’s admin is slow, inaccessible, and unreliable, and the doctor I had wasn’t highly informative. My experience was not a fluke — it matches what my doctor said his other patients reported. I’m suspicious of all these 5 star reviews.*****
Please be careful choosing where you go for TMS. Your mental health deserves the best.
I suggest considering smaller clinics where you’ll receive a personal touch. Bigger doesn’t always mean better — certainly at SeattleNTC that’s the case.