Precision Psychiatry for the Modern Brain

Personalized brain stimulation guided by measurement, not guesswork.

Depression. Anxiety. Cognitive dysfunction. We combine clinical expertise, EEG analysis, and adaptive brain stimulation to treat the brain as it actually works — in time, in process.

A Different Approach to Psychiatry

Most psychiatric treatment is based on symptoms alone. But symptoms are only the surface.

We measure brain function directly — using EEG, behavioral testing, and clinical evaluation — and use that information to guide treatment in a precise, individualized way.

Instead of fixed protocols, we adapt treatment to your brain.

Conditions We Treat

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Bipolar spectrum conditions
• Attention and executive dysfunction
• Trauma-related conditions
• Treatment-resistant symptoms

Especially when standard treatments have not worked.

How It Works

Treatment is not fixed. It evolves with you.

Why BrainHope

• Measurement-based psychiatry — not symptom-only care
• EEG-informed treatment decisions
• Adaptive stimulation protocols
• Integration of brain, behavior, and lived experience
• Led by a board-certified psychiatrist

We treat the brain as a dynamic system — not a static diagnosis.

Rustin Berlow, MD

Board-certified psychiatrist practicing in Del Mar, California. For over 30 years, Dr. Berlow has focused exclusively on outpatient psychiatry, following the same practice model long enough to observe how patients respond — and fail to respond — to standard treatment across decades.

His path into psychiatry ran through the brain from the start. In medical school he worked with Donald F. Klein, a founding figure of modern psychopharmacology and the researcher who first distinguished panic disorder from generalized anxiety. He completed two years of neurosurgical residency before shifting to psychiatry, and then a two-year NIMH T32 fellowship in mood disorders under Hagop Akiskal, the international authority on affective temperaments and the bipolar spectrum.

That grounding shaped a conviction that symptom-based prescribing alone is not enough. Dr. Berlow was among the earliest clinicians in the United States to work with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The first TMS system in San Diego was driven down from Vancouver, Canada in 2006 by his colleague Dr. Ted Mohns — two years before the FDA cleared TMS for depression, and at a time when the manufacturer would not yet sell into the United States — and Dr. Berlow began working with it in that era. In 2011 he took over Dr. Mohns's TMS practice during Dr. Mohns's terminal illness, continued that care after Dr. Mohns's death in 2013, and opened his own TMS clinic in 2014. Over the years he has integrated quantitative EEG, heart-rate variability, and other measurement tools into everyday practice — building an approach in which brain measurement, not diagnostic label alone, guides treatment.

His work sits at the intersection of clinical psychiatry and applied neuroscience: developing EEG analysis pipelines for individualized target selection, and refining stimulation protocols across TMS, tVNS, tDCS, and CES. He has trained in brain stimulation with Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Harvard, Sarah "Holly" Lisanby at Duke, and Marom Bikson at the City College of New York — three of the foundational figures in the field. He has taught 23 continuing-education workshops on TMS, training more than 400 physicians and providers in the technique.

Dr. Berlow founded the American Brain Stimulation Clinic to bring this approach — precise, adaptive, and grounded in what the brain is actually doing — to patients whose previous treatment has not been enough.

Start the Process

If you are struggling — or if previous treatments have not worked — we can help you understand what is happening in your brain and what to do next.