The clinical use of rTMS for depression has been widely studied in Europe and North America since Höflich et al. first reported the clinical application of TMS for patients with depression in 1993. Subsequently, Health Canada and the U. S. Food and Drug Administration approved the therapeutic use of rTMS for treatment-resistance depression (TRD) in 2002 and 2008, respectively. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare approved one rTMS device in September 2017 and requested that the Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology develop practical guidelines for the appropriate use of rTMS for TRD, which were published in April 2018. This special article reviews the basic principles of the Japanese guidelines in addition to the guidelines used overseas in order to improve future revisions of the current guidelines for the use of rTMS for TRD.
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