What ECT Took and What It Gave Back

Part 2 of 2 in “I Hope This Helps”

ECT is a treatment with a long history, and unfortunately it still carries with it a negative stigma and great deal of misinformation. Today ECT is a safe, effective treatment for certain forms of mental illness. While the patient is under sedation, a mild electric current stimulates a brief seizure in a highly controlled setting to treat a variety of illnesses, including severe depression.

I do not remember the conversations leading up to my decision to start ECT; the mere fact that I eventually consented to ECT shows me how lost and desperate and broken I was at this time. 

Because ECT scared the living shit out of me. 

I felt that ECT would change me for the worse, for the rest of my life. I felt that doing ECT meant I was going to be losing a part of me, like losing myself. It felt like a definitive goodbye to the person I used to be, accepting a life forever changed for the worse by my depression and trauma, a brain forever altered. It didn’t feel like I was choosing to save my life. It felt like I was agreeing to leave behind forever the life I had, like permanently marking that I would never be the same person again. My prior joys, accomplishments, relationships; those would be gone now, and I would never have them back. I was taking this step so that I wouldn’t die, only to accept that part of me already has and will never return to life. I was frankly scared I would be less intelligent after repeatedly shocking my brain, trying to reawaken the drive to live. While I knew I needed something to help, I was simultaneously so scared of how it would impact my ability to work and to think. In my darkness, I couldn’t see its potential to bring light, and I worried it would extinguish the last remaining pieces of me. Because if I lost work, I would truly have lost everything. Then there would truly be no reason to live.

And I did lose myself for a little while. One of my few scattered memories of this time is waking up after my first session with no idea where I was or what had happened. I was sitting in a wheelchair, a strap around my chest keeping me upright. I had an apple juice in my hand, that felt like a 50-pound weight. I dropped it all over the floor. A nurse came over gently, one arm reaching down with a paper towel to clean up my mess, the other reaching out, her hand landing softly, comfortingly over mine. “You just had ECT. You’re waking up from ECT.” My confusion only grew. I just had what? I did what? My life is over? How did I get here? 

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I am broken now.

For the rest of that first month of intensive ECT treatment, I have some spotty, brief memories that I can piece together now: walking into the hospital not knowing why I was there, giving a front desk person my name so that they could figure it out, fleeting moments of consciousness before getting sedated, wondering why I was doing this. Did I agree to this, worrying that this was going to change me forever, and thinking, I’ll never be me again.

Initially, I wasn’t me. Initially, I did have some cognitive side effects. And I’m not going to downplay that or how terrifying it was at the time, because that wouldn’t be honest, and I want to share what this experience was like. 

I’m not going to minimize how it continues to be something I am learning to cope with. To this day, the entire month of August is a dark hole in my memory. I showed up to a new apartment in September, completely unaware that I had already moved in. The writing I had been doing became less about reflecting on my thoughts, but simply about reminding myself of my most basic ones. They became lists of facts, of things to do. Grocery lists. Reminders to buy toilet paper. And every now and then, an expression of fear that I would never recover, that I would never be the same. Yes, I lost myself for a little. But I saved myself, too.

I completed ECT therapy surrounded by the most amazing group of providers I could have ever asked for. I got through and past treatment, because of them—a skilled ECT specialist managing my treatment and optimizing the outcomes; my incredible primary psychiatrist, who truly cared for my well-being, success, and safety, and consistently went above and beyond to help ensure it; a therapist who took the time to truly know me, so that we could heal me, who walked down my darkest roads with me, hand in hand, providing the strength I needed to brave the dark unknowns. Group therapy that taught me the skills I needed to treat my disease, to take my thoughts that were infected with depression and anxiety and traumatic memories, and to work through them. To survive them. To rise above them. All part of a healthcare system that enabled these incredible people to work together to take care of me. Together, they taught me how to survive, when simply existing, and simply breathing was too painful to bear. They provided the smallest flicker of light, of hope, in the endless abyss of darkness that had swallowed me whole. They showed me that there was another side. They figured out how to save me when I didn’t want saving. Together, they saved my life.

And slowly those to-do lists and reminders on the notes app on my phone became less frequent, or at least less basic. As I finished ECT therapy, I began to feel pieces of me turn back on again, switches that had been shut off by depression and its aftermath. 

I came back to life. I came back to work. I had survived.

I still work very hard to carry my depression and my trauma around with me each and every day, and some days they feel lighter than others. But I share it with you today to share what can happen when you do get help, to tell you that you can get help. 

What had been the most terrifying decision of my life, was the one that saved it.

I do still believe that I am in the minority of people, particularly of healthcare workers, who find themselves in a completely supportive work environment during a crisis. I do not wish to minimize the reality that many other environments may not be as supportive, that that lack of support and understanding is what makes it so very challenging to ask for help. This is something we must strive to change. 

But I think this is why we share these stories. This is why we have these conversations, why we talk about our mental health, in healthcare and beyond. I hope the stigma lessens. 

I hope you ask for help when you need it, and I hope you have someone to turn to. I hope you choose to love yourself as much as you love everyone around you. I hope you embark on your own journey, no matter how scary. Because the statistics are scary, but we can get better. We can survive, we can live. We can breathe without pain again, together. I hope to do even a small fraction of what my providers did for me, for others. I hope this helps.