A psychiatrist first talked to me about ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy) when I was 19, during my first inpatient hospitalization while I was in college. I was a psychology student and had already read about ECT, so I immediately told the doctor I wasn’t interested. I didn’t feel I needed, what I considered, such a drastic treatment at that point, despite having been depressed for years and being intensely suicidal.
Things waxed and waned over the following years. I continued to be depressed and suicidal and there were more hospitalizations. I was around 27 the next time ECT came up and this time I did a lot of research and talked extensively with my therapist and psychiatrist. I agreed to try it and had approximately 16 treatments. I started with inpatient, unilateral ECT and moved to outpatient, bilateral ECT.
I ended up being off of work for 6 weeks total; 4 weeks for the initial treatments and 2 for recovery, with a few maintenance treatments later. It was a life saving treatment, but I was never symptom free, even afterwards, and I struggled with not remembering those 6 weeks.
For several years I dealt with the residual depression through medication and therapy. Then I celebrated my 31st birthday with an ECT consultation with a new doctor recommended to me by my psychiatrist. I didn’t need to be hospitalized and at worst I was ‘only’ passively suicidal, but I was depressed and felt ‘stuck’. I thought it was worth at least meeting with this doctor to find out whether a very brief course of ECT could get me out of the rut and maybe relieve more of my symptoms. The doctor thought ECT could help, but said that we couldn’t bank on a very abbreviated course of ECT. If I were to do ECT, it could be up to 6 weeks off of work again and I wasn’t willing to do that.
About 11 months later though, my situation was worse than ever. I had learned not long before that I had chronic kidney disease, stage 3 and diabetes insipidus from the medicine I had been taking for severe depression. I had to stop the medicine in order to save my kidneys. Nothing could easily replace this medicine for me and since I had been through so many other medications, my best hope was a transition to another medication. I made the challenging switch, but as expected, that medicine alone just wasn’t enough. It quickly became clear that I needed ECT again if I was going to continue to live.
Since I had the ECT consultation less than a year prior, and that doctor was willing to work with someone who was on an MAOI (some doctors were not), I was able to start quickly. This doctor does bifrontal ECT and that made a huge difference for me. I was able to do all of the treatments as an outpatient, which was a relief to me, and ultimately I only needed 2 weeks of treatments (3 per week). I then took a week to recover (and celebrate my birthday) and returned to work 3 weeks earlier than expected.
I considered doing maintenance ECT and therefore, beginning 2 weeks after returning to work, I did 2 more treatments total, but since I was having significant anxiety leading up to the treatments and the doctor was retiring soon, I stopped.
I was feeling better than I had in a very long time and knew that I could go back for ECT at any point. I know now that I made the right decision for me, both with starting the ECT and with stopping it. About 2 months after I had my last ECT treatment I realized that I felt better than I had in about 20 years. I was almost symptom free for the first time. Now, 10 months later I am in partial/full remission despite going through several very stressful situations currently.
ECT is not free of side effects, but it is not what is pictured in media either. I know for sure that I would not be alive today without ECT. It is certainly not the only thing keeping me alive: medication, my therapist, my psychiatrist, my friends and family, and even my work are all important in my survival. But, when all else failed, ECT succeeded. There is no doubt in my mind that if I come to a place in my life again, where therapy and medications aren’t cutting it and I am suicidal, I will be looking for a doctor to provide the ECT that I know I need. My hope is that with more education and open communication about ECT, the stigma and fear surrounding this potentially life-saving treatment will decrease.
