I had ECT, yes. I think 24 sessions total, over 2 courses of treatment. I needed general anesthesia rather than a lighter anesthesia (some sort of sedation, as I remember) so I had to go into the hospital every time for the treatments. We live across the river from Boston, so I was at Mass General three times a week.
My husband is a computer programmer and would work from the waiting room, since I couldn't be released after anesthesia recovery without adult supervision. I would have to go to the hospital around 5 a.m. and I'd be home around 1 p.m., three mornings a week.
I was very happy with the treatment at the time. And a lot of people had great results.
But the depression slipped back. The requests for him to spend more time at home with me. The freaking out about leaving the house. The constant terror of being left alone.
I did a second course, and was on some experimental medications, ones that I assure you you will never be on. I developed seizure disorders. I was in the intensive care unit at one point with status epilepticus and unconscious for several days. (The neurologist who had prescribed these medications disappeared, and no one knew how to treat me in the I.C.U.)
I ended up addicted to one of the medications, and after they withdrew it eventually for an unrelated reason, started abusing other medication. After several months of that, I ended up overdosing and in a detoxification unit. (Unlike several other times, it wasn't a suicide attempt. It was genuinely a fuck-up.)
I followed the week-long detoxification unit stay with a few weeks of outpatient rehab. I was horrified by everyone I met in the extremely expensive and posh detoxification unit — I was literally the only person there for the first time, and all I could think about was that I did not want to become these people, on stay number five, on stay number seven, on stay number nineteen.
I finished the course of rehab and went to couples therapy with him. I heard for months what a bitch I was. He wasn't wrong, but the sheer level of his outrage was … overwhelming. I was devastated. I heard from him constantly things I'd done wrong.
Over something like a year, I re-earned his trust and gained his forgiveness. There are permanent scars, but 99% of the time, we can ignore it.
I asked him why he'd stayed, a couple of years after this happened. Those were a bad few years.
"I was in love with you once, and I didn't believe you were permanently gone. You looked gone, but I knew you were still in there somewhere. Turns out that you were."
I can only urge you not to walk far down my road.
He recognizes now that I had no freaking clue what was going on. I described it as "nothing home but the id". I felt like shit all the time. Tranquilizers helped me sleep 20 hours out of every 24. When they took some away, the only smart thing seemed to be to take others. It took being pulled off of every single one of them for me to notice what I was doing — really, any of what I was doing. I'd destroyed my life and my career; my adolescent daughters were distant and angry; I destroyed years of my memory. My memory is still shot in many respects, and my IQ has measurably lowered. I mean, I'm still a Mensan, but it dropped by a good ten points easily. I get headaches a lot, and get confused reasonably easily.
Be a full-fledged human being. Work to overcome your problems. Stay in talk therapy. Don't become overly dependent on one human being. I mean, it's not rocket science.
Rarely, when you're that depressed, do you not know what you're doing. You know you're driving people crazy, that you're upsetting them, that you're clingy and needy. You just … can't seem to stop.
I would never consider ECT again. Never in a million years. ECT and non-mainstream medications destroyed my life. Well, no, I destroyed my life, but they certainly sped me down that road.