A friend of Spalding Gray recently recounted to me Gray's battle with depression, which culminated in electroshock therapy. (Here's a quick online summary of Gray's battle.) The other people with me at the time were surprised to learn electroshock, or electroconvulsive, therapy still exists; maybe they'd recently read The Bell Jar ("Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant."), or they associated ECT with lobotomies: relics of a deluded and regrettably experimental era. ECT, though, is still used, often as a last resort for depression (esp. the catatonic variety) or prolonged episodes of mania.
Even in the deepest depression, I always have hope -- or more accurately, an escape plan, a fantasy of relief. For a while, I secretly wanted to be institutionalized, calmed inside a white womb, handed a doctor's note to excuse myself from life. But I've had enough friends involuntarily locked up for suicidal ramblings to know that a mental hospital would probably be the end of me. For ex., at my very worst, I still take some pleasure in good food, but I'd be forced to eat at a cafeteria (corn dogs? lukewarm chocolate milk? overcooked spaghetti with corn syrup-y tomato sauce? Life would seem bleak and tough, like their chicken breasts. My parents were chefs when I was born, and bad food, for me, is a small death.) More disturbingly, I wouldn't be allowed to avoid people, and the people I'd be unable to avoid wouldn't be annoying, but insanely annoying, or annoyingly insane. (Hospital cutbacks often put people suffering from all types of mental disorders in the same hall. A depressed friend of mine had to spend the night listening to her schitzophrenic roommie scream at blankets.)
So, ECT has become a new escape fantasy. I'd seizure, like possessed by a demon, and then the demon would leave me. I'd stop shaking and my health would be returned.
But, reading about ECT last night, it seems that shock therapy might, after all, be in the same class as lobotomies. Critics of ECT
claim patients are left with permanent memory loss, anxiety, lack of concentration and forget skills such as counting or music learned before the treatment.Among the article's quotes from those who have underwent ECT was this from a mother: "I can't remember hardly anything about my past life, only very little bits. As for bringing up my three daughters, I can't remember a thing."
Out of over 400 people surveyed by Mind, 84% said they had suffered adverse side effects. Four out of ten suffered permanent loss of some of their memories and 36% had permanent difficulty in concentrating.
But three quarters surveyed said they had not been given any information about possible side effects and only 8% were able to consult an independent expert before agreeing to treatment.
Anyway. On a lighter note, here's another article I found last night while reading up on ECT: The Ten Worst Publications in the History of Psychiatry, or what ideas modern psychiatrists hate. You'll get to read the word "anal" several times.
god you are young! On the "worwst of publications"=hindsight is always wonderful! Dispatch Freud? nah. He was if not a scientist then a great artist and he is still useful.
elecroshock? two "waves" of it. The second now used extensively...have brother who had much of the first wave. See too One Few Over the Cookoo's Nest.
Posted by: freddie-poo on January 9, 2004 02:28 PMA few years ago ECT seemed to be experiencing a renaissance of sort. Lately, however, it seems to have faded back into the near oblivion of psychiatric last resort.
Posted by: Anonymous Outsider on January 9, 2004 02:30 PMAt the end of last May, my partner, Leigh, suffered a total nervous collapse, becoming basically a Krakatoa of anxiety, depression, ocd, and self-mutilation). Most of the summer, she was fully or partially hospitalized at McLean (Plath's alma mater, and Kaysen's and Lowell's--see, if you haven't, Beam's utterly fascinating _Gracefully Insane_). The weeks she was confined, I would spend as many hours there as allowed (2-8pm). Most of the thirty or so patients in her unit were extremely sociable with one another, like lifetime residents of the same village. Actually the quality of their intimacy was complex, partaking a little of the intimacy of villagers, a little that of soldiers in a trench, a little of vacationers at a disastrous resort, or prisoners, and ofboarding-school kids. I too was astounded to learn people were still, indeed often, getting ECT--just and there mostly for depression or bipolar, the unit's predominant disorders. Leigh's roommate for a while was a sweet nineteen-year-old who was just setting out on a course of a dozen ect sessions over about three weeks. They made her tired. After she'd have one, she'd sleep most of the day. But otherwise, her affect was pretty normal, considering. Surprisingly, I met no one unhappy about undergoing ect; most had either requested it or went willingly along. I guess people just wanted to feel better, even at a potentially large cost. No reported memory losses-though admittedly only a third or so had had it done before.
Posted by: michaela cooper on January 11, 2004 01:41 AMAndrew Solomon, in his (I think) excellent The Noonday Demon, tells the story of a woman who forgot law school after undergoing ECT. He suggests that this is a rare occurrence, however, and that modern-day ECT can be both safe and efficacious.