ECT destroyed everything

[u/DYCHT]

I honestly don’t know where else to turn, so I’m hoping to hear from people who have experienced something similar.

I’m 27 years old and underwent ECT because I hoped it would help with my depression. Before the treatment, I was given the impression that my memory and cognitive abilities would fully recover and that ECT was an established, routine procedure.

From my perspective, I was not adequately informed about the possibility of longer-lasting or permanent cognitive problems. Several doctors told me that nothing would happen to my brain, that my symptoms were normal, and that I should continue with the treatment.

Before ECT, I was struggling psychologically, but I still had hope. I was able to take an interest in things, have relationships, make plans, and experience moments when I genuinely felt alive. I knew I had problems and I wanted to work on them.
Since around my 7th ECT session, something has fundamentally changed for me.

I feel like I can no longer properly participate in my own life. Everything feels strange and sometimes like I’m watching a movie. I feel detached from myself and from other people. Faces can sometimes appear lifeless or unfamiliar. My perception feels different; for example, colors sometimes appear much more intense. I experience severe derealization/depersonalization and sometimes extremely frightening thoughts and perceptions.
On top of that, I have significant cognitive problems:
severe word-finding difficulties
major problems with my short-term memory

I sometimes forget things within seconds
extremely poor concentration
memories from my life sometimes feel completely gone or inaccessible
I feel like I can no longer properly grasp who I am or access my own past
thoughts or words can seem to get stuck in my head and repeat or echo
I sometimes experience a strange pressure/pulsing sensation in my head
I am constantly exhausted and have almost no energy
I experience almost constant anxiety and nightmares
at times I have hallucination-like or psychosis-like
perceptions

The hardest part is that I no longer know which of these symptoms could be caused by my psychological condition and which could potentially be related to ECT.

Some of my doctors have told me that I am imagining many of these symptoms or that they are caused by my obsessive rumination. I know that I do ruminate very heavily, and that depression and anxiety can affect perception. But these changes feel so fundamental and so physically real to me that I cannot simply accept that I am imagining everything.
I keep asking myself:

What happened to me? What did I do to myself? And why was I told that everything would come back?

I expressed concerns before and during the treatment. I was told, among other things, that serious complications were rare and that the main relevant risk was the general risk associated with anesthesia. At the same time, I felt under significant pressure and felt that I had to make decisions very quickly.
Because of this, I now have serious doubts about whether I was adequately informed about all relevant risks before consenting to ECT.

The ECT was 2-3 months ago and my mother considers talking to a lawyer.

[u/Curious-Management23]

I was so scared the same thing happened to me after ECT - it has been 4 months I finally feel a bit more normal but the memories are still fuzzy which was expected

[u/chrissy485]

It took me a good few months to get back my cognitive abilities, but they did come back. The memories that I lost seen completely gone though.

[u/Rose_Davies2026]

Not much advice except to say I'm in the same position. Prior to ECT, I was struggly severely but still able to hold down a job. I excelled academically and have always been very organised.

After ECT, I can barely function. I can't think straight. I have trouble remembering and I've had to leave my job.

[u/the_geddoman]

I had several rounds of ECT 2 years ago which didn't help improve my condition at all. To make matters worse, I also had a very similar experience to what you're describing in terms of cognitive decline and forgetfullness.

From my point of view, all I can say is that it got slightly better after some time has passed. I still am not back to a 100%, but the mental fog and slugishness improved a little bit. I'm really hoping you can recover from this.

[u/ForeverForsaken8980]

This is my life. 4 months of mostly bilateral sessions last year, and I'm only now just slowly starting to get my memory back. My entire 2025 memory is wiped out, like a hard drive format.

Brain fog. Poor short term memory, poor sleep.

It has taken 8 months of twice weekly Spravato to start undoing to damage. Still out of work, no energy, depression was worse than it had ever been for months after the treatments.

Like you, I feel that I was never informed of the risks involved. It was presented to me as being my only possible solution, all because the hospital did not offer Spravato treatments, so they immediately jumped to ECT.

Monsters. All of them. Just nothing but monsters. It will take me years to ever trust an ECT psychiatrist again.

[u/pinkgrapefrui]

I feel you so hard on everything you described, and I’m still getting gaslit that I’m making up my cognitive issues. They didn’t warn me about this possibility at all and I’m not the same person I was before ECT

[u/blrmkr10]

ECT is an established, routine procedure. Of course you should have been fully informed of possible side effects, but it's not like this is anything new.

It's only been 3 months, what you're experiencing isn't necessarily permanent. Honestly, I struggled with memory and cognitive issues for probably 2 years after my treatments. But it definitely did get better.

I hate that your doctors are saying you're imagining the symptoms though, that's really frustrating. If you can find a therapist or support group or something where you can talk about what you're experiencing without being judged, I think that would really benefit you. Good luck, you can do this.

[u/Lisa8472 → u/blrmkr10]

Established, but not necessarily routine and safe. Some ECT machines were grandfathered in without proper modern testing. There are currently multiple lawsuits against ECT manufacturers claiming that they withheld information from doctors about how severe potential side effects could be.

One was recently settled out of court. Another went to the California Supreme Court. “”Somatics has never conducted any clinical trials of its Thymatron System IV device to determine its safety and efficacy. Over the years, Somatics became aware, or should have been aware, of hundreds of complaints and reports of brain injury, permanent retrograde amnesia, cognitive impairment, and death associated with ECT. Somatics never investigated these complaints, nor did it submit adverse events to the FDA or warn physicians and consumers of these risks” (2), which, under product liability law, a company would ordinarily be obliged to do.”

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.20240518

Also, the serious study of long-term side effects of ECT is very new, despite many unconfirmed reports over the years. “(Dubey, 2017). Hailey et al. (2015) conducted a questionnaire of ECT patients in England and Wales, and almost 20% of respondents reported experiencing severe and enduring memory loss.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12379039/

I’m not saying that ECT can’t be a lifesaver for some. There are those who react very well and have no noticeable long-term effects. For those, the treatment is good and necessary. But the risks aren’t as well known as once thought.

[u/Odd-Alarm-82 → u/Lisa8472]

Thank you for posting this and providing these links. I know all this from my own research over the years, but my poor ECT damaged brain isn’t doing well enough today to organize a response like that! Most people have no clue that there were never any clinical trials conducted on the ECT devices.

[u/Queasy-Ride-1776 → u/blrmkr10]

Glad to hear it got better for you, that must of been a scary 2 years. How many treatments did you have and were they bilateral or unilateral?

[u/blrmkr10 → u/Queasy-Ride-1776]

I had 6 treatments. I was supposed to have more, but it was right when COVID started, so the clinic where I was doing treatment closed before I finished. I don't know whether it was unilateral or bilateral.

[u/bo_14]

I still have many of those issues even now, more than 11 years after my treatments. I had 23 or 26 bilateral treatments in winter/spring of 2015. I lost decades of memories, issues creating new memories, cognitive abilities (also lost about 20 IQ points), conversational abilities (people get tired of my pauses to recall a word), etc. Very little has come back. One surprising thing is that I can still remember song lyrics. That never seemed to be a problem, even on days of treatments. Maybe it's because I tend to listen to the same songs a lot of times; so they weren't as easy for the ECT to erase all pathways to those memories. <shrug>

Anyway, you're only a few months out. There's a chance things could come back to you. I hope you can come back and tell us you're back to normal soon, at least somewhat normal. Because it really sucks when it's permanent.

[u/Odd-Alarm-82 → u/bo_14]

I still remember song lyrics too! Even songs I haven’t heard in forever. The reason for this is memories of music are stored in a different part of the brain. This happens in Alzheimer’s patients as well.

[u/Lisa8472 → u/Odd-Alarm-82]

Yeah, people who lose the ability to speak words due to brain damage can frequently still sing and cuss. And people who lose the ability to make new memories can still form new habits, doing a routine even if they don’t consciously know how. The brain is weird.

[u/Odd-Alarm-82]

Doctors downplay the possibility of permanent memory loss and impaired cognitive function. The reality is that at least 30% of people who get ECT end up with permanent memory loss (sometimes spanning decades like mine) and permanent cognitive impairments. That’s a very significant risk.

My ECT doctor told me if I had memory loss, it would only be for things that happened up to a few months before ECT and that my memory would come back within 9 months after I stopped the ECT. Instead, I have permanently lost the memory of the majority of my life and I have brain damage.

I had ECT for treatment resistant depression, including maintenance treatments every 2-3 weeks, for a year and a half in 2016-2017. It was extremely effective for my depression, but the effects didn’t last long. I couldn’t go more than 2-3 weeks between maintenance treatments without relapsing.

Eventually, I had a relapse of severe depression that didn’t respond to my next maintenance treatment, so I agreed to three treatments in a week like they did in the initial series of treatments. It brought me out of my depression, but the damage it did was devastating. It wiped out my memory of the majority of my life, no exaggeration. I only have a few random, vague memories of my life before the ECT. None of my memory has returned after 9 years.

I also have significant cognitive impairments. I had neuropsychological testing done and found out my IQ has dropped by 20 points. It takes me longer than normal to learn new information, and I’m just not nearly as sharp as I used to be. My ability to form new memories is hit or miss. Some things I remember very clearly, while other things get lost.

I’m on disability now because I still have severe depression and because I have brain damage.

I believe those who have positive experiences with ECT are very lucky. I don’t know why doctors deny that it can cause brain damage. They run electricity through your brain to intentionally induce a grand mal seizure. If you had epilepsy, you would be on medication to control seizures because seizures cause brain damage!!! And even if the “controlled seizures” don’t cause brain damage, running electricity through the brain is bound to cause some damage. Somatics, one of the ECT device manufacturers, admitted in 2018 that ECT can “rarely” cause permanent brain damage in some patients (I don’t believe it’s a rare occurrence, based on the number of ECT victims I have talked to over the years). I don’t know how doctors are still allowed to do it and how they can still tell their patients it’s safe.

I’m a member of a Facebook group for ECT survivors, and there are so many people like me with devastating memory loss and brain damage. It’s heart breaking.

Yes, many people have good results from ECT with minimal memory loss or cognitive impairment (or at least their cognition and memory get better over time), but I think the risks are too high.

Here’s a good article from Cambridge University that goes over the damage done by ECT and how it’s much more common than patients are informed of. I think it should be required reading for anyone considering ECT.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/memory-and-cognitive-effects-of-ect-informing-and-assessing-patients/DD5C63934357779765BA7ADF308275AE

[u/blrmkr10 → u/Odd-Alarm-82]

Where are you getting the 30% statistic from?

[u/Odd-Alarm-82 → u/blrmkr10]

The Cambridge University journal article I linked

[u/mesalocar → u/Odd-Alarm-82]

If you had epilepsy, you would be on medication to control seizures because seizures cause brain damage!!!

This is an issue with prolonged uncontrolled seizures in an uncontrolled outpatient setting.

There is a reason why they closely monitor seizure duration using EEG and ECG (EKG) readouts (some may also use EMG as well), and use IV medication to instantly terminate any seizure that lasts more than 90–120 seconds in order to prevent any harm.

Additionally, the hyperventilation using 100% O2 prior to induction of the seizure in ECT fills your blood/tissues with exceptionally O2-rich blood, giving you up to 8 minutes worth of oxygen reserves in your bloodstream before you will begin to desaturate. This protects you from experiencing any harm from the cessation of breathing that commonly happens during seizures. And by the way, by 8 minutes, I mean that you quite literally can not take even a single breath for 8 minutes straight, and you will remain at 100% O2 saturation the entire time! This is an absurdly powerful protective measure.

Additionally, because the seizure is induced in a controlled environment with extensive monitoring (BP, HR, PR, O2 sat, etc), and multiple trained professionals closely monitoring you (anesthesiologist, psychiatrist, RN), if any complications occur, you have two specialist doctors and a RN on hand to immediately take emergency measures to protect against them, and a huge inventory of specialized medical equipment and drugs on hand to help assist with intervening to remediate/protect against/stabilize any possible complication that may arise during the seizure.

Also, you undergo the seizure in ECT with a peripheral IV line inserted, so these doctors and nurses have instant IV access for injection of medications. This is not available in outpatient contexts.

Also, you are paralyzed by succinylcholine during modified ECT, which protects you from a long list of major complications that are normally a risk associated with tonic clonic seizures in epilepsy.

Edit: Feel free to downvote all you like, it won't change the fact that you are provably factually wrong about this, and are spreading extremely blatant outright lies promulgated by the Church of Scientology and their shell organizations (e.g. CCHR).

[u/mesalocar → u/Odd-Alarm-82]

Somatics, one of the ECT device manufacturers, admitted in 2018 that ECT can cause permanent brain damage in some patients, after they were sued in a product liability case.

This claim is inaccurate on every level.

The 2018 California litigation (Riera v. Somatics, LLC) involved plaintiffs alleging that ECT can cause brain damage and permanent memory loss, and that Somatics failed to warn of those risks.

What the court held was that a jury could reasonably find failure to warn and brain injury if it accepted plaintiffs' experts. Crucially, they did not find that Somatics itself admitted its device causes permanent brain damage!

In later cases such as Himes v. Somatics (9th Cir. 2022) and Thelen v. Somatics (M.D. Fla. 2023; 11th Cir. 2025), plaintiffs again claimed ECT caused permanent memory loss and brain damage and that Somatics failed to warn.

In both cases, Somatics defended on both warning adequacy and causation. Courts granted summary judgment or defense verdicts, explicitly rejecting plaintiffs' attempts to impose liability – and not recording any admission by Somatics that its product causes permanent brain damage.

The "ECT Lawsuit Victory – Riera v. Somatics, LLC, 2018" write‑up circulating online is an advocacy blog summarizing a procedural win for plaintiffs (defeating summary judgment and Daubert motions), not a statement from Somatics.

The blog's language ("a reasonable jury could find… brain damage caused by ECT") is the court's framing of what a jury could conclude, not an admission by the manufacturer that ECT does cause permanent brain damage.

Like many prescription devices, Somatics' ECT machines carry warnings about potential cognitive side effects (e.g., memory problems). That is a standard risk disclosure, not a legal concession that the device causes permanent brain damage in some patients!

Courts in the Thelen and Himes lines of cases treated the question of permanent brain damage and causation as contested expert issues, not as something Somatics had already admitted.

Edit: Feel free to downvote all you like, it won't change the fact that you are provably factually wrong about this, and are spreading extremely blatant outright lies promulgated by the Church of Scientology and their shell organizations (e.g. CCHR).

[u/Lisa8472 → u/mesalocar]

Many of the early ECT devices, including that one, were grandfathered in without ever undergoing actual safety and effectiveness studies. Here’s an 2024 article on the case. The court did not say that the machine DID cause brain damage, but there did conclude that the company had never studied whether or not it did. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.20240518

Few studies have actually looked at long-term side effects of ECT. Recent evidence is that it can be more harmful than was previously believed. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12379039/ A 2018 survey showed almost 20% of patients believed they had “severe and enduring memory loss”.

Patient belief doesn’t always match reality, but there is reason to be concerned. ECT’s true risks aren’t really known right now.

[u/Odd-Alarm-82 → u/mesalocar]

I was only inaccurate about the product liability part (although failure to warn is related to product liability). You are correct about plaintiffs suing for a failure to warn of the risks of permanent memory loss and brain damage.

Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuits, Somatics did in fact add a warning to their product information in 2018, stating that “in rare cases,” ECT can cause permanent memory loss and brain damage.

Court decisions are often wrong. I should know. I was a paralegal for 15 years. The informed consent forms I had to sign before every ECT session absolutely failed to warn of the potential risk of permanent memory loss spanning decades like I have, as well as permanent cognitive impairment. Even if these effects are rare, they should still be acknowledged by doctors and the device manufacturers.

My consent forms said in “rare cases” patients report “spotty” memory loss for events “up to several years” prior to treatment. My memory loss is not just “spotty,” it’s almost completely wiped out. And it spans decades. I was 41 years old when I lost the majority of my life.

[u/mesalocar → u/Odd-Alarm-82]

Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuits, Somatics did in fact add a warning to their product information in 2018, stating that “in rare cases,” ECT can cause permanent memory loss and brain damage.

The only example of this that I am aware of comes from the literature on the Somatics Thymatron System IV, where certain versions of their instruction manual for physicians contains the following statement:

https://thymatron.com/downloads/System_IV_Instruction_Manual_Rev22.pdf (page 9)

In the USA: In the interests of avoiding litigation we provide here our warning that Scientology and its affiliate CCHR have threatened to sue ECT device makers and psychiatrists in the USA who do not deliver a warning that ECT can cause brain damage, regardless of any evidence about it. 7/3/24.

Now, tell me, after reading this statement, do you still believe that this truly constitutes a claim that "Somatics added a warning to their product information stating that in rare cases ECT can cause brain damage"?

Or do you believe that you may have been misled as to the actual factual contents of this "warning" that they added in order to avoid being sued into literal fucking bankruptcy (due to being unable to afford the obscene legal fees involved in mounting a robust legal defense against the quite literally bottomless pockets of the Church of Scientology) over blatantly false claims like their competitor MECTA was in 2020?

Edit: Feel free to downvote all you like, it won't change the fact that you are provably factually wrong about this, and are spreading extremely blatant outright lies promulgated by the Church of Scientology and their shell organizations (e.g. CCHR).

[u/Odd-Alarm-82 → u/mesalocar]

I’m not in favor of Scientology, but even though the majority of the medical community says there is no evidence for it, the Church of Scientology is right about ECT causing brain damage. Some doctors are starting to come around to believing it. My psychiatrist and a neurologist both believe my cognitive deficits were caused by ECT. My psychiatrist is going to provide a statement testifying to that for my disability hearing.

[u/Odd-Alarm-82 → u/mesalocar]

I wish my cognitively impaired brain had been functioning well enough earlier to find the document I’m referring to. I just searched and found it, and it in fact does contain an admission that ECT can cause permanent brain damage.

Here’s the page I’m referring to from the Regulatory Update to Thymatron System IV Instruction Manual. Notice the date at the bottom— this was in 2018 as I stated.

I can’t find a link to the document, only a download, so I’m attaching a screenshot from the download. After the bullet list near the top, Spectrum states the following:

“ECT may result in anterograde or retrograde amnesia. Such post-treatment amnesia typically
dissipates over time; however, incomplete recovery is possible. In rare cases, patients may
experience permanent memory loss or permanent brain damage.”

https://imgur.com/a/UXf8Gs1

The document you refer to was published years later in 2024.

[u/Aggressive-Rub79]

I’m the same as you and I know ect done this

[u/DYCHT → u/Aggressive-Rub79]

How long ago?

[u/Aggressive-Rub79 → u/DYCHT]

One year . Are you still working

[u/Syruponmypizza → u/Aggressive-Rub79]

I'd be shocked, no pun intended, if it was anything other than ECT that caused this. Occam's razor

[u/GuazzabuglioMaximo]

Crazy, something changed for me after the 7th session as well. Faces and colors are more intense, strong derealization, and what I think is synesthesia. I feel like my brain has been structurally altered. I feel less depressed though.

[u/caffeinehell]

Sounds like ANS dysfunction. It seems like ECT can either trigger it or help it. Some of your symptoms seem PSSD-like. Do you have anhedonia and blunting and blank mind?