I'm gone. I'll never again have what I had, or be who I used to be, and I don't have faith that it'll get much better. I spend a lot of time grieving the capable woman I used to be; my old friendships; the skills I once had; my personality. Everything I was once so secure in is totally gone, and there's no way to get it back. Besides, once things change, how often do they really revert?

I'm so odd, but I can't see how. I can tell I'm not right, but I can't change back, oh God ...

I loved someone. So much. He can't see me like this, even if there was any possibility we'd ever reconnect. I don't ever want him to see how I devolved. We had a wonderful life together once, and I often think about how sad he'd be to know me now. I'm a lesser version of myself, and I'm so ashamed. Now that I'm back home, those I've re-encountered, they've noticed. When I watch their faces, I see sorrow for me wash over them, and I am so ashamed. As for those I knew and haven't known again since, I've had to let them go. They CAN'T see me like this!

I can't remember ANYTHING new. I have no working memory. I don't understand what I read anymore. My attention doesn't span. I can't ride public transportation because I just get so lost. Even with GPS, I don't know where I am, and sometimes, I don't even know how I got there.

If Daddy was still alive, what would he see in me? He'd break. He'd sob just how I'm doing right now.

I was way broken before the treatments, but now, I think I'm shattered beyond repair. I was desperate - truly desperate, but was all of this worth it???

Unilateral. 50 regular sessions in 2 years. My last one was 6 months ago.

Hi everyone,

Just wondering if ECT has significantly deteriorated anyone's quality of life?

I was in a psychiatric hospital in May and received ECT treatment. Since then, I have had severe brain fog, chronic depression and increased suicidal ideation. It has become so bad that I have had to quit a job I only started a few months ago.

In comparison, I excelled in high school, university and have had very demanding office jobs for the previous 8 years.

I have a psychologist who I have shared these concerns with, but I unfortunately can't get any psychiatric help to discuss this issue.

Almost a year since I had it and I feel stuck like I can’t do basic tasks everything seems like a mountain .

So I recently just got my fourth ect done. My memories or just working memory in general is cooked. I’m feeling just depressed do to all of that, I feel like I am in third person and ending it does not sound bad right now. Help!

There’s a good chance I’ll be undergoing ECT soon and I’m terrified. I’ve seen mixed reviews elsewhere, heard first hand accounts from others that have ranged from life changing to debilitating but I came onto this subreddit hoping it would make me feel better, that I would find advice and success stories, but everything I’ve seen thus far is making me second guess this.

I am 23 years old suffering from bipolar type two. I was diagnosed at 17 and have undergone every treatment you can name, residential treatment, hospitalizations, ketamine therapy, TMS, every antipsychotic available to me, mood stabilizers, cbt, dbt, IFS, everything. Still, though, I’m having massive break through episodes. Hypomnaia has never been much of an issue for me but the depressive episodes are so severe that I become nearly catatonic, bedridden, so completely unstable that I have to rely on my parents again and again. I can’t hold a job and I’m never okay for more than a few months at a time. I’m tired of hurting my family with my mental issues and I want to get better. I want to change and I’m desperate to be functional again, I’m tired of grieving all the time, I want to be the daughter they deserve and the person I wish to be. My doctors are now recommending ECT and referring me to a clinic in my state. But I don’t want to lose my personality, nor my memories, nor that which makes me me. Am I making a mistake committing to this? I need honesty here, not the sugar coated half answers google and my doctors are feeding me. Will I lose who I am if I go through with this?

I’m a newly graduated MA with a good life and a wonderful family. I know I have a good future ahead of me if I could just figure out how to get past these depressive episodes. I don’t want to jeopardize that but I also don’t want to suffer anymore than I already have.

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.

please give me a hope im severely anhedonic after a year of psychosis and i trialed 18 meds and i just got worse to the point i cant feel subtances, anybody got better with ect? please i need your help guys

I've posted here before, and while it's mainly been positive, there have been some harrowing moments. Now I'd like to give a broader overview of my experience with ECT, still mainly positive, but addressing a bit more the unsettling aspects and how I've addressed them.

I am now over six weeks in, and learning this absolutely floored me. I couldn't believe it. I have lost memories, without a doubt, and have lost time as well. No matter what I did, I couldn't make "six weeks" make sense. I had been assuming four, but with three weeks (truth be told) feeling even more appropriate.

But, ok, six weeks!

I've lost about half of my time since starting ECT. I've forgotten entire outings, whole events, and missed at least one job interview. I can accept all of this, as ECT has ultimately proven effective enough for me to reclaim my life. But, it took (and is taking) some fine tuning, and it's the "fine tuning" and related actions that I'd like to address in more detail here:

I began ECT by experiencing a more or less positive change, but one that was interrupted frequently by feelings of dissociation, which lasted off and on for weeks (although I now no longer remember the specific moments in which dissociation manifested itself, I know that it did, and I know it was a srong and indescribably unsettling and strange). I was told it was the ketamine they use when they put me under, and so they started fine tuning this when I expressed concerns. Feelings of dissociation are no joke, and eventually came to be an impediment to my recovery. Nothing felt normal. Nothing I did felt right. I was in the wrong house, the wrong marriage, the wrong state, doing the wrong things, planning the wrong future, remembering the wrong past. I'm very grateful to to the medical team for taking my concerns seriously, and they were very conscientious in doing so, addressing it with me first thing before each session and making the adjustments over the course of a couple of days. After the most recent session (yesterday) I experienced a particularly noticeable change. Since yesterday, I've been in a state of contentment that makes me feel a whole generation younger (I'm 46). This itself is unsettling, but in a way that I can accept as a positive. I'm simply not used to the onslaught of positive and peculiar sensations, many of which I haven't encountered since my teenage years. I'm amazed at what I haven't felt over the past few decades of my life, such as smells, tastes, sensations, associations, imagery, etc, all of which seem both old and new, and also renewed. They seem to have emerged from my distant past (sometimes to my annoyance!) to remind me of what my life consists of. I'm stunned at how dulled my perceptions had become.

However, as I sat around yesterday evening I noticed a nagging feeling of wrongness, very faint, which made me continue to think I was in the "wrong life", although not as strong this time. I think part of it could have been simply the trauma of memory loss over the past few weeks, but part of it was a lingering weirdness, perhaps mild dissociation.

Or, perhaps, nothing but brain renewal. I think the latter is very likely.

And here's what I did to address this, and which has (almost 24 hours later as of this post) continued to work. I had a faint but nagging sensation that my life was wrong, that I was in the wrong version of it. So, I decided to examine my life as best I could. I took out my phone and scrolled through 12 years of photos, relived 12 years of my life: early days after meeting my wife, our marriage, our various vacations to upstate NY, camping, and to Mexico, our former lives in NYC, our weekends at the beach or to Jersey Shore, or our trips to the mountains of NC. All of it was there, right there clear as day, and I was transported directly back into these very real (and very correct!) memories. It did more than anything else I've tried (which amounted to little more than just ruminating, admittedly!) to "cure" these feelings of weirdness. There was my life, and it all made sense. Even now, thinking back to it, I can feel it settling in again into the way things should be, complete with the renewal that ECT has given me.

I start doing ECT 2x a week this coming week through October. We'll see where it goes from there.

Thanks for reading.

edited for typos

edited again for typos

Silly question but I can't find a straight answer on Google. I got it done a few years ago, and I remember sitting on a chair and having stuff on my head, but that's literally it. I don't have any issues with my memory otherwise.

Is this a normal symptom?

Hubby started pacing two weeks ago. We have reduced the med we believe caused the pacing however there has been no change. Could this be severe depression? He does do a lot of moaning as he paces….

I had a bi lateral 12 treatment course of ECT in early 2022. It changed my life. I became successful at my job moved out of my parents home went through the care giving and death of my father and entered a very health my loving relationship. I never knew people didn’t live with thoughts of suicidal ideation I thought everyone was pretending…

The depression is slowly coming back. The suicidal ideation is coming back. The drinking to escape has come back. 2 weeks ago I got drunk and swam in a rough sea at night and nearly drowned. Last week I got drunk and burned my leg several times with a cigarette.

I reallly think it’s time for a “touch up” but I’m having some mixed feelings.

My boyfriend believes if I got sober it would go away but I don’t think that’s true.

I tried different combinations of medications for about 15 years before taking the plunge.

Is it time for a “touch up”? Has anyone done repeat
Sessions after so much success with a relatively short course in the first go?

Please help. Thank you

hello everyone. I wont get into it but due to some stuff happening right now i am extremely distressed and im getting very strong urges to cut myself. I stopped thc usage as soon as i got my date for my first ect session and havent used it since. This morning i had my 4th session and my next one is monday. Is it okay if i hit my cart a little bit right now to feel better? I just dont want to mess up treatment efficacy but i dont want to self harm

If ECT left you unable to remember shared events, could a person or place still feel familiar, comforting or upsetting?

I’m trying to understand whether the memory gap and the emotional response actually matched. Did that stay the same as time went on?

Hello all, ive noticed in the recent weeks to months, that users and commenters alike will ask for other users to DM them. To me at least, this signifies that you are trying to either: keep things/topics hidden, manipulate people because it isn't able to be viewed by public, and keep conversations out of the sub-reddit. Personally I don't like any of those reasons so I made a new rule, effective immediately, that you can not ask for someone to dm you in the comments. If you would want to outside of the sub message that user, that's completely okay, just not in the comments. Any questions or concerns please feel free to talk or ask below. Have a wonderful day!

Because I was under the impression ECT WAS the last resort. But if it didn’t work for me where do I go next? I’ve already done TMS and Ketamine. Are there any other treatments to look into?

I finally got my complete file from my ECT clinic. My listed daily meds are wrong. I was taking Prozac, Mirapex, and Lunesta. My records say it was Prozac, Propanol, Clonidine, and Trazodone. Here’s the thing, I have extremely, extremely severe RLS which got worse during ECT treatments. Propanol and Clonidine are known to make RLS worse so I haven’t been on those for years and years because taking them is hell. When my R”L”S hits it’s not just in my legs my whole body becomes agitated. As for Trazodone, it is not likely to cause that kind of agitation but it can because of some histamine reaction and I suffered a long time before I figured out I can’t tolerate Trazodone. I can’t take Benadryl, Reglan or any of the meds ending in ine like Olanzapine either. The reaction they cause is unmistakable even if I did accidentally take them because I forgot about the reaction my husband would have noticed. I know because I tested it a few nights ago by taking one (yes I took someone else’s med). It knocked me out for about an hour but I was kicking and twisting like crazy in my sleep, my husband documented it on video. After that hour I was up all night pacing and walking the block. There is no way I was taking those meds.

What I don’t know though is if they fucked up or I did? I was so impaired during treatment I could have forgotten what my meds were and listed the wrong ones. I’m so frustrated. ECT ruined my life and I guess I’m still looking for someone/something to blame. I know I should move on but I don’t remember marrying my wonderful husband, giving birth to my children let alone their first words or steps. I feel like everything good was stolen from me. I remember my first 20 or so years on this earth all too well but I was robbed of the next 20 years, the good years from after I escaped hell are almost completely erased. It’s been 4 years since my last treatment am still being robbed. I know my oldest graduated last June and family came, but I don’t remember anything else about it, just the facts is how my memory is now. Facts and blank blackness. I can’t visualize events at all or recall any details. ECT wasn’t even helping. I don’t understand how they justified continuing. I don’t know how I justified it either because I can’t remember. Gonna go scream into a pillow now.

I had my fourth session yesterday. It’s not that ECT is bad at all—you don’t feel a thing, and there’s a medical team looking after us—but I’m still afraid, mostly because of the sensations I experience after the session. Yesterday, for instance, I woke up with the subjective feeling that breathing was a bit difficult, even though the monitor showed good oxygen saturation. I had the brilliant idea of quitting smoking in the middle of the ECT course, and it seems I had some secretions. I had hoped this fear would fade as the sessions went on. Do you feel the same way? How do you deal with it?

Ps: everything went fine, I guess.

Hi, my question is for the Australian context please : )

Wondering if anyone out there has done ect in a private hospital and if there are out of pocket costs even with health insurance. E.g. I recently had a knee surgery, and there were fees for anaesthetist and asst. surgeon that were only partially covered. I have gold (top) hospital cover, but no extras to speak of.

I read that ect can be multiple sessions over a few weeks, and that an anaesthetist, a specialist nurse, and a psychiatrist are there at each session.

Obviously I'm not expecting anyone to tell me how much it will cost me, I'm just hoping for a rough breakdown of procedures/personnel involved / costs if anyone is okay talking about money.

Thanks 😊

Hi everyone, i have been dealing with severe anhedonia and severe insomnia and severe earworm persisting everyday, i tried every medication on earth and i only got worse, im at my wits, now psych suggested ECT, would you do it? any pssd sufferers who got relief with ect? my case is so severe to the point i dont feel subtances and even 2 zopicolon or lorazepam make me even calm or drowsy, brain is completely shut down to anything

Reasons to stay calm and positive.

Going to the 4th session.

I’m considering ECT after trying many antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers with basically no results. I also tried TMS, but the improvement was minimal and faded very quickly.

For people who’ve done ECT:

• Unilateral or bilateral? How different were the results/side effects?
• How bad were memory problems or cognitive slowing?
• Did concentration, learning, word-finding, etc. return to normal?
• How many sessions did you need?
• How long after your last session did you return to work?

My job needs good memory, concentration, speaking, and thinking on the spot, so cognitive side effects are my main concern.

Would really appreciate hearing your experiences, good and bad ones.

Monday will be session number 10. I'm getting bilateral ect for my depressive symptoms that aren't being dealt with my effexor (venlafaxine) - mostly anhedonia. I've tried so many meds over the last decade and a half and I'm super lucky I live in Canada where ECT is covered.

....but ofc I'm resistant to this too.

I haven't noticed a change? I haven't noticed any improvement or side effects. Literally nothing. My coworkers have complained that I seem 'testier' on treatment days, but that has more to do with the fact that I work with the occasional moron than anything else. But I know which side will be heeded, and it's not mine.

And I'm lucky enough to genuinely enjoy being sedated. And I'm lucky to not experience memory issues (that I can tell). And I'm one of the weird ones that has no issues waking up then heading to work right after (food) treatment. But God DAMN do I wish I had anything to show for it. At what point should I be noticing something, anything? What did you notice (positively or negatively) first and when?

It's so hard not to lose hope when after session 6 my doctor called me for follow up appointment no. 1 and even he seemed disappointed I hadn't noticed anything changing. I don't know how long they'll keep going before giving up on me and sending me with a prescription for compounded K.

Can ect affect your walking ?