Eloquent response to NYT ECT piece
From TTWS reader July:
When I was at the Mayo Clinic, I was greatly ‘encouraged’ to have ECT. Mayo doesn’t provide long time care, but they said if started ECT, I could stay on the ward for several more weeks. About half the patients there were receiving treatments. I went there hoping for state of the art, but that was all that they could offer me. At twenty-seven and a lawyer, though, even with my ‘intractable’ depression, it didn’t seem like a risk I could afford to take. Or that I was willing to, as long as I still days I was able to go on living. I watched my mom go through ECT more than a decade ago. I didn’t think it was a good idea before she did it and thought it was an even worse idea once she finished. She lost part of herself.
Nonetheless, in different circumstances, I wouldn’t have had the strength (which was at an all time low for me as it was) to have refused. It did excellent things for one my friends there. She left the hospital no longer suicidal, able to imagine a future again. Yet once home, I had to be one to call her. When she picked up the phone, she no longer remembered how to dial it.
Thanks for NYT link. I’m with Hemingway here [who killed himself after having shock treatments]: “what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient.”
liz | 2:33 PM | Uncategorized
Considering the fact that I just finished reading “The Bell Jar” for the first time, I find ECT a fairly freaksome prospect. For every public success story there are just as many failures — and if you could ask Sylvia Plath, I’m sure she’d concur.
In the early 1960s, my aunt (in her thirties at that time) lost her five-year-old son while he and my grandmother were crossing a very busy Manayunk road. She had no history of mental illness and, although quiet and withdrawn, was able to hold down a job and family.
After her son’s death, she became extremely depressed and anxious-ridden to the point that she was hospitalized. I was young at the time (around 8 or 9), but I still vividly recall the mocassins she made for one of my cousins while there. I think she was in Haverford State Hospital, where doctors wholeheartedly endorsed ECT to rid her of the depression, etc.
From what I can gleam from family members, she had three “treatments” which not only did not knock away her depression but actually exacerbated her symptoms.
To this day (I think she’s 80), she is heavily medicated to mask her demons. I don’t know if her symptoms would have worsened anyway without ECT, but it is an interesting thought.
I recently read that Hemingway was asked to do some writing for John F Kennedy’s swearing in ceremony. He literally could not put two sentences together. (This was from Michael Palin’s travel book of Hemingway.) Perhaps others, myself included, may not have been bothered. But to a writer, that’s a sad blow.
I’ve read ‘A Movable Feast’ 6 times now and my husband is reading it, knowing little of the writers, but still loving it. It is one of the most beautiful books written.
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