Posted by baseball55 on January 20, 2014, at 19:28:06
In reply to Re: shock, posted by rjlockhart37 on January 20, 2014, at 12:01:36
They don't strap you down and give you barbiturates. You are given anesthesa and a paralytic agent so that the ECT-induced seizure affects only your brain, not your body.
Why anyone who is not catatonically depressed would want to try this is beyond me. First of all, they don't just do it once or twice - 9-12 sessions are recommended before you see any effect at all. It is creepy scary stuff. You wake up drooling and not knowing where you are.
Even when it works (and it often doesn't - though I don't know what you'd consider "working" since I'm not sure what you're trying to treat), its effects wear off pretty quickly and then it's back to meds.
If your p-docs say forget it, I would listen to them. ECT is absolutely a last resort treatment. I had both unilateral and bilateral ECT and neither did anything for me except make me forget where I lived, who my neighbors were, how to drive to and from places I went to all the time, etc. I'm fortunate that my memory came back after a couple of months and that I didn't lose memory about work stuff. For some people, memory never comes back.
poster:baseball55
thread:1059102
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20140104/msgs/1059144.html