suddenly got the urge to find a place to post about what i'm going through because it's getting really bad and people don't really seem to understand. i'm glad i did that, because i see a lot of people here asking about ECT. my advice is to absolutely not do it.

the ironic thing is, ECT saved my life. not in the way you would think though. right around the time i started ECT, i acquired the necessary supplies to end my life. i was giving ECT a go as a last resort, but didn't really plan on giving it time to work or anything. my mind was pretty much made up that i was soon going to take my life, and i absolutely believe that i would have done it.

a couple of days following one of my first treatments, however, i had some kind of break from reality and was put in the psych ward for about a week. i was completely insane -- i had ridiculous theories regarding the answers to the universe, i felt like i was living days over and over again like in groundhog day, my entire worldview was just confusing and weird. the doctors said they had never seen ect cause something like this before, which is amazing to me. during this period, i was in enough of a fog that i admitted to my mom over the phone that i had supplies that i planned on using to kill myself and where they were. so that squashed the suicide plan. point for ECT, in the most roundabout of ways.

that was in october. i completed treatment around the end of january. my depression was pretty much the same. as far as side effects go, the long-term memory thing was hitting me pretty hard. i remembered NOTHING from the time period while i was being treated, other than a few images of myself in the psych ward and the treatment facility. i forget a ton of things that happened in the past 5 years or so. for instance, i'm a huge sports fan that could once tell you exact dates of random occurrences and the ultimate result of every season for teams i root for. after ECT, i remembered absolutely nothing that happened with any of the sports teams i root for in the last 5 years or so. i watched all the highlights, and it was like watching the games for the first time. that part was actually kind of fun, heh.

there were other interesting memory problems. for instance, i didn't know that martin luther king was dead. on martin luther king day. not only did i forget that the victim of the 2nd most famous assasination in history was dead, i was so cognitively impaired that i couldn't put two and two together and realize a man being memorialized by a federal holiday was not alive. scary. this is an ongoing problem -- no idea whether a celebrity/political figure/etc is alive or dead, even if they died before i was born.

i used to be a great writer. now, it's impossible to focus and i sometimes spend minutes trying to construct a sentence. it's a huge struggle to find words/phrasing that get my point across, and i often have to rewrite a sentence several times to get it to make sense. then i finally finish a sentence and am happy with it... and i go back and read it 20 seconds later, and it looks like it was written at a 4th grade level. the loss of writing ability is terrible... but it's also frightening that i could be in the mindset that a snippet of text i write looks good, then looks bad a minute later. it's like my brain resets and i become a different person in a matter of seconds. related to this -- i have become very indecisive and completely change my mind on things rapidly, back and forth.

used to be great with numbers, probabilities, etc. now i literally struggle to add and subtract two-digit numbers.

the short-term memory thing is a huge problem, and it seems to be getting worse. i can be on a computer, think of something i want to look up, and by the time my hands hit the keyboard i forget what the hell i went to type in. sometimes it hits me a few minutes later, sometimes it's just gone forever. if i go into a room to get or do something, there's a greater than 50% chance that i will forget to grab whatever i went in there for.

time is just completely distorted and weird. something that happened yesterday feels like it happened a few weeks ago to me, and something that happened 4 months ago also feels like it happened a few weeks ago. does this make any sense? of course not! it's almost like everything gets blanked out and reset every few seconds, and immediately gets discarded into one giant muddled past with no sense of when or what happened.

aside from all of these problems that i guess could be overcome, my state of mind is just seriously messed up. reality just doesn't feel real to me. i feel like i'm experiencing a reality that hugely differs from everyone else's, and in a way i'm right. earthly existence seems trivial to me and i just... don't care. don't care about money. don't care about sex. don't care about life. it's all just become a big joke to me. that resulted in me quitting my job (i was on leave for the ECT treatments. i most likely would have been unable to successfully do my job because of all the aforementioned side effects... but i didn't even try). i have no desire to find work, and no expectation that i'll ever be able to work again. just no motivation.

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in closing, i don't think ECT treatments are inhumane or evil or anything. but i do think the industry has to become better informed on the realities of side effects and do a better job of expressing them to potential patients. my thinking was "memory problems? who cares, i'm desperate so i'll give it a shot." i imagine a lot of people who go through with the treatment are thinking along these lines. the thing is, you're not capable of comprehending what exactly "memory loss" means until you've experienced this. when you're basically having short-term memory lapses every second, you turn into an idiot that can't possibly get anything accomplished. when you can't remember the names or faces of people you meet, and you constantly embarass yourself by repeating yourself in conversations, socializing seems like a tall order and you stop doing it. blah blah blah, there are countless examples. i just know that if i had the choice of going back in time and stopping myself from getting ECT, i would. eventhough it saved my life. that's saying a lot.