ECT seems quite scary and it has a lot of negative connotations, but there was a point for me where I felt that I needed to do something radical so I agreed to it. The reality for me was that it wasn't too scary, everything was explained well beforehand, as for the actual treatment it was done under general anaesthetic so all I know is that I went under and then woke up with a bit of a fuzzy head and a stiff jaw. After I slept off the anaesthetic I felt a bit wired but this wore off after a couple of hours. Initially my mood would sink again but after about 4 treatments my mood stayed wired for a bit longer and stopped sinking as low. After about 8 treatments my mood stayed a little on the high side and this persisted for a few weeks.

In all I had 13 treatments, eventually my slightly high mood settled into just below normal, so I needed to keep on with therapy and meds for several years. It wasn't a miracle cure but it took me from almost catatonic with zero motivation, hardly eating and not caring for myself to a functioning but moderately unhappy person.

The side effects for me were headache (mostly slept off with the remainder of the anaesthetic), stiff jaw (the doc made a slight change of dose to the muscle relaxant they used so this only happened once), feeling slightly wired and anxious (no worse than agitated depression and it was self limiting), feeling slightly high (again time limited) and short term memory loss. The memory loss was a little strange because I didn't notice it until people told me about stuff and I'd struggle to remember what they were talking about. I found that reading my diaries and asking people for detailed descriptions of the events I was struggling to recall helped. Even now after many years I find that odd lost memories from that time return. Some people report long-term, permanent memory loss.

There are two reasons why I am not considering ECT right now, it is not available in the area where I live and I don't have anyone to drive me to a different town two or three times a week for between 6 and 8 weeks. Also I'm not at the non functioning state I was in back then and I believe there may be better options (for me) out there, I'm just struggling to access them.

There are lots of threads about ECT in the Other Treatments forum if you want to find out about other people's experience. Some people swear by it, others regret having ECT, I'm somewhere in the middle, I know it worked for me, but even so I'm not sure I'm ready to try it again.