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Originally Posted by Slowbrains
Have you had memory loss probelms during ECT? How bad it is? Does it recover? Can you go to job normally? Social life?
My Pdoc keeps dropping me hints to go to ECT, how good and safe treatment it is nowadays etc... I'm just scared how it would affect to my work escpecially. I'm an engineer and need my brain (or what is left of those).
I'm very curious to give a try. I'm BPII, quite depression dominant. So far it seems not to be responding to meds...
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Dear Slowbrains,
From what I understand, unrecoverable memory loss with ECT is quite likely. I don't know the statistics, but you can look this up. I also hear that you tend to feel better for a while, but then have to keep going back again and again or you get worse. I do know of one case where someone says that only ECT helped them
Sherwin Nuland: How electroshock therapy changed me | TED Talk | TED.com
The thing is, slowbrains, meds for depression have a terrible track record of actually working better than placebo, so it's not surprising and I don't think that you should be alarmed if you're not getting any benefit. pdocs will often not tell you this, but things like exercise and meditation have quite a good chance of working. They are safe and are therefore better treatment attempts than meds or ECT. If you can manage it, why not try all the safe, healthy things first? Doesn't that make sense? Also, I think it's really worth double checking for purely medical problems. These are often missed. Here's what I think is the best overall plan:
http://forums.psychcentral.com/4262681-post105.html
- vital