[Daonnachd]

Anyone doing grad studies and dealing with ECT? I'm in a programme and I'm increasingly thinking my next step may be ECT. I'm afraid of it. Any personal perspectives would be great.

I didn't have ECT while in college, but I did have ECT, twice, while working as a teacher. I'm assuming you are wondering if doing both at the same time is possible. I'd say probably not for a couple of reasons. ECT is generally done every other day for around three weeks straight. Working on ECT days really isn't possible. You are at the hospital all morning and the rest of the day you are pretty wiped out, sometimes dealing with a bad headache, etc. I would recommend that you at least take off work/school for the weeks you undergo ECT.

The other problem is that during ECT, it is very common to lose some short term memory. Retaining information during treatment is a challenge. For some people the memory issues linger for a few months in various degrees, and unfortunately there is no way to know ahead of time how your memory will behave.

ECT was very, very helpful to me, but it is a treatment that is very intensive and can take some time to get back to normal. I'd say take some time away from your studies if ECT is the route you take. Trying to go to school during treatment could really be pretty disastrous. I was fortunate enough to do my treatments while off for the summer which was plenty of time to go through the three weeks of treatments and be recovered in time to get back to work. I honestly would never try to do the treatments during the school year without taking a medical leave of absence.

[Daonnachd]

Thank you! That's the sort of thing I had not been able to find online.