Electroconvulsive Treatment (ECT)

Enid: And I was offered ECT then and I don't think I even thought about it much, you know, kind of, they said it might help [inaudible]. I couldn’t, at that point I couldn't care less what they did or what happened.

Alka: I would drive him to the CT suite where he would have an assessment by a nurse. So he'd have his blood pressure taken, they'd take him through a series of questions, particularly to check that he hadn't had anything to eat or drink since the previous evening. They weigh him, and in doing so, because you go through a course of treatment, the nurse actually gets to know the patient as well. I'll come back to that in a moment. And then, the patient is given an anaesthetic.  It's a short acting anaesthetic. And once that anaesthetic has been administered the patient is given electric shock treatment.

Cathy:

How are you sort of feeling for the rest of the day then?

A bit sort of zonked out. And it, like I said earlier, it definitely does affect your short term memory. You know I’d struggle to remember what happened, you know, that day or the day before. So that’s a bit scary.

Matt: And the, it was really weird. It was really hard to kind of measure what affect it was having, but by about the fifth or the sixth treatment, she-, her mood hadn’t changed very much but her energy level had changed really dramatically. Really, really picked up, much more talkative, much more you know, she was doing -. Yeah there was all sorts of stuff going on in the ward which she’d been ignoring, and kind of art classes drama classes and badminton and table tennis. And she was kind of -she was signing up for everything and doing all of these things. And it felt really positive, because that's what she had been like ordinarily getting involved in everything. But the really odd thing was that her, was like her energy had recovered ahead of her actual mood and her actual thinking. Like she was kind of cheerful but she'd be cheerfully saying really kind of dark things, you know. So it was,  so like I was thinking this was the last thing to to recover but it felt it felt really encouraging, that felt really positive. And it felt really, kind of exciting that this, this thing was, was, was going to, to work. Especially because everybody had been talking about it as the kind of the last option.

David: I don't know whether ECT actually helped or not. I mean, if they say it can re kickstart the brain for-, and it take it seemed to take too long for me to actually turn round and say it worked. I don't think it did.

Tania: And I gave ECT a try and had 7 or 8, I had eight treatments ultimately, but I think after the seventh one I just woke up and the whole thing had lifted and it was quite incredible. I can’t, you know, I could never put it into words. It was as if I'd switched back on and I’d come back to life again and the screen had kind of gone

Tracy: Well perhaps it does work for some people. It must do otherwise they wouldn’t continue to do it. I hope that that’s why they continue to do it. But I would never have it again no matter how bad I was, because the worst thing for me was the memory loss.