Tristan felt huge relief when ECT appeared to work dramatically for his wife. However, his wife had a relapse 6 to ten weeks after the treatment and he thought that antidepressant medication helped improve her well-being in the longer term. She had a course of six treatments over six weeks which is about the shortest course I think that you can have.
And but she was quite well for a little while after the ECT. And it did feel like a huge relief at the time and up until that point I had no real strong idea as to when or if [name of wife] was going to get better so just to see the possibility of her being better for the first time since [name of daughter] was born was huge relief and I was immensely grateful for it and felt very positive about it in many ways despite some previous reservations. Well perhaps it does work for some people. But I would never have it again no matter how bad I was, because the worst thing for me was the memory loss.
But like me they are desperate, you try anything. Whether he thought it did or not. I know they would have. After having ECT, she got better quite quickly and was able to return to work.
See full profile. My parents think I would have, they think it would just would have taken a lot longer. So different sets of treatments or …? Yeah yeah. But for me I think it was lifesaving and I became well again very, very quickly and within a couple of weeks of being in hospital I had got myself a Sunday job and I was back functioning normally.
You know, when I had a few days in hospital of feeling really well and then I was discharged and I continued to feel well after that. Tania had been very ill and in and out of hospital and it took a while to come to terms with her depression. And I had been, you know, over a year of being in and out of hospital and very dangerously ill. And I gave the ECT a try and I had seven or eight, 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.
And after that, I mean, it took some time, it took some time to make a full recovery, because, you know, after the experiences of the previous year and I was, I was really in pieces and I, you know, took a while, over the course of the next few months I needed to get my sleep sorted out and I just needed to come to terms with the anxiety that whole, the whole episode had produced for me.
And I had some cognitive behaviour which really helped me, like, get sort of relaxed and face kind of getting back to life again and just kind of get over what happened.
It was not a change in her mood but in her energy level, returning to her talkative active self. It really, really picked up. She was much more talkative, you know, she was doing.
Because that was what she had been like ordinarily, kind of get involved in everything. But the really odd thing was that her, it was like her energy had recovered ahead of her actual mood and her actual thinking. Right now, it is not possible to predict who will have more severe memory problems, but techniques such as using unilateral placement instead of traditional bilateral placement have been utilized to try to minimize these effects.
When deaths do occur, it is usually due to cardiovascular complications. Certain populations, such as those with serious heart disease, recent stroke or heart attacks, or with brain tumors, are at higher risk of serious medical complications.
Much of the consultation work-up is geared towards identifying these high risk situations and mitigating them if ECT is still to be pursued. In some situations, we will not do ECT because of the medical problems. Even so, ECT is remarkably safe even in some of the most seriously medically ill patients who have concurrent depression. ECT is often a life-saving treatment, which has been withheld from many until late in the course of their illness because of the social stigma, not because of the science.
It could very well be a first line treatment were it not for the continuing stigma. Future advances in technology promise to improve the treatment further. ECT is often still portrayed in the media in the relatively brutal way it was first done, i. Anesthetic agents are anticonvulsants, and it required an advance in the science of anesthesia before we could anesthetize patients, generate a seizure, and avoid the muscle movement associated with seizures.
Also, ECT began to be used in this country at about the same time we began executing criminals with electricity in the Electric Chair. In traditional bilateral ECT, the electrodes are placed on the right and left temples, allowing simultaneous stimulation of both sides of the brain.
This assures a good quality seizure in the parts of the brain that need to be affected, but also allows electricity to pass over the left-temporal lobe of the brain. This is where most people have their language and memory centers. The effect is to cause theoretically more memory problems. Unilateral electrode placement allows both electrodes to be kept on one-side of the brain the non-dominant side , which avoids having electricity pass directly through the language and memory centers mentioned above.
However it requires that the seizure which will now start on one side of the brain only to generalize or move across to the other side of the brain. A type of recurrent mood disorder characterized typically by both manic episodes and depression See Depression. Some individuals may have primarily manic episodes; others may have mostly depressions with rare manic periods, while others may have mixed symptoms of both mania and depression.
Episodes can be infrequent or rapid-cycling i. Lithium has been the traditional medication used to treat this disorder though many other agents are now available as well. Note that ECT works very well for both mania and depression.
A treatment modality using small amounts of electricity to generate a grand-mal seizure in a patient, in an attempt to treat various psychiatric disorders, especially depression. Usually this takes about 20 to 25 minutes.
Patients who are given ECT on an outpatient basis must have someone drive them home after the procedure and stay with them until they go to sleep at night. People should not drive in the 24 hours following ECT. A single ECT session usually lasts one hour. This includes the time the patient will be in the treatment room approximately minutes and the time spent in the recovery room approximately minutes. Typically, ECT whether inpatient or outpatient is given two to three times a week for a total of six to twelve sessions.
Some patients may need more or fewer treatments. These sessions improve depression in 70 to 90 percent of patients, a response rate much higher than that of antidepressant drugs.
Although ECT is effective, its benefits are short-lived. For this reason, patients take antidepressant medication after ECT or may continue receiving ECT periodically to prevent relapse. The immediate side effects of the procedure which may last for about an hour include:.
Patients may also develop memory problems.
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