High-Powered Treatment

After weighing the risks with the depression he just couldn't shake, he made an appointment with Melman, the doctor at Seattle's Swedish Medical Center.

The hospital is being renovated, which has shunted the ECT suite to a somewhat unfortunate location: the basement, just down the hall from the emergency room.

"I can remember seeing one person (in the waiting room) that really looked out of it, just like a zombie, sort of," Bill Russell says. "I was just thinking, 'Oh God, no, I don't want to end up like that.'

"We almost got up and felt like saying, 'No way, forget it,'" he remembers.

A quick husband-wife huddle reminded them that they were now down to their last idea for relieving Bill's depression, because psychotherapy, medications and hospitalization hadn't helped. They resolved to give shock therapy a shot.

An anesthesiologist put Russell to sleep as he lay flat on a gurney. After he was out, nurses gave him a muscle relaxant through an IV, paralyzing his body. They placed a blood pressure cuff on his lower right calf, preventing the muscle relaxant from flowing to his right foot, which they would rely on during the treatment to twitch and tell them when a seizure was happening.

Melman placed one handheld electrode at the crown of Russell's head, and the other at his right temple, sending electrical currents through his brain for about 10 seconds while Russell lay perfectly still — only his right foot slightly moving.

During his first month of treatments, Russell's world was like a foggy, fuzzy dream. He was in the thick of ECT's most common side effect: short-term memory loss. Before his wife left for work each day, she papered their home in Post-Its — Remember to take your pills! Here's my phone number! — and took his keys and license, because if he hopped in the car, he might not remember how to find his way back.

"It was like living with Ozzy Osbourne," Sue Russell remembers. Between July and December 2007, Bill Russell had 20 ECT treatments. He went back to work part-time after the first three months of ECT.

The severity of memory loss varies from patient to patient, and in most cases it's limited to the weeks before and after. While Russell had a somewhat innocuous experience, Melman recalls a former patient whose relative died during the weeks of her ECT treatments. Her family had to tell her again and again of their loss.

'I was completely devastated'
Some former electroshock patients say that the treatment's side effects don't end with short-term memory loss. Juli Lawrence, who had 12 ECT treatments in 1994, says it caused long-term cognitive damage. She says she now has trouble learning new things, and she still has problems with her memory.