I studied psychology as a mature student. One of the other adult students on my pre-degree course (kind of equivalent to community college I guess) had been a train driver. After two suicides on trains he was driving he'd developed clinical depression and been treated with ECT. This was around 2002, so it would have been the modern 'safer, targeted form of ECT'.
Ultimately despite an enormous amount of academic support on our programme he had to drop out. His permanent memory issues - a form of anterograde amnesia, were so bad he couldn't function academically, even at the limited level required to pass the course.
Depression is awful, monstrous, indescribably horrific and dehumanising. Losing ones mind, to me that's worse. As Hemingway said after his ECT (right before he committed suicide), "It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.”
I studied psychology as a mature student. One of the other adult students on my pre-degree course (kind of equivalent to community college I guess) had been a train driver. After two suicides on trains he was driving he'd developed clinical depression and been treated with ECT. This was around 2002, so it would have been the modern 'safer, targeted form of ECT'.
Ultimately despite an enormous amount of academic support on our programme he had to drop out. His permanent memory issues - a form of anterograde amnesia, were so bad he couldn't function academically, even at the limited level required to pass the course.
Depression is awful, monstrous, indescribably horrific and dehumanising. Losing ones mind, to me that's worse. As Hemingway said after his ECT (right before he committed suicide), "It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.”