ECT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
It’s supposedly a last-resort for severe mental health issues, but experts still have no idea how it works and… psychaitry and the brain is still not very well understood, so it kinda feels like a modern version of bloodletting in my opinion.
Honestly, after reading about this stuff… I kinda have this paranoia of: “What if someone already did this to me and I don’t remember it happening due to the side effect of the ECT itself?”
Now I have this fear stuck in my head and I can’t help but constantly wonder if I might have some lost memories… like what if my parents have done much worse abuse to me, and then they managed to convince a doctor to illegally do ECT on me, and then I never remembered any of that?
Am I just overthinking this?
I mean reading about stuff like the plot of Total Recall is scary, but that’s fiction.
ECT is real life…
Now I’m just obsessively worried that: what if what I think I know about myself, my life’s story, might not be my full story… like what if there are dark secrets that my family is hiding from me?
Like y’all ever watched the Men In Black and the neurolyzer thing? I remember feeling very uneasy every time they used that thing, every time that scene came up… I fear the idea of memory erasing more than even death… just the idea of losing who you are, who you were…
(I’m posting this just to try to get this thought out of my head… it’s been bugging me)
Anyone else have similar obsessive thoughts?
For what it’s worth, I did ECT. They put you under for it now, so it’s much safer than it used to be. It definitely made my memory a bit worse, but it did help with depression and acute suicidal ideation while I was undergoing the treatment, it just didn’t have enough durability to persist for long between sessions for me. I was doing my best with trice weekly ECT, but I couldn’t work with that schedule. Ketamine and TMS were both less invasive with fewer side effects, so I’d recommend trying those before trying ECT.
Well you definitely need to reign those paranoid thoughts in just to save yourself some stress so rational self talk time: you were not secretly kidnapped and given ect
But anyways, if warranted it’s a pretty normal medical procedure now and not done under disturbing and weird conditions. Some people need to try it because nothing else works and it’s one tool in the toolbox to try and improve symptoms.
We don’t know really how most mental health treatments work besides some objective biochemical interactions anyway
I think you need to speak with a therapist and/or psychiatrist regarding these thoughts.
ironically, putting myself in a medical setting would make me more afraid of the thought of like… the fear of a therapist declaring me crazy then doing the involuntary ECT thing…
feel like that would make my anxiety be worse, I could accidentally say the wrong thing and the fear becomes reality
