Sandy Ernest Allan started on the path to becoming a journalist focused on mental health after receiving a 60 page, typewritten manuscript in the mail from a reclusive relative.
“I had an uncle who assigned me to write a book about his life,” he said. “And that happened to include his schizophrenia diagnosis and his time in state hospitals and all of this stuff. And so I had to get smarter about conversations to do with human rights and psychiatry, psychotropic drugs, and some diagnoses like schizophrenia.”
During the eight years he was writing that book, Allan says he became interested in electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) which is the subject of a recent long-form article he penned in The Believer magazine.
Allan said in writing the piece, he spoke to a number of people who self identify as survivors of the treatment whose experiences followed a similar path.
“You go through the treatment and you wind up with major memory loss, and it’s now impacting your ability to live your life,” he said.
“And then you return to your physician or your provider, whoever was actually giving you the shock. And you say, ‘well, I’m having these symptoms.’ And almost all of the time, when I spoke with people, what they would say is, well, their doctor said, ‘it can’t be like that, it’ll get better.’
And then if they said, ‘well, hey, it’s not better,’ their doctor said, ‘there’s nothing we can do for you.'”
Allan’s piece also explored cultural depictions of shock treatments in various forms of media.
“It’s not that Hollywood is guilty of misrepresenting shock, it’s that it always talks about shock anyway,” he said.
“That always struck me as a kind of interesting thing, like, why does this always come up? Why is this a trope on so many horror shows,…in all kinds of horror, you know, from kind of the silly to the not, there’s just so much use of this, and what does that say about how we deep down feel about this?”
Healthlink BC says that studies have shown that ECT is an effective short-term treatment for severe depression. It says that it is possible to have long term memory loss after ECT, and that for some, there are lasting gaps in memory. The resource also says that the risks of untreated severe depression are often greater than the risks of ECT.
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