At 27 Beth has had 68 ECT treatments aka “Shock Therapy” and while she attests to it’s effectiveness in helping her with her bipolar episodes it has also taken a toll on her memory; including not recognizing her boyfriend of several years.
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Episode notes:
More About Our Guest
Social media: @heybethmay
Email: tobethmay@gmail.com
-Article about a therapy dog that made an amazing impact on me.
www.uclahealth.org/u-magazine/leo-me
-Slam poetry piece I did about bipolar disorder
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwaHkfHrx4g
-My short story compilation
www.amazon.com/Apocalips-Beth-May-ebook/dp/B01NCJ05XV
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Episode Transcript:
ECT aka “Shock Therapy” – Beth May
Transcribed by Kajsa Lancaster
PG: I’m here with Beth May. I found out that you are a friend of Ashley Burch!
BM: I am! I have that honor. Shoutout to Ashley! (Laughs)
PG: Hello, Ashley. So, you received Electro Shock Therapy, also known as Electroconvulsive Therapy or ECT. How long ago was it?
BM: My first treatment was in 2014, and I’ve had it sort of in and out – not in and out but more off and on until a few months ago. I’ve had 68 treatments.
PG: And that’s a lot, correct?
BM: I think so! I don’t know.
PG: So we’ll get to what it’s been like since you have had the treatments. Let’s start chronologically with your life and your story and your issues and battles. Obviously, depression is a big one. Is that the main one, you’d say, in your life?
BM: Oh, that’s why I got ECT. I started feeling depressed in high school and then I didn’t have my first manic episode until I was 19.
PG: What do parents buy a kid for their first manic episode?
BM: Um, I don’t know, a stern talking to?
PG: (Laughs)
BM: By somebody else, called a psychiatrist, fingers crossed…!
PG: A pink bow on a hospitalization.
BM: That’s right. We’ll pay for your really sensitive prescriptions, ma’am.
PG: Yes, yes. (Laughs) So, you had your first manic episode at 19.
BM: Yes.
PG: But the depression was there in high school?
BM: Yeah, in high school I was weird (laughs) and now I have the idea that everybody’s weird in high school, but in high school the thing is that everybody feels that they’re the weirdest. I wasn’t very popular, I wasn’t very smart, I wasn’t very anything so I just kept getting weirder and weirder and –
PG: Can you be specific – and you are 26?
BM: I’m 26.
PG: Okay. Can you be more specific about what the –
BM: Oh, I would wear really stupid clothes. I would wear pajamas to school, I would wear weird hats, like, I dressed like the middle layer of a Russian doll set.
PG: (Laughs)
BM: And I would pretend to be into weird things, like witchcraft, or I suddenly wanted to be a pilot because my Dad was a pilot. And I love movies, I’ve always loved movies, but I would pick the weirdest movie and say that it was my favorite or something. I would say, oh, 1995 The Usual Suspects, only this one character, only the dumb cop eating a donut is my favorite thing, so…
PG: And was this because you felt like that was a role that was open in your –
BM: Absolutely. What’s weird about high school is that I felt so strongly as myself, but I just didn’t know what that was. So whatever it was that I was, I felt very strongly about it, but I didn’t know how to describe it. So I would fill in my identity with these other things that weren’t me but might as well have been, because I didn’t know who I was.
PG: What were the things that you were thinking and feeling that you were afraid to show that were authentic to you?
BM: That I… That I had nothing to use to go forward in life. I knew that I was kind of smart, or something, but I had no evidence for that. All these things that I felt, I had no evidence for.
PG: Do you feel like you’re a disappointment to yourself or your parents?
BM: Oh, always, always. Still.
PG: Do you ever talk to your parents about it?
BM: Yeah. It’s hard to talk to my Dad about it because we, uh – the relationship dynamics that I have with my mother and my father have always been incredibly different, and they switched dramatically once I got out of high school. So all through my life I was Daddy’s girl, I loved that my Dad was a navy pilot and he was this, sort of – he always felt really ambitious and cool, and he was the instigator for all of our moving around the country and stuff like that. He had cool friends. And my Mom was a teacher, so she was just sort of – I mean, I think I just thought of her as, like, the family secretary when I was younger, and that seems so – I realize now just how horribly simple that’s making everything about her. But now she absolutely my best friend, and my Dad and I have… I just have this fear – a fear that, even though my father recognizes, he can’t really explain why it’s not real, and it’s that my Dad is not proud of me; that my Dad is actually really disappointed in me.
PG: Rather than him expressing disappointment, is it the absence of his excitement about anything in your life that makes it feel that way?
BM: Yeah, or…
PG: I’m just assuming that there’s not a tremendous amount of enthusiasm about where you’re at?
BM: That’s very true, and it’s also – I realize now that I never knew what enthusiasm looked like on my father. So when I really needed it, like right now, and if I share good news about something, it’s sort of like talking to a wall that nods. Which may be harsh but –
PG: That’s what my Dad was like. He was a checkbook at the end of the couch.
BM: Yeah, that’s a really good way of –
PG: And I knew he loved me, he just didn’t know how to get out of his head and really connect to another human being.
BM: Yeah, and I – you know, I’m a millennial and we’re so addicted to having a reason for our woes, for being able to justify some sort of sadness that we put on LiveJournal or Tumblr posts with this actual physical thing, and I think for someone like me who was so blessed to have a very normal, supportive, loving childhood, to have no stomping ground to lay any of the awful feelings –
PG: The frustration of being a human being.
BM: Absolutely! It’s a weird time when you feel like you need that excuse to be sad but you don’t have it. So it was easy for me to just be very down on my mother and just be like, ‘My Mom is so mean to me, my Mom wants me to be this perfect church-going girl and I just want to watch Hugh Jackman movies and sit up all night…’
PG: Was there a feeling that if you had become what your mother wanted you to become, you would have fit in even less at school?
BM: I think I thought that I would have fit in more, but I would have felt more like an alien than I already did.
PG: I gotcha.
BM: But, you know, I’ve seen pictures of my middle school years. I don’t even cringe anymore because it’s just such a staple of how weird I was, but all these girls in pictures with me, they’re so cute and they’re discovering makeup and actually wearing underwire bras and, you know, I look like my hair is the length of a cocker spaniel’s ears and the same wily mess, chocolate on face like a four-year-old, but I’m in middle school. I don’t know, it was just…
PG: What do you owe that to? Your disinterest in their interests? Or your lack of awareness?
BM: I lacked the interest and that I felt that because of that, I had fallen so far behind that I could never catch up, that I would never learn how to do makeup, I would never learn how to be a woman.
PG: And what’s that based on?
BM: You know, middle schoolers are mean. Middle schoolers would see me and they’d be like, ‘Oh, is Beth even a person? Is Beth a boy or a girl? Beth is never going to get a boyfriend,’ and stuff like that. And I wasn’t really thinking about that. So to hear that, it made me wonder if I should worry about it. It was feeding into a bunch of other simultaneously dumb and existential questions that everybody has in middle school and high school.
PG: I see.
BM: I don’t think I knew what depression was until I got to college. Actually, is it cool if I talk about mania first?
PG: Yeah! Talk about whatever you want.
BM: When I got to college I switched from whatever I was taking in high school, which I don’t even think – it must not have been an SSRI. I switched to an SSRI because I was getting even more tired, or something. And maybe a week after I started taking the SSRI, I feel like my life is separated between this moment and every moment before, because suddenly it felt like a switch had gone off where everything was going to be okay. All of these fears and anxieties that I had brought as an adolescent into college were instantly gone, where I had the power and the knowledge and absolutely the energy to accomplish anything. Not only anything, but right now! And I just let that fuel me for a couple of weeks, until it got out of control.
PG: Were you sleeping?
BM: No.
PG: But it must have felt amazing.
BM: At first, it did. And the faster my thoughts got, the more other people were not able to – I would say they weren’t able to keep up, but it’s really that they were unable to pretend that I was making sense. It eventually got to where the only conversations I could have were with myself, just pacing around and going from one thought to the next. That became a very freaky feeling because when I was manic, I wanted to be around people and I wanted to bring the party –
PG: And express yourself!
BM: Absolutely! So, to have unknowingly and for reasons that I didn’t know – I didn’t really know what was happening to me – it was making me more isolated. Eventually I got the… (pause) I knew that I had to go to the Grand Canyon. (Laughs)
PG: (Laughs) And where were you in school?
BM: I was in Phoenix, I was at ASU, so it wasn’t… But, it was in the middle of the night. So much of all the bad mental illness I’ve had in my life has been about certainty. It was just this idea that I most certainly had a calling at the Grand Canyon, that I had to reach there by sunrise, even though it was four hours away and the sun was already rising, I knew that I had to go there.
PG: Well, if the world was going to be okay, you needed to get there…!
BM: You know, I think I described it at the time as a calling, like I was compelled, that a higher power was calling me to the Grand Canyon. But it was more like a certainty that I would go. It was this idea that something had already been decided. So, I started driving, and I didn’t end up in the Grand Canyon; I ended up in Blythe. (Laughs) Like, six hours west or something.
PG: Blythe is as desert as desert gets.
BM: Oh, yeah. And from there I –
PG: You were lost?
BM: I don’t even know. I was lost, I was –
PG: Or did you just want to set Blythe straight?
BM: (Laughs)
PG: Let them know your idea for an underwater amusement park?
BM: Like, listen up, Life. I thought it was, like, A Streetcar Named Desire. I would be the protagonist of the entire town… No, but I slept that – quote, unquote, “slept” – in my car, and then I drove back. And from there all things get kind of foggy, because I think sort of went down pretty fast. I was really lucky to have not been arrested or killed or hospitalized during this first manic episode, but instead I just got wicked depressed afterward.
PG: Not being an imposing physical figure and being a white girl –
BM: Oh, you can get away with anything!
PG: If you were a black man, you probably would have been shot.
BM: I absolutely would have been. So, I used that ability to get away with things, to sort of justify relapsing into mania over and over again.
PG: Because you know nobody’s going to beat you down.
BM: Yeah! I have a picture of me holding a stranger’s boa or something, like a python, in the middle of a street in college – I think it was a commonly college walked street. I was just walking around with this snake that I had stolen, and there’s a picture of me, and I –
PG: Oh, you stole it from somebody?
BM: Yeah, I said I would take a picture with it, and then I walked away with it – with a snake!
PG: For how long did you have this snake away from this person?
BM: I don’t think it was very long.
PG: So it wasn’t like a day, it was a few minutes?
BM: No, no. I was very, very drunk, too. But I knew it was long enough that somebody was upset with me. The snake might have been upset with me, but I’ll never know. I just yearn for the cold touch of a snake sometimes.
PG: Who doesn’t? Who, I mean, what is Christmas if you don’t have the cold touch of a snake?
BM: Some people wrap wreaths, and I’m a python girl. I just remember telling – because I wasn’t even seeing a psychiatrist, being on antidepressants, and I went to the doctor saying, ‘Hey, I don’t think this Prozac or whatever is working, because I had this incredible spiritual experience where I thought I had to go to the Grand Canyon and stuff like that.’ So my psychiatrist said, ‘Oh, I think you have bipolar disorder, because that’s what happens when people with bipolar get put on SSRIs sometimes.’ And so often when I talk to other people with bipolar, they tell me how they battled with their diagnosis or they didn’t believe it for years and they didn’t do anything right with it for years. I was the opposite – I instantly believed it, but I had no idea what it meant.
PG: You finally had an identity! (Laughs)
BM: Absolutely! Instantly I was like, this is it! This is who –
PG: I’m Bipolar Girl!
BM: Yeah! Yeah.
PG: Was it 1 or 2 that you were diagnosed with or was there no distinction made?
BM: Originally it was 2, I think, but then, I think because I was sort of relaying my experience with mania, they were like, ‘Well, it’s Type 2,’ or something, and then I was pretty quickly afterward diagnosed with Type 1.
PG: Yeah – Grand Canyon will upgrade you to Bipolar 1.
BM: Yeah, like, I want to go first class into the psych ward…! So, to call myself bipolar and to have bipolar ended up being two radically different things. Because when I said I was bipolar to people – which I did a lot more in college – I didn’t even associate it with the symptoms I was experiencing. I had joined the rowing team at ASU – which is just a complete stupid oxymoron of, like, a desert rowing team – and we had to get up for practice at 6am. And by that time I was on Seroquel or something.
PG: Oh my god!
BM: Yeah! I gained 50 pounds my first year at college, if not more; I was really heavy. I couldn’t get up for a 3pm class, let alone the rowing team!
PG: Rowing at 6 in the morning!
BM: Yeah! I was cut immediately! I sunk so perilously low without realizing that my life was not at all a life anymore. It was overwhelming how easily it could happen and how –
PG: Did you tell your psychiatrist, I’m unable to get out of bed? Or did you just blame yourself – ‘Oh, I’m a lazy piece of shit, it’s not the medicine’?
BM: I definitely blamed myself, because of two reasons: I was depressed, and that’s what happens when you get depressed, you blame yourself; and I hadn’t associated bipolar with a physical thing, which is bizarre because now when I think about mania or depression, they barely seem psychological to me. Depression, to me, feels like absolute, soul-crushing tiredness – not the tiredness that comes with accomplishment, but the tiredness or unpacking from a long trip.
PG: Right. You look at the dishes, like, ‘How could I possibly do those?’
BM: Yeah. And mania, to me, feels also very physical. That energy and stuff. But in college, when I was first diagnosed, that didn’t seem like a thing. I was like, ‘It’s a mental illness! It’s not a physical – why would I be tired from this?!’ I thought I was lazy. My parents were very confused at this point in time because they just didn’t understand how, if I were on medicine, it couldn’t be working. Or how I could be neglecting to get better.
PG: It didn’t occur to them that you might have been over-prescribed or mis-prescribed?
BM: Or something… It took me a long time to get anything right, medication-wise.
PG: And a lot of it is hit and miss. Apparently it’s a lot better nowadays because they can do a DNA check, and that helps rule out certain types of meds so that it’s a little less trial and error.
BM: Oh, that’s awesome. It’s like ancestry.com.
PG: So, what brought about the ECT?
BM: I was in and out of the hospital a couple of times in college, mostly for depression…
PG: Did you check yourself in, or were people worried about you?
BM: I think before ECT, I checked myself in once, and then once my friend – I think I was in a mixed, like a dysphoric mania, with these incredible, horrific, racing thoughts. I could hear a dialogue of my own thoughts against each other and stuff.
PG: That sounds horrifying.
BM: It was just – there’s nothing like it, and I say that in the worst way possible.
PG: So you have the energy of mania with none of the exhilaration or fun? It’s just –
BM: It’s like your panic attack in your head and somebody else’s panic attack, battling it out in your head.
PG: Oh my god!
BM: And knowing that you’re never going to get to sleep, even – yeah, it was awful.
PG: It’s like Dancing with the Stars, but with panic attacks.
BM: (Laughs) Oh man. Yeah, that’s it. Then nobody ever gets voted off or anything. So, my junior year, or rather, the beginning of my senior year, I got in so many – I don’t even know how many projects I got done, but it’s the amount that, in hindsight when I think about all these things that I did in this one semester, I’m like, how would anybody be able to do that if they weren’t manic, and how did I think that I wasn’t manic while it was happening? In my defense, it was a very hypomanic, under-the-radar mania, but I got so much done – I wrote a play, I did a short film, I acted in a couple of plays, I got great grades, and stuff. So after all those things came to fruition, I was so depressed that I ceased to be a human being.
PG: So it was months of hypomania or mania, and then the crash happened?
BM: It wasn’t a crash. It was sort of a glide down, farther than I ever thought that I would go.
PG: Give me some snapshots of what it looked like at its worst.
BM: I was doing a play. They always say, sign up for things when you’re manic. Or the mania is the meal and the depression is the check. (Laughs)
PG: Oh, I love that! Oh my god, that’s so fantastic.
BM: I forget who said that, I wish I could credit them. So, the check came for this great manic meal. I had already auditioned and gotten into this play, and I was excited about the role until I wasn’t excited about anything, and the thought of going to rehearsal was like if somebody say, ‘Hey, do you want to hike the Pacific Crest Trail right now with no preparation, and you also have asthma,’ or something. It seemed too impossible to even consider, and the idea of – it’s bizarre to think of, but I wasn’t suicidal, because I couldn’t even conceive of –
PG: The effort.
BM: The effort!
PG: And Googling… (Laughs)
BM: Yeah! I eventually was like, I didn’t know my lines, it truly was the Actor’s Nightmare. I didn’t know my lines for this play, and everybody was like, you can’t do this. Because it eventually gets so bad that everybody knows, and they’re just like, ‘Oh, when did Beth become a grey ghost person?’ I was really skinny then, too; I was about 100 pounds. I don’t remember how I got into the hospital. I think it must have been voluntarily, but I don’t really remember being there. That must have been when I heard about ECT.
PG: And one of the effects of ECT is memory loss. I have to say, you’ve done an admirable job of piecing things together, given how much of your memory you have lost from all the treatments you’ve done.
BM: Well, buckle up! Before I got ECT, my boyfriend at the time, Colin, he had seen me through all of this. He’d seen me very depressed and he’d seen me battling with what it meant to even think about having a normal life and thinking about just going forward. And then I started getting ECT, and in Arizona they do bilateral ECT first. What that means is, the electrodes – they’re shocking both sides of your brain, essentially. It’s the most “effective” form of ECT, but it’s also the one with the most side effects. So, for example, in California they only do unilateral ECT, unless your case of depression or mania is so severe that you have to do bilateral. In Arizona it’s not like that; they’ll just go right for the bilateral.
PG: Mm. And they do it out of the back of a truck.
BM: Yeah, it was in a portable next to the hospital, and it just seemed so sketchy, but that’s the sado-desperation I was in, and honestly, that my parents were in by that point. They were doing stuff like, my Dad would have to come up and get me from Phoenix, from Tucson in the middle of the night because I would suddenly just panic, I would have panic attacks that would last weeks, and stuff like that.
PG: Oh my god.
BM: By that point, it was just like… They were always scared of some sort of call from me, and they could have gotten any call, whether I was alive or not and stuff. I realize it had gotten that bad, but now I don’t remember the sort of narrative arc of how everything fell apart. So, Colin would take me, and my parents would get me sometimes too, to get ECT, Electroconvulsive Therapy. It started out three times a week, and I felt better pretty quickly. That’s one of the benefits of ECT is that, you know, if you’re really, really friggin’ depressed, it works quickly. It works much faster than an antidepressant –
PG: Which can take 6-8 weeks, or 12 weeks sometimes even.
BM: Gosh, yeah. But I remember feeling better pretty soon, and because of the stigma of ECT, I was… If I wasn’t ashamed to talk about it, if I felt comfortable talking about any mental illness with somebody, then I felt comfortable being an evangelist for ECT. I felt comfortable being like, ‘Hey, I know that there’s this stereotype that Francis Farmer and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest does ECT, but this has really helped me, and this is something that I feel is a godsend.’ And then it started not becoming a godsend, I still called it a godsend anyway.
PG: Why?
BM: I want to be clear that I do think it saved my life. But it was – I don’t even remember when I started noticing that my memory was damaged.
PG: That makes sense. So, upfront, you got all the benefits of it – you got the meal, and then the check…?
BM: Yeah, the weirdest part is that I – Facebook tells me that, ‘Oh, 8 years ago today you said this dumb thing,’ and I remember a picture that came up on my Facebook a few months ago where it had been clear that I had been getting ECT for a month or so, and –
PG: How often?
BM: Three times a week.
PG: Okay.
BM: And by then, I knew that my memory must have been really damaged and really pieced together, but I was still very much proclaiming this to be – because I didn’t want…
PG: You didn’t want to believe that it had harmed your memory?
BM: Hell, no! I didn’t want to believe that it had caused any harm if it caused any good, because I had been so fed up with taking one medicine and then combining it with another medicine and then… I took a medicine called Geodon and I got serotonin syndrome, and I felt like I was going to die. All the medicines up until that point just felt so stupid and felt like they didn’t work or they made me too tired. So to have this one thing be less holy than it felt when it first started helping me, that was awful. That was inconceivable to me. And so I had to keep playing up that it was so pure in its goodness and its help.
PG: So it’s not that you regretted doing it, it’s just, you didn’t want to speak aloud the truth that there was this big side effect?
BM: Yeah, and especially because of the stigma of getting it in the first place. There was this inherent bravery, I felt, this sort of noble act of me talking about how this helped me, and that I felt like I was perverting it by saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I forget people’s names if I’ve known them for four years. I’m asking my boyfriend what his name is as he’s driving me home.’ During ECT, they do try to really mark your cognitive – because they know that this is a side effect and that it can be a bad one, and so they do this test. It’s four different categories, and the worst irony here is that I remember taking these stupid tests, more than I remember any part of my life during this period of time. Because they’ll do stuff like they’ll ask you to spell ‘world’ backwards, and they’ll ask you to draw a clock and make the time say 9.45 or something. Draw a lion but say it’s a giraffe. It’s these little tasks to test you cognitively that don’t change. Eventually I got really good at spelling ‘world’ backwards, but I was forgetting actual historical events in my life, like had I met this person, had I taken this class? I would forget entire classes.
PG: Would it sometimes come back, the memory of something?
BM: Yeah, I describe it now as, it’s like knowing you’ve read a book or knowing you’ve seen a movie, and sometimes if somebody says, ‘Oh, yeah, um, wasn’t that the one with the Jamaican bob sled team?’ then suddenly you can think of, like, ‘Oh!’
PG: That’s A Wonderful Life.
BM: (Laughs) Oh, yeah, Cool Runnings or… Sometimes it’s like that and sometimes it’s like, ‘No, maybe I saw that on a DVD display case in Blockbuster in 1995 but no, I can’t remember that at all.’ It was especially devastating to me with Colin, because he would say… Like, it’s weird how you forget how much a day is spent reminiscing if you love someone. Just to have that companionship, part of being friends with somebody, part of loving someone is saying, ‘Do you remember this great time we had, just the other day, that was so funny how so-and-so said this,’ or ‘I had a great time doing this…’ And when all of that goes away, you have no context for whatever relationship you’re in at that moment.
PG: It’s like you’re on your first date.
BM: Absolutely.
PG: At least for one of you.
BM: But it’s all of the uncertainty of a first date with somehow the intimacy of a marriage.
PG: Wow! That must have been heartbreaking for him.
BM: I don’t know how he – he’s one of the strongest, best people I know. To this day, he’s one of my best friends. But now, he lives in New York, and we’ve been friends longer than we were together, because –
PG: And it didn’t last, obviously, the relationship with him?
BM: No.
PG: What was the final straw?
BM: This is – I didn’t remember this being the final straw until a year ago or so. We didn’t talk about the end, we just talked about funny stuff that had happened during the relationship. Sometimes he would talk about things and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that,’ and he knew that I didn’t. But I remembered, he went on a skiing trip with my family. We were so excited because we hadn’t gone skiing in a while. I hadn’t gone skiing since I was a kid. And I was saying, ‘Hey, Colin, do you remember when we were driving home from that ski trip and we saw the really big vulture circling outside the car window.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that was the worst car trip of my life.’ And I said, ‘Why? That was a great trip!’ And he said, ‘Do you remember that you broke up with me on that trip?’ And I didn’t. That’s such a horrific thing to do, to break up with somebody on your family’s…
PG: While the vulture is circling.
BM: I think that was after. It’s like, whoever I was, I wasn’t even able to wait to break up until we got out of an enclosed familial vacation trip situation. And what hurts the most for me – I know tons of stuff hurt the most for him, but what hurts the most for me is knowing that I was that person. That whoever person broke up with Colin on a family ski trip, that was me – and I’m still that person, even if I wouldn’t do that now. All these things – while I was with him, I suddenly felt like my life was not my own, that I could be told that anything happened and that it would be true, or that these things that I did didn’t belong to me anymore.
PG: That’s terrifying.
BM: Yeah. It was not only terrifying in the sense that I could be convinced of anything that I had – it’s not like anybody I loved or anybody who loved me would gaslight me like that – it’s like I had no internal consistency of who I was. We become ourselves every day and we are ourselves every day, but sometimes I didn’t know who that was. I couldn’t remember days and days and days on end, these important things that had shaped my life. It ended up affecting both before and after. They were just gone.
PG: And the irony, too, that your struggle as a kid was finding an identity for yourself, and here it is being eroded from external circumstances that you needed to do to survive.
BM: Yeah.
PG: Do you ever feel physically cursed?
BM: No. I feel… I still feel guilty.
PG: Why do you feel guilty? And the reason I ask that is because I often feel cursed, like, ‘Well, this is working now, but this good part is not going to last long because something always gets shit on. My body always lets me down.’
BM: I think I would use the word doomed, not cursed.
PG: Oh, okay. Oh yeah, by cursed I didn’t mean like magical witches.
BM: I told you I was weird in high school. When I’ve been suicidal, again, even like mania, it was never the impulse to want to do something; it was the certainty that I would. It was that even if I didn’t want to kill myself – because I didn’t want to kill myself – it’s that I knew that I would kill myself. And the worst part was not knowing when it would happen.
PG: The outside is absolute darkness, I’m just not ready to get out of bed to face it. (Laughs)
BM: Yeah. I always feel guilty that I couldn’t catch it early enough, or that I couldn’t use my in-between, my normal phases to better myself so that this wouldn’t happen again.
PG: Catch what early enough?
BM: If I was in a stable mood I felt, even then, guilty if it changed.
PG: As if it was your fault?
BM: Yeah. And sometimes it was. Sometimes I would go off my meds, sometimes I would self-sabotage by way of drugs and alcohol and sex, and all of that was just a piece of this larger issue where I thought I wasn’t doing enough. Which is crazy because I did so much that I lost my memory!
PG: And you are putting the pressure on yourself of dealing with mental illness and expecting to have “dealt with it” perfectly, which there is no… The very definition of mental illness is that it impedes areas of our lives to the point where we need external help.
BM: Absolutely.
PG: And that is being so hard on yourself to… said the pot to the kettle.
BM: (Laughs) Flash forward to now living in LA. I’ve been here two years, and the first year I was here was actually pretty good. Or the first six months rather. And I had a manic episode in January 2017 – I was hospitalized and I started ECT again here.
PG: How many treatments had you had prior to that?
BM: Thirty-eight bilateral treatments. And I’ve gotten another thirty or so here.
PG: And was the memory loss from the second set as bad as the memory loss from the first.
BM: Not at all, no. When I found out the difference between bilateral and unilateral, I was kind of horrified. I had no idea that this was an option when I first started getting ECT.
PG: That is fucked that they didn’t tell you that.
BM: Yeah. Because I remember, once I knew that I was losing my memory… I couldn’t even keep words. I would feel like such an idiot in class where I was trying to think of a name or trying to think of a simple word like ‘dog’ and it just wouldn’t come to me. So I was literally on Alzheimer’s medicine in Phoenix. I was on Namenda and all these medicines to make me remember things, and I just couldn’t. So, switching to unilateral here in LA, it went really smoothly.
PG: The depression lifted? Or the mania didn’t come back?
BM: The depression lifted, but there is that weird… They always say that if somebody’s lost, if there’s a death in the family, you can express your condolences immediately, but go back in six weeks or so, because that’s when people have drifted off; they’re not thinking about you anymore. And I think the same thing applies to hospitalizations and depression in general. Yeah, there is that traumatic immediacy of being in the hospital, and there is that really dark attention given to depression when it’s at its worst. But the whole year after that, I was so depressed without knowing that I was. I was working three days a week where I work, so I had Tuesdays and Thursdays off, and I would tell everybody, ‘Hey, I write on Tuesdays and Thursdays.’ And I didn’t do jack shit. I was in bed. And I somehow had legitimately convinced myself that, ‘Whoa, you know, I’m lazy, but at least I’m not depressed like I was a couple of years ago.’ I had completely fallen into this lie.
PG: Is this after the second round of ECT?
BM: It was during.
PG: Were you making progress?
BM: Yes, yes, yes.
PG: And were you letting them know – or I guess because you didn’t think it was depression, you couldn’t give them the feedback?
BM: No, and there were other, you know – I was getting better, I kept getting better and better and better. It wasn’t until December last year where I feel like I woke up and I wasn’t –
PG: Like six months ago?
BM: Yeah.
PG: Recording right now, it’s the end of June of 2018.
BM: I felt like I woke up a different person. I was more clear than I had felt in years. I think about college and it’s a blur! I know everybody says that about college, but it’s a blur that I can’t even decipher what it was before it got smudged. So much of it is gone. So much of people who I valued, people who I respected, are gone or don’t know how much I care about them because I can’t remember the best memories I have of them.
PG: What’s that like for them, and how do you explain that to them? Like, if somebody comes up to you excited, and there are times when you don’t know the face or the name?
BM: Yeah, and I say every time, ‘I’m so sorry…’ But it’s always a little too much, unless I know them well enough to – it’s always too much to be like, ‘Oh, as you know, I’ve lost a year of my life from Electroconvulsive Therapy…’ It’s like taking one stigmatized thing and then stacking on another and another… It’s like, ‘As you know, I have a mental illness – overshare! – and as you know, I have received Electroconvulsive Therapy for this mental illness – oh, overshare!
PG: But how do you know who to share it with if you don’t recognize the person?
BM: I used the comparison of An Actor’s Nightmare, but it is – it’s like going in and improvising the level of intimacy you have with the person based on their reaction and the people around you and stuff.
PG: I gotcha. And she’s referencing a play by Christopher Durang.
BM: I thought it was a –
PG: Was it Christopher Durang who got it?
BM: Yeah.
PG: A guy wakes up on stage and he’s in a play that he doesn’t recognize.
BM: I just thought of it – because I get the dream all the time. And I get the dream about school, too, where I’m going to a test and I have never studied for it and I’ve never even been in the class, and I just thought that was the general phrase. So, some people, I know that they know that I’ve gotten Electroconvulsive Therapy but I don’t even know how they know it. Especially moving to LA has been bizarre because primarily my narrative memory – events – has been affected, but also what I struggle with is remembering procedural things: how to drive to this place, or… And it’s hurt me a lot in work because people will be like, ‘Oh, this is how you log this submission, this is how you bind this paper, use this machine,’ or something. And I’m even writing it down, which looks weird, and they’re like, ‘Why, it’s simple.’ Or I’m the one who’s like, ‘Could you teach me this again? Could you tell me this again?’
PG: Do you ever share with them why?
BM: I did when I first started at the company that I work with now. There was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.
PG: Why?
BM: The person I told it to – I don’t have a persecution complex so much, but I feel very much that it has been used against me. I feel as if I’m treated as fragile and that it’s not a reflection necessarily of the treatment, but I think it’s hard to conceive of a smart person losing their memory like that. But it happens, and so, I think it’s very easy for the person I’m talking about to be like, ‘Well, she was probably an idiot before, that’s why she can’t remember how to get to this airport,’ or whatever. Obviously it depends greatly on the person, and I think it says a lot about people’s empathy when they do believe that this has happened to me. But honestly, it’s like depression. If somebody hasn’t had it, it’s possible to explain it, but it’s not at possible for them to really connect with it. It’s describing a colour that they’ve never seen. So I feel very much like I’m behind intellectually or something, in my job and just generally speaking. The worst part is, to romanticize however smart or however great my memory was, or however great the work I did in the past was, it doesn’t matter because I can’t even remember it.
PG: Wow.
BM: So there is this question of, like, was I ever good at this or did I just pretend that I was? Or, will it ever be like this again, where I could do good work and remember words and describe things accurately, or is it just that I just thought that that’s what I was doing when I couldn’t remember anything?
PG: Has there been an improvement in things coming back to you in the last six months or since your last treatment, or are you just kind of level from where you are from your last treatment?
BM: I feel pretty level in terms of memories and stuff like that. When I got ECT here it didn’t affect any of the memories I had already lost. A weird thing to celebrate, but… Primarily my memory loss occurred around 2012-2013, 2015 even. From 2015 on, I remember things pretty well. The only lasting memory deficit I have is that sort of procedural how to do things, or if somebody has told me something. I can remember things that have happened to me, but I can’t remember really things that I’ve said or people have said to me. It’s almost like a more insidious way of forgetting things because it does very much mimic the forgetful person who doesn’t care. Whereas when it was happening in Arizona it was more obvious that something else was going on.
PG: Anything else you’d like to share? Oh, I have two questions. How long does the session take, does it hurt, and are there cookies?
BM: Um, cookies… No…?
PG: You just forgot.
BM: (Laughs) Oh my gosh. Yeah. That’s the big punchline. I remember there being like biscuit things, I don’t know how to describe it.
PG: Really?!
BM: Yeah, it was something, more expensive cookies or something, when you’re at a fancier friend’s house or something. They were like, ‘Do you want these…’ I know there were Tam Tams or something from Australia.
PG: Oh my god, I was just kidding!
BM: Oh no, no, this is a serious thing…! But okay, so, ECT itself. It’s so quick. They put you out. They have to strap you with all sorts of electrodes and they put a blood pressure cuff on your calf, because your right foot is the only thing that’s not paralyzed. They have to make sure – because you’re getting a seizure in your brain.
PG: Mm. And you’re unconscious?
BM: Yeah, they put you out. They give you anesthesia, and they paralyze you, too, so the only way that they know that the seizure is working is if your right foot is moving. You’re out for like a half hour but the procedure itself only lasts about five minutes.
PG: I see.
BM: You wake up, always cold, because that’s what happens when you wake up from anesthesia; you’re just like freezing cold. When I got bilateral it hurt my jaw a lot. It would make me get headaches and stuff like that. But really as far as side effects go, physical side effects, it’s really negligible. It looks much scarier than it is. Before you can get ECT you have to be put through these tests to make sure that your body will handle it. I remember when I wanted to get ECT in LA, I couldn’t even – I had to make appointments to get an EKG and stuff. And I’m like, ‘I don’t have the energy, it’s not worth it.’
PG: The irony.
BM: Yeah. I remember I had to go get a consultation with these doctors who were in charge of the ECT Department at UCLA. I had to get a consultation with them and they were asking me to do these stupid cognitive tests that they asked me to do in Arizona where it’s like, draw a clock and spell ‘world’ backwards and who was the president before Obama – all these simple things that I couldn’t do at that point because I was so depressed. I remember feeling embarrassed, because I was crying in this office, like, ‘I’m so sorry that I can’t do these things.’ And they were like, ‘That’s okay, because you need ECT.’ It all just came back around – whether or not my cognition is damaged from being depressed or getting my brain shocked. Because that’s another thing about depression that people don’t really mention, is that you’re just so stupid all the time.
PG: So foggy. Decision-making is difficult. Yeah, it just distorts everything. It’s like a fog.
EM: Yeah. You can’t drive while you’re getting it three times a week. Can’t drive or make big decisions, which is sort of a broad thing. It’s shockingly easy… (Laughs) Yeah, been waiting for that one all interview.
PG: (Laughs) Well, Beth, thank you for sharing all of this stuff, especially in such detail. And being so honest about your feelings around it. I really appreciate it.
EM: Oh, I appreciate you letting me come on. Thank you.
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