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Electric Shock Therapy For Ptsd

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Hi,

No! I thought electric shock therapy ( ECT) was a thing of the past. I would want to know a lot more before I agreed to it. However - Rory, my husband and a psychiatric nurse before he retired says it could be effective, especially for depression!
 
Hi,

No! I thought electric shock therapy ( ECT) was a thing of the past. I would want to know a lot more before I agreed to it. However - Rory, my husband and a psychiatric nurse before he retired says it could be effective, especially for depression!

My girlfriends, husband has gone through around 20 rounds of ECT and he probably would be dead without it. It is not at all like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." You are asleep through it, you have very low doses of electricity, and you don't end up with broken bones. My friends husband did have a little short term memory loss but it was heaven sent for him. No meds worked and he tried suicide several times. Now he wants to be alive.
 
Seems to me like something for when everything else has failed. I am very opposed to antidepressants (for myself; for others they might be fine and that's up to them) but I think I might try those before I tried electroshock therapy.
 
My mother had many sessions done. There was less of her every time. She says it worked, yet there is no marked improvement in her moods according to her psychiatrists. She no longer remembers anything about my early childhood, my first steps, my first words, nearly every milestone and I'm not the only one of her children whose lives she's entirely lost pieces of. It is one of the most painful things I've witnessed. What little relationship she had with each of us was ripped away. It may work for some people, I'm not a psychiatrist so I wouldn't know. But in my experience, it was unnecessary and barbaric. These people kept giving her treatments when the previous had no effect. I have a lot of anger over it. Maybe it's a last resort treatment, but even then I would in my personal experience, caution people against it.
 
I think EST is normally used for major depressive disorders. So if this is accompanying PTSD, then maybe EST could be helpful. But only if all other treatments for depression have been tried. Some severe depressive disorders are treatment and medication resistant.

But I would definitely only consider EST as a last resort.
 
I had ECT for severe depression. It wasn't like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but emotionally it felt invasive and it reinforced how powerless I felt at the time, with my treatment so completely in other people's hands. It didn't help me at all, but it doesn't seem to have had any lasting negative effects either - other than struggling to come to terms with the fact that at the time I felt I didn't have any other options and now I see things differently.

I'm only speaking for myself, because I know everyone's different and is on their own journey. For me, the CBT/anti-depressant/ECT approaches that I tried for years were the wrong path. I didn't know it at the time, but what was important was to address the deeper meaning the trauma held for me and to find a new meaning for myself now. I understand now that for me it's more about taking back power, and having ECT was the opposite of that.

I still think that talk therapy alone isn't enough for me. In the past, I interpreted that to mean that things like anti-depressants and ECT were necessary. For some people, they might be the right thing, I couldn't know. But for me, it was a somatic therapy that didn't centre on exposure methods (craniosacral therapy) that was the missing link to processing things that I couldn't reach with psychotherapy alone.

I agreed to ECT at the time based on the knowledge I had then. If I'd had the understanding about myself that I have now, I wouldn't have done it.
 
But for me, it was a somatic therapy that didn't centre on exposure methods (craniosacral therapy) that was the missing link to processing things that I couldn't reach with psychotherapy alone.
.

I had some experience with Somatic Experiencing while I was hospitalized. When I spoke about my DH's PTSD and some other traumas of my own, I felt like someone was choking me. I learned that it is a reaction I get when I have to talk to my DH about anything that could set him off or anything that I am scared to talk about. Very Interesting.
 
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