When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Yogi Berra
We all come to decision points in our lives, sometime decisions that we don’t really want to make. Sometimes the decision choice we ultimately select is the one we’ve been fighting against for a long time. As frequent readers of this blog know that I have depression, and it has truly been a chronic disease in my life. Mine is the treatment resistant variety of depression, lucky me! I’ve come to the point that I am seriously considering Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT article on Wikipedia). I’ve read too many anecdotal stories of the horrors and side effects of ECT. Perhaps it’s time I look at the science and proven efficacy of ECT.
According to Wikipedia 1 ECT is effective for approximately 50% of people. Given the intractable nature of my manifestation of my depression, 50% may not seem so good, but I’m willing to do anything to get relief. ECT induces seizures by passing an electrical current through either a single hemisphere of the brain, or through both hemispheres of the brain (unipolar and bipolar stimulation respectively).
Of the 50% of people who respond positively to ECT, half of those people relapse 2 within 12 months. A discouraging turn in the statistics, but is a 25% chance of getting lasting relief worth the effort? At this juncture, and considering how tired I am of the disease, I would say yes.
I need to gather more information before I take the fork in the road, but I’m very close to saying yes.
NOTES
1 I know that Wikipedia is information source that can be changed and manipulated by everyone. What I typically use it for is an initial research on a topic as it is fairly good source to pick up the lingo of a particular topic so that subsequent Internet searches use appropriate keywords.
2 By relapse I mean the return of some or all of the depressive symptoms. It’s not like a relapse in alcoholism where I would need to consume an alcoholic drink to trigger the return of the active disease, a relapse in depression could be triggered by any one of a number of things that would result in the return of depressive symptoms.
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