By the end of my second week in the hospital, my doctor was thoroughly frustrated with me. I had inflicted harm on myself multiple times, many of the prescriptions he had me try weren't having the desired results, and I was becoming more and more hostile with each encounter with him. Instead of following the usual patterns, I was being difficult. Part of me wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. But the rest of me knew I needed to get better and find the treatments that worked for me.
About halfway into the third week, the doctor finally brought up an idea that both horrified and intrigued me. "Have you considered looking into ECT?" It wasn't until he used its more commonly known name that I felt that cold chill trace down my spine: shock therapy. Instantly, my mind jumped to the horror films where someone was strapped to a table and forcibly shocked repeatedly in an agonizing manner. Surely such archaic methods weren't practiced in modern times, of course.
My dad came up to the hospital one afternoon and the doctor detailed what happens during a session of ECT. During treatment, patients would basically experience a "reset" through a shock-induced seizure (still not sounding good at all.) They would of course be put under anesthesia and would not feel anything. There were very few known side effects, all of which the cold doctor shrugged off as wives tales or as something with such a minimal chance of happening as to almost be entirely non-existent. Several hours, many tears, and an instructional video later, I came to the decision that this would be a good thing for me to try.
Within the next few days, I had my first session. They woke me up well before dawn and escorted me to where the procedure would take place. As expected, the room was not inviting at all due to the knowledge of what I would be put through. I was quickly laid down in a hospital bed to observe the room around me as the staff prepared me for treatment. The one thing that always sticks out in my mind about this experience is the anesthesioligist. She was a very cheerful and friendly woman who always wore outrageously patterned scrubs and insisted at all times that showtunes be playing when she worked. I was a bit confused when they strapped two blood pressure cuffs to my arm before they began to inject the sweet concoction of drugs to put me under. My eyes began to get heavy, my heart slowed down, and I gently drifted off to the soothing sounds of Mame.
What could have been minutes, hours, or even days later I woke up, groggy and lost in the fuzzy forest of half formed thoughts. I had been wheeled over to an area nearby where I could recover before they would take me back to my room. Even though I was still under the influence of the medications, I could sense that something else was off, something....deeper. But I had no energy or motivation to chase that thought process, and so I settled back comfortably as the anesthesiologist changed the soundtrack to Oklahoma before I was taken back to my room. Maybse something good would come of this after all.
The stigmas surrounding mental illness and the treatments associated with it are always there and unfortunately will most likely always be there. We live in an age where although we are learning more about those illnesses we still treat them as unreal or even as something that is a cry for attention in many cases. Be honest with yourself: how many times have you seen someone who is depressed and in a less-than-charitable thought wondered if they were doing this for attention? Believe it or not, every single one of us has had that thought, whether consciously or subconsciously. We fear that which we don't understand, which will often trigger negative thoughts and sometimes negative action.
There is a series of pictures that communicates my feelings almost to a 'T' when it comes to how people handle mental illness or mental disorders. It is a series of small cartoons, each image showing what it would be like if people treated other diseases like they treat mental disorders. Think about this for a minute. What if physical diseases were treated the same way?
"Have you tried to not have the flu?"
"Aren't you afraid taking your insulin everyday is changing who you really are?"
"Oh don't worry. You just have to change your frame of mind. Then you'll feel better."
Mental illness is real. People suffer from it. Until we improve education on the field and until we can learn to understand as a society, it will continue to be treated as something that isn't real. Take some time today. Look up information about these. Try to understand what others might be going through. And above all else: Love those around you no matter what they are going through.
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