I needed a good psychoanalyst, I knew that and I needed one who could get me emergency admissions from time to time as we worked. I was also broke at the time and had no family at all. How I got through those years and found exactly such a psychoanalyst is the content of a book I just finished writing.

It was extremely hard to go against all those pill pushing ECT admiring doctors and I faced down several commitment attempts, but I was able to find consultants who voted against commitment and finally I made it through.

But one of the main reasons I was able to stick to my guns and defy, what seemed at the time the whole psychiatric world, was that when I was a teenager I had a breakdown and took the pills offered me by a kind caring knowledgeable psychiatrist. Those pills were the first heavy-duty antipsychotics: thorazine, stelazine, compazine and a few other zines.

And that was a learning experience I never forgot. They didn’t help me. I got sleepy, then entered a fog and by the third week, on all of them, I got grand mal seizures. I never took another antipsychotic not the old ones not the new ones none of them. I figured anything that gave me grand mal seizures was pretty damned bad for me. So from then on I mistrusted any doctor no matter how well known no matter how kind or how caring when they offered me their pretty pills and lovely electrical currents to stun or burn or brand my brain.

I only mention all this so that none of you out there think I was immensely wiser or stronger or whatever than you are. I was just more experienced. I think there’s an old saying that goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Well as a teen I got fooled several times and I took a lot of useless and damaging drugs and vowed never to do so again.

No one has to be depressed or crazy or sick for life, no one. There is an alternative and it ain’t bad, it’s called getting a really good therapist. That isn’t easy because very few of them are any good. But if you are stubborn enough and persistent enough I believe you can find someone. It was no miracle that I found the doctor I found. It was just stubborn hard long-term work when I was severely depressed and often psychotic. Honestly if I could do it back then so can you.

Oh, and by the way, I did get well or better or whatever it’s called and have lived a good life since then. It’s a hard life but I’m free of psychosis – utterly free and suffer mild unhappiness from time to time, which as you know is very different from depression. I do take an MAOI – an antidepressant but at a very low dose and it never would have worked for me without the 4 years of intensive psychoanalysis I finally succeeded in getting.

I’m doing a school paper partly on the effects of ECT and they might be helpful

now, medicare is allowing me to get 1 treatment a week. it has saved my life.

i will always advocate the benefits of ect, and the reality that it DOES HELP people. maybe not all, and certainly it is misused, but it IS HELPFUL for some of us, and it is WRONG to deny us that reality.