So Few Steps to ECT Electrodes Today

     We’ve all heard or read horrible personal tales from people who have ended up getting ECT after being deemed “treatment resistant” because psychiatric medication – unsurprisingly — had failed to help them. Often these poor souls have been seeing a psychiatrist for years.

     This week, however, we heard from a middle aged woman who last February went in to an emergency care clinic to be treated for a strictly physical ailment, mononucleosis. She’d had Epstein-Barr for years and every so often it triggered a case of mono. She’d go to a clinic, be prescribed some kind of antibiotic for it, and it would shortly be gone.

     This time it was suggested she take Zoloft too because she seemed “agitated” by the fact the mono had recurred again. Innocently enough, she agreed. She had never taken any medication of that kind in her life.

     After a few weeks, she began having an adverse reaction to the Zoloft, but she had already been on it long enough that she developed severe withdrawal symptoms when she stopped taking it cold turkey. Those symptoms were mistaken for more agitation and anxiety. She was then put on Klonopin.

     She went through several months of misery being put on one medication after another and having adverse reactions to each and then having increasingly severe withdrawal symptoms when each med was ceased abruptly. Her physical condition continued to worsen, too, unlike earlier episodes in her life when she had been successfully and quickly treated for an Epstein-Barr flare-up.

     After three months a psychiatrist was put on her case who labeled her with “general anxiety due to her medical condition.” She was prescribed Zyprexa, but she had a bad reaction to that psychotropic drug, as well. She was assigned to a second psychiatrist and he prescribed her Ativan and the antipsychotic Risperdal because by now she had become increasingly manic.

     She was then placed into a psych ward where she was given six electroshock sessions because she had been adjudicated “treatment resistant.” She had said she did not want the ECT, but the psychiatrist took her to probate court and the judge ordered her to receive the shock treatments.

     A horrifying story, but all the more so because it shows the seamless connection today in some hospitals between a strictly medical approach and a psychiatric influence. This woman went to a clinic just to get her Epstein-Barr flare-up handled and nine months later she was having two electrodes wrapped around her temples to jolt the 400 volts of electricity through her brain which was needed to give her a grand mal seizure because she was “crazy.”

     We’re not telling you this story just to scare the bejeezus out of you the next time you go in for a simple antibiotic to handle some pesky sinus infection. We’re telling you this story so the next time you go in to some emergency clinic for a strictly physical problem, you know enough to avoid those next few steps that some medical person might take to lead you down such a dangerously camouflaged psychiatric path.

     You don’t want to end up prone and unconscious on a paper covered table with two electrodes wrapped around your temples just because your nose wouldn’t stop running and itching.