This is directed mainly towards people who have actually gone through ECT and want to share their experience with it. If you haven't gotten it and have done research on it, I'd also love to hear your thoughts!

I have Bipolar 1 and I started getting ECT in december. I did it for about 2 months, twice a week. Then I decided to stop since it was significantly impairing my memory and ability to continue with my academics. While I was in the mental hospital for another unalive attempt, my psychiatrists decided ECT was the best option for me to help with my severe depressive episodes, since nothing else I had tried apparently worked.

I know it \*definitely\* improved my mood and it did not take long at all for me to start feeling those improvements. (I felt excitement and joy for the first time in so long, getting out of bed wasn't a chore, etc.) But I just could not handle the amount of memory loss it was causing, so I stopped.

It did not take long for those effects to wear off and my depression to slowly seep back in after a while. It has been almost 2 months since I stopped and I still have not regained a lot of the memory loss it has caused. I remember after like 2 weeks of ECT, my family was talking about Biden, and I could not remember who our vice president was. This was 2 weeks after \*stopping\* ECT. I don't even want to get into how bad my memory loss was during it, all I know is that I cannot remember most of it. I still feel like my ability to recollect information has significantly worsened. My depression has already returned even as I'm still on medication. What's changed since I got ECT is that my cognitive functioning in general has gone down-- everything has just become foggier-- my memory and ability to recollect information has gone down the toilet.