What if ect doesnt work for depression

Because patients are under anesthesia and have taken muscle relaxants, they neither convulse nor feel the current. Patients awaken about 5 to 10 minutes after the end of the treatment. Patients are then moved to the recovery room and remain there until their blood pressure, pulse and breathing return to their pre-treatment levels. Usually this takes about 20 to 25 minutes.

Patients who are given ECT on an outpatient basis must have someone drive them home after the procedure and stay with them until they go to sleep at night. People should not drive in the 24 hours following ECT. A single ECT session usually lasts one hour. This includes the time the patient will be in the treatment room approximately minutes and the time spent in the recovery room approximately minutes.

Typically, ECT whether inpatient or outpatient is given two to three times a week for a total of six to twelve sessions. Some patients may need more or fewer treatments. These sessions improve depression in 70 to 90 percent of patients, a response rate much higher than that of antidepressant drugs. Although ECT is effective, its benefits are short-lived. A patient must live close enough to the DBS center for regular visits. Follow-up surgery may be required to alter the position of the electrodes or to replace battery packs or mend broken wires to maintain stimulation.

Patients may still need therapy as part of their follow-up plan. Research into the success of this approach is ongoing, but Greenberg says that, for patients who have tried it, this depression treatment seems effective.

The reason to do it is to help some very sick people and, through the research, gain a better understanding of brain circuitry that might lead to more effective treatments. By subscribing you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Health Topics. Health Tools. By Madeline R. Reviewed: May 5, Medically Reviewed. What Is Electroconvulsive Therapy? She had a course of six treatments over six weeks which is about the shortest course I think that you can have. And but she was quite well for a little while after the ECT. And it did feel like a huge relief at the time and up until that point I had no real strong idea as to when or if [name of wife] was going to get better so just to see the possibility of her being better for the first time since [name of daughter] was born was huge relief and I was immensely grateful for it and felt very positive about it in many ways despite some previous reservations.

Well perhaps it does work for some people. But I would never have it again no matter how bad I was, because the worst thing for me was the memory loss.

But like me they are desperate, you try anything. Whether he thought it did or not. I know they would have. After having ECT, she got better quite quickly and was able to return to work. See full profile. My parents think I would have, they think it would just would have taken a lot longer.

So different sets of treatments or …? Yeah yeah. But for me I think it was lifesaving and I became well again very, very quickly and within a couple of weeks of being in hospital I had got myself a Sunday job and I was back functioning normally. You know, when I had a few days in hospital of feeling really well and then I was discharged and I continued to feel well after that.

Tania had been very ill and in and out of hospital and it took a while to come to terms with her depression. And I had been, you know, over a year of being in and out of hospital and very dangerously ill. And I gave the ECT a try and I had seven or eight, I had eight treatments ultimately, but I think after the seventh one I just woke up and the whole thing had lifted and it was quite incredible. And after that, I mean, it took some time, it took some time to make a full recovery, because, you know, after the experiences of the previous year and I was, I was really in pieces and I, you know, took a while, over the course of the next few months I needed to get my sleep sorted out and I just needed to come to terms with the anxiety that whole, the whole episode had produced for me.

And I had some cognitive behaviour which really helped me, like, get sort of relaxed and face kind of getting back to life again and just kind of get over what happened. It was not a change in her mood but in her energy level, returning to her talkative active self.

It really, really picked up. She was much more talkative, you know, she was doing. Because that was what she had been like ordinarily, kind of get involved in everything. But the really odd thing was that her, it was like her energy had recovered ahead of her actual mood and her actual thinking. It was like, she was kind of cheerful, but she would be cheerfully saying really kind of dark things you know, so it was, it was like her thinking was the last thing to recover, but it felt.

It felt really encouraging, it felt really positive and it felt really kind of exciting.