Yes, so then after the I think it was the 7th treatment it was stopped quite suddenly, because the consultant changed. And there was this weird set up where the consultant who had wanted her to come into hospital was running the admissions ward. So he brought her into the admissions ward, but then you were only supposed to stay there for a few days, and she ended up being there for two weeks while they were finding her a bed in the kind of, in the more long term ward. During which time the treatment started. But then she got moved quite, quite suddenly into the new ward, and that meant that the original consultant wasn’t in charge of her care anymore, even though it had been that who had set up the ECT. And the new consultant just had a completely different opinion about the diagnosis, the problem, the history, and the use of ECT.

That was incredibly frustrating because you know, just the whole structure just seemed really absurd, because while she was at home there was one consultant, and then he had to hand over to this other consultant who was only in charge of the admissions ward, who then had to hand over to this third one. Who, you know, he spoke to her for about twenty minutes, read her notes, and decided to stop the ECT, which you know, it had been building up. Lots of people had been involved. The team that was looking after her in the community, those two consultants had discussed it, and you know, everybody in the admissions ward and I’d discussed with [name of wife], you know, it had just been this really kind of long, involved, decision making process. And this new consultant was able to just, just stop it.

And it got to the point, I think, I something happened, somebody, I think one of the nurses, one of the nurses on the ward spoke to me, and said something and she was kind of being a bit cagey, but she said something to me about the way the consultant had been, the new consultant had been speaking and kind of suggested that she thought there was a problem, and maybe I, it would be helpful for me to speak to him to give him more information or something like that. And so I phoned him up and then he offered to meet me, and so I went and spoke to him for about an hour. I mean he was quite generous with his time, but you know, it was, it was awful. He just, he had a really clear idea about what was wrong with her, and just completely disagreed with what other people thought, and it was to do with the depression and the psychosis. And, the fact that ECT’s for treating depression. And it’s no good for treating psychosis, and and he was saying, she was only exhibiting symptoms of depression because of the psychosis and so she had to have, just have a stronger anti-psychotic and everything would be fixed.

Whereas my experience, having seen her virtually get ill was that no, she had been gradually getting more and more depressed, until it got to the point, you know, where she had tipped over into psychosis but because he, you know, and I think he just generally didn’t agree with ECT full stop. So he was just able to come in and say he was going to stop it.

I guess the kind of the cultural baggage of it was quite significant. And given that [name of wife] was already really uncomfortable with people knowing that she was ill, people knowing that she was on medication, people knowing that she was in hospital. I mean she was in hospital for three months, the second time, three or four months. And she kind of wanted me some how to pretend that she wasn’t and was worried about people finding out that she was in hospital and that was really difficult.

And so ECT was kind of one more thing that somehow was embarrassing or shameful or you know, people weren’t supposed to know about. And you know, that was all part of her experience of illness and since recovery, shes been quite comfortable talking to people about being ill and about being hospitalised and having ECT, but still ECT is a kind of, the last thing to surface and sometimes in a way I think, she kind of enjoys startling people with it. Yes.

And a part of that they were worried about her safety, but part of it was that they wanted to start a treatment of ECT and although my understanding is it’s not essential to be an inpatient to go through ECT, I think it helps and I think I think, you know, if somebody’s particularly ill or, not completely on board with the idea it helps. So that was why they wanted her to be there, and once shed been there for only two or three days and was kind of settled down a bit they started talking to her, to the two of us about it. And she was very reluctant as I’d expected, but also, partly because of the way in which she was ill she was very kind of resigned as well, and I think, I don’t think this was ever said to her. I don’t think it was the case, but she, she took what they were saying to mean, if you didn’t agree with the ECT that they would do it somehow compulsorily, somehow under a section. Which I mean I don’t know, but it wasn’t my understanding that they could do that. But that was what she thought. So she agreed to do it fairly reluctantly. But also I think in a kind of you know, just to an extent she didn’t really care, because of just how very depressed she was.

So yes, and I remember the first one was on a Friday about 9 o’clock and I remember dropping the children off at school and then trying to get up to the hospital in enough time, so that I would be there when shed, when she came out. And I discussed that with somebody on the ward, or with her consultant or someone, and I had been told that that was absolutely fine. And I couldn’t be there while it was actually happening, but I could be there as soon as she came out of the recovery room.

And but then I got up to the ward and you know, nobody knew what I was talking about, you know, and I went to the ECT Suite and there wasn’t any way in. There was nobody there. I went to the ward and they said, Well that never happens, you can’t, you can’t do that. And that was a fairly kind of common theme, the whole kind of period of, of [name of wife] being ill, was, was my role as her partner. And just not really being taken into account very much, and you know, not getting much information , not being asked for my perspective, you know, not, not, how are you doing?’, but how do you think [name of wife] is doing?’

I was the person who was spending most of the time with her you know, and when she very first became ill, the Crisis Team came out to see her, and didn’t even say hello to me, just literally, just had nothing to do with me at all. Didn’t say, what do you think’s happening, what do you think the problem is? Nothing at all. And that just kind of kept happening.

And when they first mentioned it to me, again as when I’d seen that sign, I was really surprised, really quite shocked that it was something that was being considered and it was quite, I guess it was quite frightening because it just seemed so different. You know, I’d got used to medication, I’d even got used to the idea of hospital and everything else, but ECT just seemed really different.

But on the other hand by then, we knew nothing else was working. And I was very open to any suggestions. And also quite scared, because I knew that [name of wife] would react very strongly against the idea of, you know, shes been reacting very strongly against the very idea of being ill, so I knew that this would be really, something really extreme that she wouldn’t want to get involved in.

So the first thing that I did. As soon as it was mentioned was I went off and looked it up on the internet. And I was really, I was really aware that sort of looking on the internet is problematic because you’re never quite sure where you’re getting your information from and you can quite quickly get into people with kind of maybe agendas and fixed ideas.

But I came across some quite helpful stuff. There was one information sheet from the Royal College of Psychiatrists and one or two other things that seemed quite kind of level headed and quite kind of, you know, this is the evidence, these are the studies that have been done. This is, you know, this is what it is, for starters because I think I still had my kind of mental pictures from films. And actually to be told right, this is something that happens under general anaesthetic. This is the procedure, to how long it lasts, this is the after effects. That was really helpful. And then you know, the actual statistics about its effectiveness seemed really surprising. Do you what I mean. I can’t remember what it was, but it was something really significant, like oh I’m going to guess, but you know, like 60 or 70% of treatments are successful as opposed to 20 or 30% of medication courses.

And it was kind of puzzling that nobody really seemed to have a clear answer about the process by which ECT might be effective, but then also nobody seemed to have much idea of the way in which medications are effective. And, you know, like I said, by then I just thought, you know, well in a real mess, well try anything that isn’t actually dangerous. It’s got to be worth a go.

So we had this trip, I mean not far, we went 20 miles down the road and stayed in a cabin that some friends lent us for the weekend, and the build up to going was fraught and really tense and there were lots of arguments about how we were going to get there and when we were going to go, and what we were going to take and [name of wife] was getting very anxious and frustrated about it.

And then just really suddenly, it was really strange, I think the day before, the day before that last ECT treatment, she kind of suddenly relaxed about all the arrangements and we just settled on what we were doing and then we went, and the journey there was fine, and I remember waking up the next day, after we got there, and you know, the kids woke up really early. As I said the kids were three and five by then, and so we were on holiday and so they woke up really early and came to our bed and you know, [name of wife] was just laughing about stuff they were doing and I think they were tickling her, or she was tickling them and you know, she was just in a really, really good mood.

And they went and played outside and she got up and made a cup of tea and there was just something, it was like something had switched overnight. It was really incredible, really incredible. And and after that, I mean that was. I think it took me a couple of weeks to realise that that was only the very beginning of a very slow recovery and you know, kind of in the months after that, every few months would realise that [name of wife] was a bit better than she was, and I kept thinking that shed recovered and then realising that she was still recovering. And it probably it probably took a year and a half after that in total. But that, just that overnight away at that cabin something really clicked and, and again it’s really hard to measure whether, whether that was because of the ECT or whether, because the ECT had finished at some level, at some subconscious level she kind of had to decide theres nothing left, there aren’t any treatments left and this, you know, just have to get on with it.

And she said, I don’t remember this, but she said since that one of the consultants had talked about lithium and that she was so scared of the idea of lithium that she had to kind of make herself recover. So there might have been some of that going on.

But the way, judging by the way, during that first course of treatments that shed picked up, you know, kind of step-by-step, it’s really hard to think that it wasn’t connected with her recovery. And, I think, I think we both now think of ECT as being the thing that kick started her recovery, very much so.