The art therapist said to draw an emotional biography of your illness. The nurses gave the patients only four colors of crayon. After some deliberation, I drew my girlfriend in blue, then used red and orange to make the fires in California. I sketched my sister, Jane, rocking an approximation of her baby, Theo—whom I’d never met—in her arms. All of the faces were coming out wrong: angry and put upon, as if to say, I cannot sanction what he’s doing with my likeness.
It was my third day in the psych ward, and I knew vaguely that my first electroconvulsive-therapy treatment was scheduled for the next day. But on the ward, the concept of time tended to blur. All I could say was that at some point, a nurse would affix electrodes to my temples and a doctor would begin inducing seizures. They’d keep zapping me until my agitated depression began to recede. And if those seizures didn’t work? I might have to get pretty comfy in art classes like this one.
If you spend enough time seriously depressed, you’re fundamentally aware of ECT buzzing in the distance. At least it’s not ECT, you say about this ineffectual drug or that ineffectual therapist. Or Well, there’s always ECT, when that drug or therapy doesn’t take. You probably don’t talk about it much, because it freaks people out. But privately, you know.
By May 2021, I’d spent a year descending into ever tighter spirals of despair. Somehow I’d held on at work, fooling the bosses that I was still a human being. But all the time, my best friends and girlfriend had hugged me and grown more and more afraid as I cycled through different SSRIs and SNRIs, then tricyclic and tetracyclic antidepressants, and then, on the advice of my distressed psychiatrist, through ecstatically high doses of medically supervised intravenous ketamine. Nothing worked for long. In my diary, I noted with horror that my desperation to get better was making room for an equally desperate wish: that some swift and painless event would release me from this slow and painful thing that other people called life. Thus I’d consented to the sterile safety of the ward, where I stood the least chance of hurting myself.
I was aware of the myths about ECT: It would cause brain damage, or at least sap the intellect; it was as much a punishment as a cure; it was the first step to a permanent tenure in the madhouse. All of this I knew to be nonsense. Yet I also understood that sustained treatment, especially of the most aggressive electroshock, can prevent the consolidation of short-term memory into long-term and, in some cases, can complicate memory going back months.
I was already familiar with the unpleasant disorientation of memory loss, because the past several years had constituted my deepest episode in a long career of depression—and depression, it turns out, is one of the most common causes of lost memory. I’d resolved to keep the electricity at bay as long as I could. But the drugs weren’t working. Nothing was working. So, I had come to accept the risk—in principle. I was open to bartering my way toward some kind of future by trading away a few memories. It seemed a reasonable exchange at the time.
In modern neuroscience, researchers typically divide long-term human memory into two categories: explicit and implicit. The former is subdivided into episodic memory, which is your recollection of personal events (that home run you hit in third grade; your first kiss), and semantic memory, which is general information about the world (what language people speak in Brazil; the year of the Battle of Hastings). Under the implicit category, we find procedural memory, which comprises ingrained skills and motor memory (how to play the piano or ride a bike). During depression, the most notable memory loss tends to be episodic: factual autobiography. That’s because your episodic memory depends on a well-functioning hippocampus—which is a luxury that depressives don’t always have.
In sustained periods of major depression, memory inhibition strikes in two ways: You form new memories less easily, and you lose some access to older memories. Neurologically, that makes sense. If your hippocampus is shrunken and lethargic, your ability to consolidate short-term memory into long-term memory diminishes precipitously. Psychologically and philosophically, it also makes sense. The monochrome dread that marks each day also blurs the days together; the depressive is prone to withdraw from social life, from a traditional clock, from a sense of time, from meaning. You might feel like the life you’re living is not your own; you might try not to pay it much attention. Small wonder that it’s hard to remember.
In many people, depression is marked by the certainty that the condition will continue, that you will always feel like this. If you’ve also lost faith in your memory, despair will recur, and imagining any kind of a future will become doubly difficult. When memory and depression are at war, depression creates its own feedback loop that works to shut out memory, along with sense and wisdom. If, for example, you could fully remember and inhabit a memory of when you were well, brought joy to someone you loved, performed a triumphant concert with your band, or hiked to the top of a mountain, then you’d know in your bones that depression is, among other things, a lie. You’d know that you are not the lowest of creatures but, rather, a creature brought temporarily low, that some retrievable version of you is capable of meeting the comedy and tragedy of life in measure.
Nearly a year before I stumbled into the ward, I was already noting a disarray in my ability to retain moments. These lapses began in small ways. Some days I would start composing an email to a colleague, then review my sent messages and find that I’d already conveyed the pertinent info that morning. Slowly, other things became harder to remember: when and with which band I’d played a concert at such and such a bar, or when I’d most recently seen my mother. Forgetfulness of this kind isn’t merely inconvenient. Quickly, it becomes existential. Even in the earliest stages, my memory loss meddled with my illusion of a stable self. Selfhood is, after all, largely a function of memory—a serialized story about who you are, based on who you’ve been and what you’ve done.
[Read: My life depends on playing chess 40 times a day]
In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his 2008 memoir about the approach of death, Julian Barnes wrote, “Memory is identity. I have believed this since—oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life, you cease to be, even before your death.”
In his glib way, Barnes captured a sentiment that most people broadly share: We’re walking résumés, sentient histories who constitute our sense of self based on versions of what we’ve been. When you’re cognitively compromised from disease or age or drugs or something else, people start to talk about you as though your very being has vanished. He’s not himself. That’s just the disease talking. We pronounce these words with the implication that a loved one’s true being is one unblemished by any bits of embarrassing neurodegeneration. This is also how the hypochondriac or depressive or amnesiac sees things. Amnesiacs use a lot of verbs to describe what has happened to their memory, and one of the most common, I’ve found, is obliterated. It’s a telling choice. To be obliterated is to be erased, removed from any experience describable in letters. How, then, do we rewrite ourselves?
My time On the ward was short—just six days—but my course of ECT was long. I initially received nine treatments of the unilateral variety, with electrodes placed on my right temple. But my friends and family didn’t notice any improvement until I began thrice-weekly bilateral treatments. Bilateral can be more effective for some patients but is also more liable to complicate memory. When the bilateral treatments started to work, my friends saw it before I did—maybe because the only thing I noticed, for a while, was a deepening alienation from a full recollection of my self.
Before long, though, I could talk with my sister on the phone in complete sentences, sometimes even long ones. My appetite began to reawaken. I could cook, after a fashion. I could sit at the piano and make it through a whole Ray Charles song. Yet the clearer my mind became, the more acutely I perceived the gaps.
It’s particularly strange to encounter the absence of memory while you’re recovering your wits. “Looking at old pieces I wrote,” I noted in a fragmented journal entry, “I feel like an alien. I don’t know the guy who did any of this.” A psychiatrist told me I should fill these weeks of recovery with all of the things that I loved. “But I don’t love any of the old things,” I wrote.
I’d always been pleased with my memory and considered it one of my main virtues. In the past, I’d been known as a steel trap or, as one ex-girlfriend put it, an “archivist,” often the first to remember a line of conversation or what stage the moon had been in during a night on the beach four summers ago. Now I had trouble remembering which beach I had gone to under said full moon. And when I pictured the woman I’d been with, I worried I was thinking of the wrong person. Who was I, really, without my memory parlor tricks? A troubled friend observed: “It’s like seeing an athlete you admire who all of a sudden can’t walk.”
The good news was that, as bilateral treatments continued, my mood kept getting better. My personality, for good or ill, began to return. But certain memories did not. So I called Harold Sackeim, one of the greatest living authorities on ECT, to see whether he could tell me something about ECT, about myself; I wanted to pick his brain because I was scared and tired of picking my own. One of the things that has long intrigued him about the treatment, he told me, is that “it’s a laboratory for learning and memory.” Although some ECT researchers have described the memory effects as minimal or even nonexistent, Sackeim was up-front about them. Even decades ago, he said, he was warning patients that ECT can have permanent consequences. He was quick to add that these tend to be worth it: “I’ve never seen a patient with catatonia that didn’t get better.”
Sackeim also stressed the neural benefits that can come with the treatment. “Tons of cognitive functions improve dramatically with ECT. Basically, when you’re depressed, it’s really hard to learn new things,” he said. “You’re so distracted by the things you’re either worrying about, or you’re agitated, pacing. And so you take in very little information about the world.”
Finally, I asked him whether I should expect memories to return. He was admirably direct—didn’t hem or haw like most other doctors I’d asked. “What I tell people is that if some things don’t come back at six months, they’re never coming back.”
With each day, I recognized new gaps: profound (when my girlfriend and I had first exchanged I love you), frivolous (what I’d done the previous New Year’s Eve), and logistical (which of my mother’s knees had most recently undergone surgery). Right before my first ECT, I’d finished reading War and Peace, and six weeks later, all I could recall of the book was that Pierre was a gentle soul, and that moneyed Russians during the Napoleonic era ate lots of tasty French food.
Even older memories seemed to be affected, some going as far back as 12 months. Of course, I knew basic facts about myself. But that’s very different from having direct access to your full memory—different, too, from identifying with your past, or with the illusion that any of it belonged to you.
The doctors say that procedural memory isn’t affected in the same way as episodic memory. For example, ECT can rob you of a month of your life, but it’s essentially impossible that it will rob you of your ability to ride a bike. So I became greedy for procedural memory. Like a hoarder, I collected and cached away new skills to tether me to something firm.
Lifting weights, I worked to rediscover what trainers refer to as the “mind-muscle connection,” and I kept putting on more muscle, a shield against future illness and general decrepitude. (In my deepest depression, I could hardly walk. A single kettlebell throw would’ve been as unimaginable as an ultramarathon.) But most of my caching took the form of accomplishments—slide guitar, jazz piano, anything with a learning curve. I taught myself to conjure the iridescent beauty of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and the strutting octaves of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Once I trusted myself in public, I even began to play live music again, occasionally manning the keyboards in a friend’s country band. If my memory should encounter any future shock, I hoped, maybe this ever richer library of tricks could help bring me back.
I also returned to the English and Latin texts that used to make me laugh in college and grad school. Rereading Fitzgerald, then Dickens, then Horace, then the always-hilarious Petronius, I began to remember all of the people I’d been when I first encountered these books. A further small but important bit of myself returned when I marshaled some of this reading into a long essay, about Petronius’s unlikely lessons for staying sane in a mad world. In the essay, I made my first public admission of having had ECT. Friends and strangers began to email me, and the emails read like whispers: “My mother got electroshock, but never wanted to admit it to anyone.” “My sister is beginning ECT. Is it ok if she emails you?”
As I read the warm responses to the essay, I felt a noticeable lightening, a reprieve, as if I’d been exonerated from a murder charge: The alleged victim has walked into the courtroom, head held high, reciting Petronius. I was a new man, but I was the same ridiculous figure I’d always been. I was, in a sense, free.
[From the September 2026 issue: What if Freud was right?]
My dad, who sympathized with my memory challenges, recommended a book by the British psychologist Charles Fernyhough. It’s called Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts, and if you happen to have a memory disorder, reading Fernyhough is invigorating. As a scholar and humanist, he shows a deep understanding of amnesiacs, who “are caught between two identities, without the ability really to inhabit either.” He says we can look for hope in the associative nature of memory. Each memory exists as a network, drawing from various parts of the brain to constitute and reconstitute itself. In depression, those networks begin to fray. But just as associative memories thrive when activated internally, they can be stirred by external stimulation—“in collaboration” with others.
Memory, Fernyhough observes, is “a social process.” Talking with my friend Brian brings up all sorts of little things I never would’ve expected: the time I met his daughter in our friend Aaron’s backyard, and the mischievous way she kept trying to pull the hood off my jacket. Talking with my friend Lucia takes me back to old, sad afternoons with her, in the garden outside my apartment, and how one songbird sounded so indignant. “Memory is not just about remembering the past or predicting the future,” Fernyhough writes. “It is also a way of being with other people. If you lose memory, you lose that opportunity to connect.”
I now think of a compromised memory as a static page and a healthy memory as one with hyperlinks, richly connecting the full index of one’s past with the present through invisible threads of logic and fellowship. Socializing is the shortest path to remembering and the surest way to reestablish your sane, functional self. Sackeim once mentioned to me that depressives with strong kinship circles are much less likely to relapse or harm themselves than more isolated patients. Recovering your ability to joke, to act, to help is the single greatest thing you can do to restore personality and memory and joy.
Perhaps the most important new memory is the one I created a week after my last maintenance ECT. I drove to visit my sister in Boston and met my nephew, Theo, in person for the first time. On Jane’s couch, this jowly 10-month-old and I sat face-to-face and inspected each other. Theo didn’t have any of the forbidding aspect he’d worn in my crayon drawing from the ward. After surveying me gravely, he reached out his hand with deliberate assurance and tried to remove my nose. Jane wept. There had been a time when she thought I’d never get to meet him.
This article was adapted from Ted Scheinman’s new book, Jolt: My Electric Journey Out of Darkness.