How Editor Ted Scheinman Found Relief Through ECT

For Ted Scheinman, the roots of his lifelong battle with depression are etched into a specific childhood memory. At age three, during a fair in upstate New York, he accidentally dropped his new Batman toy into a sink, an event that triggered a sudden, overwhelming sense of despair and the thought, “I am going to die.” Now 41, the senior editor at Smithsonian magazine explores this “life as a depressive” in his new memoir, Jolt: My Electric Journey Out of Darkness, which documents his decades of mental distress and his eventual decision in 2020 to pursue electroconvulsive therapy. T ed Scheinman can date the origin of his depression with laser accuracy. He turned on the tap, to add sound effects and drama. There was a whoosh – and the unthinkable happened. Enlarging spot that for young Scheinman triggered several rapid thoughts, the last of them being: “I am going to die.”, water landed on Batman’s pristine boot in a darkening. During ECT, an electric current passes through the brain, triggering a brief seizure. Affected neurons fire simultaneously and repeatedly, triggering the release of neurohormones and neurotransmitters (such as dopamine), in those seconds. Of course, the reader knows where this memoir is leading – and maybe, somewhere in his head, that’s how Scheinman felt, too, from Jolt’s title on. “Sympathetic portraits of people with mental afflictions were very common in our household,” he says. “I think I heard about ECT very, very young. “It’s such a dramatic thing, right. The “jolt” – nothing like the arching back of cinematic portrayals, a mere twitch of his left big toe – remains “a black box”, but what happened between those moments.

By the time he was 35, Scheinman felt he had reached “a much darker place” than ever before, describing himself as “the lowest piece of dirt on the Earth.” He viewed ECT not merely as a last-ditch effort, but as his “only hope” for recovery. Despite the procedure’s cultural stigma, often reinforced by depictions in works like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Bell Jar, his primary fear was simply that the treatment would fail to provide any relief. Fittingly, on our video call, Scheinman sits before a row of bookcases, bookishness pervades Jolt and. They’re perhaps not the words many mothers would offer a child about to embark on ECT. “It might sound sort of clinical or heartless,” Scheinman says, “but it was the opposite.”. He says, “but the fear almost felt distant because I was pathetically hopeful”, having the electrodes attached to his temple was scary. You picture yourself convulsing more than you will, you go on this table. You get up after however many treatments and walk out a changed or restored person … I was attracted to the sheer apparent extremeness of this treatment.”, and if you’re lucky. In turn, implied a solution, perhaps the extremity implied an ending that. He felt “much better than I realised I could” – and the next year, better still, for about 18 months after the ECT ended.

Scheinman’s upbringing was steeped in literary and intellectual life.

His mother, a professor of 18th-century English literature at Colgate University, encouraged his academic curiosity and frequently discussed mental health with empathy. He remembers exclaiming “Oh boy!” and waking with a headache.

She even maintained a correspondence with author Alan Bennett, who famously characterized his own mother’s experience with ECT as a “miracle. In 2006’s Untold Stories, describes the effects of ECT on his own mother as “a miracle”, and she held a correspondence with Alan Bennett who.

Before Scheinman was admitted to the psychiatric ward at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington DC in 2021, his mother urged him to document the process, telling him, “This is great material,” a remark Scheinman views as a compassionate attempt to help him derive meaning from his suffering. What does Scheinman think she was trying to tell him? “If you could make meaning out of this … you would have power over it.

His first session took place on the morning of May 12, 2021. While attaching the electrodes felt daunting, Scheinman recalls being fueled by a desperate, intense need for change. During the subsequent five months, he underwent 11 unilateral treatments and 14 bilateral treatments. Though the experience was intense, his friends noted improvements in his disposition before he realized them himself. Over time, the debilitating grip of his depression began to loosen.

Reflecting on his journey, Scheinman maintains a precise, analytical perspective. He acknowledges that he remains a “major depressive” by clinical standards, yet he feels significantly less trapped by his condition. He has since unpacked his hospital “go-bag,” noting that he stands ready to undergo the treatment again if necessary. In the years following his recovery, he has taken up volunteer work through the National Alliance on Mental Illness and maintains a strict regimen of physical activity and music, which he views as a vital part of his therapeutic routine. He would want to become a playwright, scheinman had a vivid imagination; in a few years. Or at least, a sense of agency within the illness. In any case, Scheinman can recall lying on the hospital bed, the squeeze as the blood-pressure cuff tightened around his left ankle, the prick of the needle administering general anaesthetic, and the pervading sense of relaxation bordering on euphoria as he tried to count down from 100 in line with the anaesthetist’s instructions.

The memoir also delves into the complex dynamics of his family life. His parents separated while he was in college, and the book explores the differing roles they played in his development. His mother, who passed away last year, and his father, a doctor and medical researcher, both feature prominently in the narrative. Scheinman writes candidly about the dissonance of his childhood, where his intellectual maturity often far outpaced his emotional development, leaving him feeling marooned. After the novelist Austen. (His younger sister acquired the name a few years later, they were there in utero: his mother assumed he’d be a girl and planned to name him Jane.

Jolt is described as a “view from the other side of the tunnel,” blending his history with research and personal reflection. While he admits that his earlier replies about the writing process might have been glib, he notes that digging through years of medical records and journals was a profound, thorough process. Today, Scheinman says he feels his “sense of adventure is back” and he is committed to living as fully as possible.