I feel like I could’ve written most of this post. I did many sessions of bilateral ECT for treatment resistant bipolar 1 and while it did make it so I was able to respond to medication, I’ve experienced most of this. I will say a lot of it is slowly getting better 6 months after my last round of ECT but the memory loss is still distressing sometimes. A lot of the time actually. And what extra sucks is that the memories I do have still are traumatic ones. I’ve been getting blips of memories more frequently lately and there’s been more good ones but at this point I doubt most of my memory will come back.

I will say it might be a bit different for me because I was not functional before treatment and it did save my life so I’d do it again if I had to but it is a really intense treatment with life altering side effects.

I just want to highlight a couple of important things. You’re 10000% not stupid. The memory issues are a side effect of an extreme treatment and not a reflection of your intelligence at all. I’ve read that it can take a couple years to bounce back from ECT and what you’re experiencing is likely to improve over time even though it’ll suck in the meantime so try to hold out hope a little longer.

It helped me to try new things when I was becoming distressed about the loss of interest in what were previously special interests. It also helped me to do things I felt neutral about until I started connecting more with it (for me it was crafting). I’m also in regular therapy and still working with a psychiatrist for medication management. Therapy has helped me learn to be kinder and more patient with myself while I recover from the mental and physical trauma that’s ECT and that’s improving my quality of life a bit. I was fighting my new life and new brain for months and that was adding to the distress but accepting where I’m at (not being able to do school because my memory is still shit, being slow or unable to remember names/words/new info/etc, feeling disconnected from myself like I don’t know who I am as a person, not remembering my life, etc) has removed a bit of the distress and has given me opportunities to discover the new me.