‘I was in a darker place than I’d ever been. ECT was my only hope’: how Ted Scheinman finally broke through his depression

Ted Scheinman can date the origin of his depression with laser accuracy. It was the day he went to the fair, aged three, and returned to his home in upstate New York clutching a Batman toy that he’d won. In the bathroom, he swooped his new doll over the sink. Scheinman had a vivid imagination; in a few years, he would want to become a playwright. To add sound effects and drama, he turned on the tap. There was a whoosh – and the unthinkable happened. Water landed on Batman’s pristine boot in a darkening, enlarging spot that for young Scheinman triggered several rapid thoughts, the last of them being: “I am going to die.”Scheinman in Hamilton, NY, in 1988. Photograph: Courtesy of Ted ScheinmanNow 41, Scheinman, a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine, has written a memoir of his “life as a depressive”. Jolt: My Electric Journey Out of Darkness charts his path from toddlerhood to the point in 2020, at the age of 35, when he referred himself for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). By then, he was in “a much darker place” than he had ever been – and regarded himself as “the lowest piece of dirt on the Earth”. The treatment was “not so much a last resort … as my only hope”, he says.Jolt is really “a view from the other side of the tunnel”; a travelogue – which somehow manages to be amusing – of the journey towards an experience that for many remains taboo. During ECT, an electric current passes through the brain, triggering a brief seizure. In those seconds, affected neurons fire simultaneously and repeatedly, triggering the release of neurohormones and neurotransmitters (such as dopamine). Despite the treatment being steeped in horror – as in artistic depictions such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Bell Jar – Scheinman’s main worry was that “it wouldn’t do shit for me”.Literary references are never far from view in Jolt – or in Scheinman’s life, for that matter. They were there in utero: his mother assumed he’d be a girl and planned to name him Jane, after the novelist Austen. (His younger sister acquired the name a few years later.) Bookishness pervades Jolt and, fittingly, on our video call, Scheinman sits before a row of bookcases.“Write this down!” his mother kept saying before he was admitted to the psychiatric ward of Sibley memorial hospital in Washington DC in 2021. “This is great material.” 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.”His mother, who died last year, was a professor of English at Colgate university in New York, specialising in 18th-century English literature. (His father was a doctor and medical researcher.) What does Scheinman think she was trying to tell him? “If you could make meaning out of this … you would have power over it. Or at least, a sense of agency within the illness. She knew who I was,” he says.Comedic and disturbing … Jolt. Photograph: Alyssa Schukar/The GuardianFrom Jolt’s title on, of course, the reader knows where this memoir is leading – and maybe, somewhere in his head, that’s how Scheinman felt, too.“Sympathetic portraits of people with mental afflictions were very common in our household,” he says. “I think I heard about ECT very, very young.” Some of his mother’s friends had benefited from the treatment. And she held a correspondence with Alan Bennett who, in 2006’s Untold Stories, describes the effects of ECT on his own mother as “a miracle”.At dawn on 12 May 2021, Scheinman was taken for his first treatment. Having the electrodes attached to his temple was scary, he says, “but the fear almost felt distant because I was pathetically hopeful”. Actually, more than hopeful: “I felt this intense sense of need.” Because if it didn’t work, what then?“It’s such a dramatic thing, right? You go on this table, you picture yourself convulsing more than you will. And if you’re lucky, 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.”Perhaps the extremity implied an ending that, in turn, implied a solution. 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. He remembers exclaiming “Oh boy!” and waking with a headache. But what happened between those moments, the “jolt” – nothing like the arching back of cinematic portrayals, a mere twitch of his left big toe – remains “a black box”.Steeped in horror … an ECT machine from the early 1980s, at the Glore Psychiatric Museum in Missouri. Photograph: Michael Siluk/AlamyWhat he does know is that at some point over the five months of mostly outpatient treatments – 11 unilateral, 14 bilateral (meaning that electrodes were applied to both temples) – his illness began to improve. His friends, driving him to and from the appointments, noticed before he did. For about 18 months after the ECT ended, he felt “much better than I realised I could” – and the next year, better still. Now, five years on, “I feel more myself than I have felt in years. Most of my days pass without depression.”Scheinman qualifies this: “I mean, I do still consider myself a depressive.” His fondness for verbal precision makes him prone to self-correction. “According to my history, by the diagnostic and statistical manual, I am a major depressive.” Prior to the ECT, he was diagnosed with agitated depression with bipolar characteristics. “But the further and further I get from the worst of 2020 and 2021, the happier I get, the more settled.” In May, he got married (to Tara Ganapathy, an attorney specialising in congressional investigations).In a funny way, Jolt reads like a coming-of-age story with a zany timeline. Scheinman was such a precocious intellect that he seems to reach graduate-level discourse by age six, then spends years waiting for his body, wardrobe and emotions to catch up. “I felt marooned between being a tiny adult gentleman and the big feelings of a child,” he says. The book is full of descriptions of young Scheinman dressed in his grandfather’s hand-me-downs, old before his time. Today, although he’s wearing a Patagonia fleece, his assertion that he has gone “full hippy” itself sounds a bit tweedy.Some of Jolt’s most comedic – and disturbing – moments come from the dissonance between his biological age and his mother’s parenting of him. When, for instance, Scheinman enters a germophobe phase at elementary school, she warns him: “You’ll have a very disappointing sex life if you go on like this.” Another time, she soothes his tears with the words: “A lot of sensitive and creative people have a period of depression.” To which six-year-old Scheinman protests in anguish: “But that’s such a cliche!” He was thinking of consumptive Romantic poets, he says, which surely alienates him from many first-graders. Does he feel any regret at not having been a more childlike child?Precocious … Scheinman with his younger sister, Jane, in 1992. Photograph: Courtesy of Ted Scheinman“I think that would have been really nice. I probably would have had a little bit of a smoother go of it,” he says. “If and when I raise a child of my own, I’m really going to try to give them a properly delineated childhood. I’m going to be very careful about not even hinting that there’s an expectation or possibility of being too precocious.”“Delineated” is a telling choice of adjective given how the boundaries between Scheinman and his mother vanish as the memoir goes on and his parents’ marriage declines. They separated while Scheinman was at college, at which point his mother’s phone calls intensified. “Often, it seemed she didn’t wish to listen so much as talk and be confirmed in her martyrdom. So I confirmed it,” Scheinman writes.His father is the book’s more classic villain: he had an affair, but beyond that, his blithe optimism appears to grate on mother and son. Scheinman professes much less tolerance of his father’s shortcomings than his mother’s overcomings, and in Jolt’s most moving scene, he shares a heartfelt, peacemaking boat ride with his father. He gets “goosebumps” just talking about it.“I kept doing gradations of forgiveness and acceptance with my father,” he says. “We were never estranged. But that’s very different from having a true, frank, uncluttered relationship.” His father has read Jolt four times and is, says Scheinman, “a big fan”.Alongside his depression, the book shows Scheinman to be not only functional, but successful. He gets his growth spurt, excels academically, wins parts in plays, has friends, girlfriends, a place at Yale (to study English and classics), does a PhD and becomes an academic before pivoting to journalism. He wrote his first book, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, in his early 30s (his mum called it “a Mom-oir”).“I think that overachieving is probably bound up with my particular flavour, or flavours, of mental disorder, which is trying desperately to do all the right things or just anything that could get you internal forgiveness or internal peace. Or to get some laurels and be like: ‘Well, now I can rest on these,’” he says. The book shifts between these drivers with a perennially unquieted self-questioning that feels both exhaustingly dramatic and quotidian.Scheinman tried many treatments before arriving at ECT. He had his first talking therapy at the age of eight – his father’s suggestion – and further courses followed over the decades. There were drugs too, recreational and prescription. He self-administered alcohol, ran cross-country. And although ECT was “a last resort”, he now wonders if it’s necessary “to wait quite as long for people who are really in straits”.No one knows exactly how the treatment works – whether the shock or its aftermath causes the “reset” effect. In 2023, the Royal College of Psychiatrists reported that of 1,835 patients to have received ECT in the preceding 12 months, 68% were found to be “much improved” or “very much improved”. According to the American Psychiatric Association, 70-80% of patients experience substantial improvement after ECT.‘I stand ready to go back under the electrodes if I have to.’ Photograph: Alyssa Schukar/The GuardianHowever, the treatment can cause memory loss. Scheinman struggles to access stretches of memories during the ECT course, “as well as significant stretches of the six months leading up to those treatments” – gaps that must present a challenge to a person’s sense of continuous selfhood. So does he feel his treatment restored or changed him?“I think restored is probably closer to the mark,” he says. Later, he emails to say that his reply may have been “overly glib”, and that the process of writing the book, which entailed many hours of interviews with friends and relatives, as well as scouring medical records and diaries dating back to when he was five, “ended up helping profoundly”.“I’m still myself!” he writes. “I just feel less trapped by myself.”About a year ago, he unpacked his hospital “go-bag”. “I stand ready to go back under the electrodes if I have to, and I’ll do it quicker this time,” he says. “Without engaging in any horrible recovery cliches” – I can’t help thinking of his harrowed six-year-old self, when he says cliche – “I’m keenly aware, especially because I now have a wife whose life I don’t want to make difficult or unhappy, that I might need ECT again. I don’t try to evangelise for it in any way, but one of the things that surprise people is that I wish I’d gotten it sooner. I really think I would have lost fewer memories.”He has informally coached a few people who are considering ECT, and is in the process of volunteering through the National Alliance on Mental Illness “as a person who can be contacted”. In the meantime, he has belatedly begun meditation. He stays active with what he calls “a reasonably strict regimen of exertion and movement” and plays music “as though it is a prescription”.“I try to live very, very fully,” he says. “I feel like my sense of adventure is back.” Jolt: Depression, Memory and My Electric Journey Out of Darkness by Ted Scheinman is published by Wildfire (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.