[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 23 September 2018.]
More information for those of you who are curious about electroconvulsive therapy.
First, the electricity is a bit of a red herring. Its only purpose is in inducing a seizure in the patient. I haven't found backing for this yet, but the doctor told me that way back before electricity, herbally induced convulsions were common folk treatments. Since it's easy to cause them with an electric shock, that's how we do it nowadays.
Most patients receive six to twelve administrations. Where I was treated, they did them three times a week, MWF. The actual procedure has been... misrepresented. They hook you up with an IV and an EKG+EEG, and they put you under general anesthesia via the IV. While you're out, they give you a muscle relaxant. This is so your body doesn't convulse, except for, I'm told, your fingers and feet. They then deliver a certain brief shock between two points on the skull; there are variants that stimulate only one or both lobes. This triggers the seizure, which lasts approximately a minute. When the sensors show that your seizure is over, they simply wheel you to recovery to come out of sleep. Easy peasy.
It is regarded as very safe. It doesn't interact with medications and it is given to pregnant women in all trimesters. Its only real side effect is amnesia and, in my case, a kind of vacant fogginess. I had a little bit of retrograde and a lot of anterograde amnesia. Yes, the amnesia was weird—it grew unnerving enough that I stopped taking the treatments after two weeks, six of them.
ECT is effective: helps for about three quarters of patients. I think it helped me somewhat for some time, especially before my SSRI had had enough time to kick in, and it probably would have helped more had I stuck with it longer.
In the first comment to this post, I've linked to a TED talk with more info.