Shockaholic

Shockaholic

It turns out that the Italians are the unsung heroes electroconvulsive therapy–wise. It is these brilliant wise guys who gave us ECT, or as it was formerly and less respectably known, SHOCK TREATMENT. Actually, it was really one Italian in particular, though I like to think of all Italians banding together and coming up with one of the finest alternative treatments for depression and mania.

The particular Italian who brought it to us (and when I say “us” I mean “me”) was a very thoughtful neurologist named Ugo Cerletti. Dr. Cerletti was a specialist in epilepsy and, as such, had done extensive experiments on the effects of repeated seizures over time in animals.

Well, we all know how crazy cats and dogs can get, and who among us hasn’t had to cope with our share of nutty pigs? I can’t count how many nights I’ve spent haunted by terrifying images of pet pigs in the throes of a seizure. Many of us are familiar with the expression, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Well, perhaps a lesser known saying (but certainly just as apt) is, “What’s good for the anesthetized pig prior to slaughter is also effective in treating a devastated human susceptible to suicide!”

Over time, Dr. Cerletti managed to convince several other bold colleagues with sufficient spare time to assist him in developing an apparatus able to deliver brief electric jolts—at first merely to the odd crestfallen cat but eventually to actual psychotic human beings.

It was in April of 1938 that Dr. Cerletti began delivering, on alternate days, to some of the more psychotic and suicidally depressed patients, between ten and twenty ECT shocks. And you’ll be happy to hear that the results were nothing short of miraculous. For example: 90 percent of the gang with everything from your wilted-garden-variety depression to hopeless catatonia showed everything from moderate to tremendous improvement! (The unhelped 10 percent were probably the agents of the improved 90.) And of course the other handy upside was that, for the most part, these patients wouldn’t remember much from right before to a few weeks after their treatment, so it was rare that patients complained about the experience.

Not that, in the beginning, there weren’t complaint-worthy aspects of the procedure. In the earliest days, the ECT seizures could be so violent your bones might break, especially those that were commonly referred to as the “long bones.” But it wasn’t long before doctors discovered a medication that could not only prevent the previously unavoidable convulsions but would also protect the longer bones of the formerly vulnerable arms and legs. Soon after, the administering of a short-term anesthesia ensured that the patients no longer even had to be conscious during those miraculously healing seizures.

Of course, ECT is rarely considered as treatment until all other valuable medications and talk therapies have failed. Then, and only then, do they suggest that you light up the dark and gloomy skies behind your forehead.

To say the least, this treatment has anything but good PR. You won’t be stunned to hear that “shock” turns out to be one of those words that is almost impossible to put a positive spin on, which I’m sure is why they’ve done all they could to phase it out of the current official term. (Not that “convulsive” sounds all that great, or even “electro,” for that matter.) I mean, come on, whenever you see ECT depicted in a movie it’s pretty much always a terrifying event, like pushing someone out a window or under a train. Now, I have long been someone whose TV is on twenty-four hours a day tuned to movie channels old and new—my television is a bit like complicated wallpaper, eager to entertain but all too frequently unable to oblige. So, given the relentlessness with which I’m exposed to both the classic films and the more current offerings, I think it’s safe to say I’ve seen pretty much all of the available mental hospital movie fare: everything from The Snake Pit to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, to Frances, and all the way up to Changeling.

Yes, even in the 2008 film Changeling, ECT was portrayed as the undisputed finest method available to both control and render mute the more problematically uncooperative patients in the ward. So, when doctors first proposed that I might find this treatment beneficial, there was absolutely no way on God’s less-and-less-green Earth that I was going to subject myself to its reputed horrors. I, like most others, thought you had to be completely insane to consider it, or have it considered for you, and up to then I guess I didn’t feel completely insane.

I mean, clearly no one would vote for volts until everything else had failed. It’s reserved for those languishing in the suicidal ideation lounge, and I had never been truly suicidal. Not that I haven’t, on occasion, thought it might be an improvement over the all-too-painful present if I could be deadish for maybe just a teeny little bit of it. You know, like a really good sleep, after which I’d wake refreshed and equal to whatever the problem had been, that problem would have now vanished.

In my first novel, Postcards from the Edge, my main character, Suzanne Vale, who many have pointed out bore an uncanny resemblance to me, was asked if her drug overdose had been a suicide attempt. Suzanne dismissed this notion as absurd, to which the doctor then pointed out, “Well, some might find your behavior very suicidal,” to which I—excuse me, Suzanne—responded, “Well, the behavior might be, but I’m certainly not.” You might even find that, with my particular combination of poor judgment and recklessness, it could be seen as being a very good impression of suicidal. It really does convince people, particularly doctor-types, and it’s almost impossible to unconvince them.

My emotional difficulties were exacerbated during the period following the death of my friend Greg Stevens, whose name almost never appeared in print without the identifying phrase “gay Republican political operative.” So why break tradition here? My gay republican political operative friend had only recently died, and try as I might, I couldn’t help but blame myself for not having saved him. I did this largely because he died sleeping next to me (though not, technically, with me—see “gay”) from a combination of OxyContin use and sleep apnea. But because it happened on my watch, I subsequently had a very difficult time putting it safely behind me. And, over time, I hope you won’t find it entirely preposterous that I came to believe that my house was haunted. Specifically, of course, by Greg’s gay Republican political operative ghost.

I’d heard that my home was the scene of a few spectral sightings prior to my having moved in. For example, the woman who’d lived there the longest, eight-time Academy Award–winning costume designer Edith Head, was said to roam the property on the weekends wearing a yellow nightgown. Why a woman so involved with the creation of a large number of cinema’s most memorable costumes worn in some of Hollywood’s treasured films, would choose to wear something so unadorned as a nightgown—and a yellow one at that—is beyond me. Maybe she was tired of fashion and chose to wear something she could nap in for a very bland eternity. Perhaps she wore a nightgown for haunting at night! That would be a practical solution, no? But whatever the reason, if Edith did happen to roam her once-beloved home, she never floated past me. Nor did I spot any visions of Bette Davis, who sold the property to Edith, or Robert Armstrong, King Kong’s captor in the original film, who built the house and sold it to Bette. No, my house was blissfully apparition-free until my gay Republican political operative (GRPO) friend Greg died in it.

Given my enormous sense of guilt, I suppose part of me wanted Greg to come back. In any form. And since corporeal was totally out of the question, ethereal would have to do. I didn’t actually feel his presence until about nine months after he’d died. It was close to Christmas, and I would open the front door to the house, stand on the threshold, and call out, “Hi, Greg!” Or, “Homo, I’m Hun!” Naturally, I avoided these salutations if I thought my daughter, Billie, was anywhere she might hear me. Not to mention anyone with some authority to have me committed.

At some point around this time, I was conferring with my book editor, and when I mentioned feeling Greg’s GRPO energy around the house she recommended I call the author of a book she was editing, who coincidentally also happened to be a psychic and who she felt might be able to shed some light on my recent darkish times. I did finally phone the woman, who told me that she felt that the reason Greg might still be around—and as I said, in my opinion, he was very around—was because he hadn’t realized yet that he was dead. He had been yanked from the world so suddenly that he didn’t know that he was no longer still in it. I told her that I felt that for quite some time now the air in the house seemed saddled with something more complicated than air. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that heaviness, either. A lot of people staying with me at the time had told me that they felt something, too. Okay, so maybe not all these people were safely on the sober side, but I’d spent a shitload of time in my life more than slightly shitfaced and not once was I ever troubled by spirits—alcoholic or otherwise. Over the next six months, this Greg-ish feeling diminished until one day I noticed it had gone away entirely. Perhaps he finally realized he wasn’t alive anymore.

But in my stressed state—oh, no! Unfortunately oh, yes!—I had begun using drugs again. And not just any drug. No, I had to start using the drug that Greg had so recently done to his premature death. I began snorting OxyContin.

Now, I am not a stupid person. I’m a fairly intelligent person who does stupid things. Incredibly stupid things. I can’t defend it. I can explain it until the end of time, but that still doesn’t make it in any way excusable, especially when you factor in the impact it had on my daughter (along with anyone else in my bonkers life who gave a shit about me). And I did it knowing full well how painful it was to have a parent who was unable to resist the impulse to resort to getting consistently altered. Altered and unavailable.

Back when Greg died, the first thing Billie said to her father was, “Now Mommy will be sad.” She didn’t express how having a dead friend of ours affected her directly. No, she immediately considered what his death would do to me, and perhaps secondarily how difficult, eventually over time, my grief and guilt would be for her. I tried really hard to make it not matter. Truly, I wanted so badly to be okay. Sure, yeah, for myself; but more than that for her. To protect her from the darker parts of me.

But I failed. It’s difficult to put into compelling words the sort of toll it took on us both. I tried—I swear, I tried—to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get on with my life. But (a) I don’t wear boots (so pulling up their straps was out) and (b) I found I simply couldn’t.

I tried to take a version of the AA wisdom to heart. “What others have done I can do.” I found myself watching documentaries of World War II veterans describing the horrors they’d barely survived, and their tragedies humbled and weirdly consoled me. My experience of Greg’s death, my blaming myself for his loss, or however you want to describe it, was a freckle on the esophagus of what these men had gone through. I figured that if these guys could get through that, then surely I could overcome my measly dark feelings. But, unfortunately, not without that detour through my dear old hunting grounds, dope. (And what a good word for it that is.)

At some other point during my intermittently self-destructive existence, I heard someone’s counselor say, “If it wasn’t for drugs and alcohol, a lot of us would’ve killed ourselves.” I thought about that as I ingested my Oxy, abusing this insight as a justification for needing to mute the large sound of Greg’s fallen tree. Of course, I should have gone to a grief counselor and/or to meetings—both of which I eventually did—but first I bungled through this not-so-shortcut.

No wonder I felt Greg’s ghost haunting me, right? I summoned the guy every time I took in the comfy poison that blurred him almost all away. So eventually—as it always, always does—it all caught up with me. Those around me began considering how and when best to intervene. Coincidentally, the moment they chose was the very day that I’d decided to turn myself quietly in to the authorities. But too late! Just as I was about to surrender to the psychopharmacologists, the addiction doctors, and the reliably saving grace of Twelve Steps, a few of my friends phoned Billie’s father and confirmed what he no doubt already suspected—that I was high, and as a result, my mothering skills were tragically very low.

Boy, was I beyond pissed at them! Newly sober and righteously indignant (which puts the “duh” in redundant), I began referring to my intervenors as the heavy meddlers. Why hadn’t they called me before calling Bryan?! Blah, blah, blah… all of which I’m beyond ashamed of now, and which eventually resulted in my sitting down and writing more than a few amends letters, belatedly assuring them I understood they’d acted in my—but more to the point, in Billie’s—best interest. They’d done what they did out of love for me and concern for my daughter. But oh, the months it took to get me to the letter-writing place! You know the one, a few miles beyond all that indignant self-righteous narcissism. The time it took for me to come to my recently and all-too-willingly abandoned senses was a period I wouldn’t return to for the world. And the whole wide one at that.

So, while I underwent that long demoralizing return trek to my version of normal, Billie went to live with her father, which was obviously the move that made the most sense, given that I was not only not any longer a person she could in almost any way rely on, but was also no longer anyone whose gestalt was anything predictable or reassuring. But simply because this was the most sensible solution under the circumstances didn’t do much to make my loss of her treasured company any easier to bear. For the first time in my life I really felt that I understood the word “heartbroken.” Which, of course, was made all the worse by knowing that I had brought all this breakage on myself. But she would remain safe and out of my potential harm’s way until I could turn my insensibly spinning life around.

Having betrayed Billie’s trust, I had to find my way back to being someone she could once again believe in. I had to try to recover whatever I could of what I’d previously heard referred to as a “maternal instinct.” I had to prove—not only to my daughter but to anyone else who had managed to maintain some sort of closeness to me other than proximity—that the management (that is, the diminishment and rearrangement) of my selfishly precious fucking feelings was not the sole or all-too-primary purpose of my misguided life.

I wish I could explain—and armed with that explanation, somehow excuse—the seemingly unending, ongoing, relentless, inordinately intense, pathetic fixation I have with my feelings. That wilderness lurking somewhere down south in my bi–solar plexus and, simultaneously, right there in back of my eyes, demanding my attention and eternally taking my emotional temperature. How do I feel? No, really how do I feel? How could I feel? Some other way, surely. By the end of this endless archeological self-examination, the observer part of your mind doesn’t know what it’s looking at anymore. Because being both archeologist and pit is, essentially… don’t make me say it… oh fuck. Okay… The pits.

As luck wouldn’t have it, all this coincided with the exact moment that I was scheduled to take my show on the road. And that is not a euphemism for anything. Wishful Drinking was actually booked into the Berkeley Repertory Theatre for a two-month run in early 2008. And the only thought going through my head, pretty much 24-7 then, was, “My daughter hates me.” Well, that and, “I’m hungry for fattening food.”

There I was getting up onstage every night, delighting people with my hilarious life story and sharing all this perspective and insight that I’d gained by circling the drain and such, and if people had known how I really felt, I’d have been nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress even though I wasn’t in a film or portraying a character other than my measly aging self. I don’t know how I got through it. Or maybe I didn’t get through it, but either way I was a mess.

Offstage, I couldn’t put things into words, and that was the one thing I’d always been able to rely on. Putting my feelings into words and praying they wouldn’t be able to get out again. It had always been my salvation. If I could get it into words, I could escape the slow quicksand of almost any bad feeling, but now I’d lost my ability to even do that. I was in pain squared, pain cubed, pain to the nth power. And this wasn’t the more noble sort of pain—this was that embarrassing pain of self-pity because I truly believed that Billie would never be able to forgive me. And so naturally I would never be able to forgive myself. She hated me, and I just knew she hated me, because she had every right to hate me. I hated me. Join the crowd! It was a trend!

I started seeing this child psychologist to help me help Billie through this, and one afternoon at the conclusion of our session, she studied me briefly and said something like, “You know, I hope you’re not considering some sort of self-harm or suicide, because that would be really bad for Billie.” So, see? She was helpful, because that would never have occurred to me.

By then, it won’t stun you to learn, I was truly ready to try anything. Someone could even have recommended a therapy where you just climb into a big vat of dyslexic snakes, or a therapy where they cover you with orange sherbet and drizzle maple syrup on you—anything! But, no, what they suggested was electroconvulsive therapy, and I must have said, Why not?

At that point I didn’t know anyone who’d ever undergone this treatment. Oh, sure I remembered hearing a woman talk about it in her clearly audible voice during her brief stay in a mental hospital back east. This pale, gaunt depressive told our little damaged group, “I was planning to kill myself, but then I thought, ‘Well, okay, I can always do that, I definitely have that option, but maybe first I’ll try this ECT thing. And then if that doesn’t work, then I can kill myself.’” It occurred to me that was its place in the pantheon of remedies—the last resort for those people whose only other options are the taste of a gun barrel, a long hard fall, a carful of carbon monoxide, an overdose, or a noose.

Happily, none of the stories I’d previously heard about ECT turned out to be true anymore. Spoiler alert: You’re given a short-acting anesthetic and a very effective anticonvulsant, you go to sleep for about ten minutes, and your big toe moves a bit, which is all that remains of the bone-snapping thrashing of old.

I’ve found that people are especially curious about how I was convinced to submit to a treatment I’d spent my entire life regarding as tantamount to torture. What was said that enabled me to finally agree to let them put their little nicotine-patch-looking things on either side of my head? And the answer is, I don’t remember. I don’t. I’ve found that the truly negative side effect of ECT is that it’s incredibly hungry and the only thing it has a taste for is memory. I can’t begin to tell you how many friends have asked me what it felt like waiting for that first shock, and all I could answer was, “You know what? I seriously can’t remember a fucking thing. For all I know, they could have dressed me in a ball gown, surrounded me with dancing dolphins, and married me off to Rush Limbaugh.”

But, after doing it a few dozen times, you gradually find yourself able to recall and even describe the experience. The nurses lay you gently down on a gurney. Then these attendants wheel you over next to a doctor standing in front of what essentially looks like a record player—something about the size of a small television. Then the doctor puts cute little sticky pieces of film that are attached to wires on each side of your forehead. And then, who should merrily materialize at your side but the trusty anesthesiologist, and as he starts the injection, he says something reassuring like, “Now dream a nice dream.”

So I attempt to oblige him and maybe fifteen minutes later, I wake and trade in my backless gown for my street (Rodeo Drive) clothes and take the elevator back to the underground parking lot, where I get in my car and lie down in the back seat, and someone who hasn’t just had significant amounts of electricity sent howling through his head drives me home, where I sleep for the next three or four hours.

And whereas before my brain had felt as though it was set in cement, leaving me… I don’t know… kind of stuck, the ECT blasted my Hoover Dam head wide open, moving the immoveable.

In the beginning, they did it three times a week for three weeks. Eventually we settled into once every six weeks—which is where we’ve set down roots and stayed. And, over time, this fucking thing punched the dark lights out of my depression. It did for me what drugs had done for me. It was like a mute button muffling the noise of my shrieking feelings. Your whole life you hear about this terrifying treatment that turns you into a vegetable, only to finally find out that it had all the charming qualities of no big deal. Sort of like getting your nails done, if your nails were in your cerebral cortex.

So here I am, on maintenance now, and for now, at least, here I intend to stay. I go in for a tune-up whenever I notice the onset of depression, which I frequently don’t recognize until it’s within earshot of too late. Sometimes a few weeks might pass until I say, “Oh, wait! Shit! I don’t think I’ve changed clothes in maybe five days.” Then I might start to feel like doing drugs would maybe be a sensible idea, and that right there is pretty much the clincher.

But did I tell you that this thing is a bitch on memory? Probably, but it might be worth repeating. I mean, let’s say, I read an e-mail—“That was a fantastic dinner the other night. Thank you so much”—and I have absolutely no clue who wrote it, what we ate, or where we ate it. Anybody I’d met during that first intense blast of silent shock is gone. Everybody. In a way, you don’t tend to forget old memories so much as you lose the ability to generate new ones.

What I’ve noticed recently is that ECT doesn’t remove entire chunks of memory so much as little bits of it. It’s sort of like, I don’t have too much trouble remembering events, but what I now lose are words, and sometimes they’re really basic ones, which can be pretty embarrassing, so I’m not really a big fan of that. And I’m not talking about obscure words here. These can be ones that you might really need a lot. You know, whereas before I might occasionally lose words that anybody might misplace—like “pastiche” or “schadenfreude” or “Luddite”—now I can even lose more practical words, and I lose them a lot. For example, “practical.” I can lose that word, and I’ll be fumbling, “Um, uh,” looking for it everywhere and I don’t even get close. So whoever I’m talking to might end up fumbling around with me, and chances are they’ll find the word a lot sooner than I will. And when they do, it turns out that I haven’t even gotten remotely near it. Sure, I know the feeling of the word and I might even be able to locate one with the same amount of letters or syllables, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to get near the fucker, because I’ve lost all the energy or enthusiasm for the hunt. It becomes not worth it. You know, how much rummaging around can you do to find this word you’re only going to use occasionally at best?

The bottom line is that my vocabulary has taken a real hit, leaving me perhaps not that eloquent anymore. Then again, plenty of people probably thought I sounded more pretentious than eloquent anyway, right? Like a carhop who swallowed a dictionary. So see? There might be an upside to all this, like maybe now I’m more plainspoken. Or maybe I just sound more plainspoken (but I break just like a little, absentminded girl).

But since I expect to have a bad memory now, I pay extra attention to things, as if there’s going to be a pop quiz about my life at the end of each day. What do I recall about what I did? So I try to make a point of remembering things while they’re happening.

Of course my memory loss could as easily be caused by my drug intake over the decades that began with my late teens, or by aging, as by the electroconvulsive therapy (or a combination of all three—or as I’m fond of saying, LSD, AGE, & ECT). What I do know, though, is that my memory is a lot worse since the treatments. But, hey, it could just be that I’m remembering this whole thing wrong.

Ultimately, though, who gives a shit why I can’t remember what I can’t remember when I feel so much better, right? I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been putting my purse in the refrigerator or anything. I mainly just forget people’s names, some of whom I’ve known most of my life. But this was something I was always capable of doing anyway, only now it’s worse. Hey, even if I can’t remember their names, I’m still mighty glad to see them! And if they appear to be in trouble I can always yell, “Hey! Look out!” And chances are, if they’re not deaf, they’ll move before that sinister clown stabs them or the piano falls on their head.

Another thing is that I find myself forgetting movies and books, some of which I only recently enjoyed, which, if you think about it, is really not that bad, because now I can be entertained by them all over again. And grudges? How can you hold on to something you don’t remember having to begin with! All of which has the potential to make me a nicer, kinder, far less affected human being. Someone more equipped to live in the present, now that the past seems to be otherwise engaged.

The prelude to all of this ECT business was to take pounds of medication, which aided me in my determined quest to gain tens of thousands of pounds of weight. So my medically induced mood improvement made me look fat and awful, which resulted in my getting depressed again. So who would you rather be with? Unplugged Carrie, fat and weeping torrents of medicated tears, or plugged-in Carrie, forgetful but fine-ish, and on the right side of plump? You choose. No, wait! It’s my life. I’ll choose. One could argue that, by having regular ECT treatments, I’m paying two—that’s right, two—electric bills. One for the house and one for the head.

Ultimately, I think what all of these jolts of electricity are doing is helping to blast me to the end of any unhappiness that is not situational. I mean, really, what other explanation is there? You have to figure that there’s a limit to pretty much everything. With the possible exception of certain beyond-belief reality shows, how long can something go on, right?