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In the tradition of Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire and William Styron’s Darkness Visible, an evocatively written memoir of riding the depression roller coaster, choosing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and regaining equilibrium, with fascinating side-journeys into the nature of identity and memory—by the celebrated Smithsonian editor, memoirist, and essayist.
Sitting in a circle on the seventh floor at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC, Ted Scheinman, thirty-five years old, remembered why he was there. His lifelong battle with depression, beginning at age eight, had returned more punishingly than ever—and he was running out of options. After enduring a range of increasingly colorful therapies, including nearly every SSRI and SSNI on the market and two months of ketamine infusions, he’d checked himself into a psychiatric ward to undergo an aggressive course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—better known as “shock treatment.” ECT was his desperate last resort. Miraculously, it worked.
But it did exact a price: Ted was now missing episodes of his memory going back a year or more. Even after that first zap, as he recovered back in the ward, he could recollect little immediately preceding that morning’s treatment. He couldn’t remember the names of the patients with whom he was now playing slapjack, or the phone call last night to his mom, or even what his last meal had been.
In Jolt, Ted’s riveting account of his descent into—and emergence from—major depression, and his accompanying memory loss, opens an utterly original window into the surprising connections between memory, identity, and mental illness. Jolt asks: How much can any of us trust our memories, and how can we adapt when memories fail? How do our memories form who we are, for good and ill? What happens when we forget too much—or too little?
Lyrical and rigorous, intimate and universal, Jolt is about depression, memory, and how we reconstitute ourselves following identity-obliterating hardships. Most of all, it’s about what we’re willing to sacrifice to have a chance at life.
