JOLT

A journalist reflects on his experience of electroconvulsive therapy, and the debilitating depression that led him to it.

Scheinman opens this memoir in a Washington, D.C., psych ward—at age 35, the night before his first round of ECT (also, often derogatorily, known as “electroshock” therapy)—as he sketches at the behest of therapists “an emotional biography” of his illness with the four colors of crayon doled out by the nurses. From the hospital, the narrative loops back to Hamilton, New York, where he grew up the son of two academics, with a childhood that on the surface looked like a “bucolic idyll” but was, in fact, much more fraught. His parents’ marriage frayed and ended after his father’s affair, and Scheinman, treated like a “little adult,” felt responsible for his parents’ and younger sister’s emotional well-being, seeing a therapist from an early age. At Hotchkiss and then Yale, ambition and depression run in tandem; formative encounters with Margaret Holloway, the schizophrenic, homeless Yale Drama School alum known as the “Shakespeare Lady,” teach him a lesson he returns to throughout the book: “You’re either inside the [normal] castle or outside.” After Yale comes graduate school, a study of Jane Austen fandom, and a magazine career (Pacific Standard, Smithsonian) accompanied by accumulating instability and mental-health battles in his 20s and 30s. The depressive spiral that brings him to the psych ward in 2021 is rendered with precision; particularly frightening for the author is the prospect of losing his memory, a known side effect of ECT. Scheinman turns unglamorous episodes of his life (endless weeping, periods of near catatonia) into vivid, often funny prose, and he is an extremely likeable guide into the exclusive realm of those facing the most profound psychiatric challenges.

Witty, candid, and an important contribution to our collective understanding of a controversial therapy.