On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering

ON THE SEA OF MEMORY Chapter One How I Lost My Memory Something must have happened on May 4, 1998, because from that day forward my entire life changed. Since I don't remember what occurred, a Spanish friend of mine, Isa, who was visiting from Madrid and staying at my apartment in New York City, recalled the following: "You came to Madrid in February 1998 and went several times to see a psychic who guided you in a kind of seance and put you in touch with your mother [who had died three years previously] in order to break the imprisoning bonds between you and her. I came with you each time to translate for you; and you cried and said good-bye to your mother, and you seemed much happier after this. "Three months later I visited you in New York, and one morning you woke up and said, 'Why are you here? Why are you here?' I didn't understand, because you had always been a very good friend to me. And then you started shaking uncontrollably. So I went out and bought you some Bach Flowers, but you didn't want to take them, and finally you called a doctor who told you to go to the hospital. "I went to visit you every day. They were giving you electroshock treatmentsI didn't even know they still gave shock treatmentswhich I was against, and I spoke to the doctors. But they said you needed the treatments. One day when I came to the hospital I noticed that almost overnight your hair had turned gray. Everything was very strange. But you looked as if you had so much light in you. It was as if your soul was very spiritual but it was your ego that wasn't. Your ego was depressed and maniacal, but your soul was full of light. Maybe the psychic in Madrid opened up something that was too much for you to take." Between 1998 and 1999 I was a patient in four New York City hospitals, suffering from major depression and suicidal thoughts. At the first two of these hospitals I underwent a course of thirty-six treatments of electroconvulsive therapy. ECT, or electroshock, entails sending an electrical current of about 200 voltsthough sometimes less or more than thatfor a fraction of a second by means of electrodes connected to a machine resembling a stereo receiver through the frontal lobes of the brain of a patient who has received general anesthesia and a muscle relaxant to prevent broken bones, cracked vertebrae, and physical spasms (the only perceivable movement during the treatment is usually the slight, involuntary twitching of the patient's toes); a face and nose mask to provide oxygen to the brain; and a rubber block to prevent biting off his or her tongue. The result is the creation of a grand mal epileptic seizure that lasts up to one minute. (Remarkably, it is still not known how or why ECT works or what the convulsion actually does to the brain.) In the popular imagination, the prototypical electroshock patient brings to mind Randle P. McMurphy (who thought of ECT as "a device that might be said to do the work of the sleeping pill, the electric chair, and the torture rack"), the antihero of Ken Kesey's 1962 novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, a book drawing on his experiences working in a psychiatric ward in an Oregon state mental hospital in the 1950s. Like McMurphy, ECT recipients at that time, as Sandra G. Boodman observes in The Washington Post, tended to be under forty, male, and impoverishedpatients confined to state mental hospitals, often against their will. But women, of course, were also sufferers of this then often misused procedure. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the internationally renowned writer Janet Frame, misdiagnosed without formal interviews or tests as a schizophrenic, underwent more than tCott, Jonathan is the author of 'On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering' with ISBN 9781400060580 and ISBN 1400060583.