The Joy of ECT, part 3

So we had lunch with our friend R, who suffers from drug-resistant clinical depression, and who recently returned from Emory University in Atlanta, where she received a month-long series of electro-convulsive therapy treatments (electroshock).

She's back.

The person that we knew, an intelligent, funny, charming, vivacious person, is back. There's no trace of depression, of crying, of staring into space, of an inability to stay on a conversational topic.

In fact, she's more focused, sharper than ever. She's really there, in a way that we had never seen. She used to hop from topic to topic in conversation, like a squirrel, and I never really could follow what she was saying. I just thought she was flighty. Instead, now I realize that it was a symptom of her ever-worsening mental state.

She's back, and so much better than she ever was.

I'm very glad.