'ECT was my only hope': journalist Ted Scheinman on breaking depression

At the age of 35, in 2020, Ted Scheinman referred himself for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). He was, he says, in "a much darker place" than he had ever been and regarded himself as "the lowest piece of dirt on the Earth". The treatment, he adds, was "not so much a last resort … as my only hope".

Scheinman, now 41, is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine. He has written a memoir of his "life as a depressive", Jolt: My Electric Journey Out of Darkness, published by Simon & Schuster. The book charts his path from toddlerhood to the point in 2020 when he chose the treatment that would, he says, finally break through his depression.

How far back does the story go?

Further than most. Scheinman can date the origin of his depression, in his own account, with laser accuracy. He was three years old. He had been to a fair near his home in upstate New York and returned clutching a Batman toy he had won. In the bathroom, he swooped the doll over the sink, adding sound effects and drama by turning on the tap. He was a child with a vivid imagination; within a few years he would want to become a playwright.

Then the unthinkable happened. Water landed on Batman's boot in a darkening, enlarging spot. For the young Scheinman, the sight triggered several rapid thoughts, the last of which was: "I am going to die."

That episode, as he tells it, opened a troubled childhood that stretched into adulthood. By 35, neither therapy nor medication seemed to help — the standard interventions had, on his account, failed him across three decades of illness.

What does the memoir change?

For readers, Jolt joins a small shelf of first-person accounts of ECT, a treatment that remains contested in public perception even as clinicians continue to use it for severe, drug-resistant depression. Scheinman's position is unambiguous: by 2020, he saw the treatment not as a last resort but as his only remaining option.

What the previewed material does not say is how the treatment went, what it involved, or what came after — the full account sits behind the Guardian's paywall and in the book itself. The publisher's page for Jolt (ISBN 9781668075593) carries the complete narrative.

What the excerpt does establish is the arc: a depression with a traceable beginning at age three, three decades of failed remedies, and a self-referral for ECT at 35 that the author credits with getting him out of what he calls darkness. The memoir, published by Simon & Schuster, is the record of that journey — and, by Scheinman's telling, the proof that a way out existed.

Whether the wider debate over ECT shifts in its wake is a question the book's reception will answer.