Ten Books on Electroconvulsive Therapy, Chosen by a Patient Who Wrote One

Ted Scheinman, author of the forthcoming memoir Jolt: My Electric Journey Out of Darkness, has assembled a reading list of ten books on electroconvulsive therapy — a treatment he underwent 23 times over several months and calls, along with music and true love, "one of the few real miracles I've experienced firsthand."

Scheinman's book, published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, describes voluntary ECT: short electrical shocks to the brain that induce a seizure, delivered under a "euphoric cocktail of anesthetics and muscle relaxants," after which, he writes, "you no longer wish to disappear from life." He credits Italy, where the method was innovated, with coining the verb zapare — to zap.

What does the list include?

Scheinman leads with Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, arguing Plath is misread as a cautionary tale. Plath — like her stand-in Esther — was saved by modified ECT under a doctor loosely based on Dr. Ruth Barnhouse. He quotes Esther's account: "darkness wiped me out like chalk on a blackboard… I felt surprisingly at peace." Biographies, he notes, judged Plath to have achieved long-term remission after her course of treatment.

The history on the list is Edward Shorter and David Healy's Shock Therapy, which covers insulin coma therapy, metrazol shock and the field's abuses and successes. The authors write: "ECT was the secret love of psychoanalysis."

Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance presents a harder case. Its narrator describes "Annihilation ECS" — a court-ordered personality destroyed by 28 shocks. But David Healy and Bruce G. Charlton observed in Medical Hypotheses in 2009 that biographer Mark Richardson documented the ECT episode as "a literary device" added late in drafting; Pirsig's real memory loss was short-term.

Donald Antrim's One Friday in April credits David Foster Wallace with persuading him to seek ECT. Antrim writes: "After ECT, the feeling in my body of immense weight went away." He calls stigma "society's unacknowledged violence toward the sick."

Therapist Martha Manning's Undercurrents offers the list's bluntest endorsement: "Nobody bats an eye when electricity is delivered to a stalled heart… I'd do it again in a heartbeat." She admits the downside — confusion and memory loss.

Neuroscientist Camilla Nord's The Balanced Brain counters the "brain damage" charge; Nord writes that "rather than brain death, ECT may be more likely to engender brain cell life." Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking and Shockaholic treat memory loss with humor — she learned "to live in the present, now that the past seems to be otherwise engaged." Charles Fernyhough's Pieces of Light reframed Scheinman's thinking about memory as "an artist as much as it is a scientist." A. Alvarez's 1971 The Savage God, though Kay Redfield Jamison called it "rather romantic," helped him understand the part of himself that craved release from life.

One early Jolt reader, on maintenance ECT, reported a doctor saying he couldn't believe the treatment was "still a thing" — and wanted to stuff the book into his hands. Whether the list can shift that skepticism at scale is the question the books themselves will now face.