ECT on the front page of our hometown paper

From the 9 July 2009 Worcester Telegram and Gazette: ECT debate: A danger, or effective therapy?
My experience with ECT (Electro-convulsive theraphy, colloquially known as shock treatments) has been positive. I believe that it broke the cycle of depression in a way that other treatments - medications or various forms of psychotherapy - could not. It's been more than a year and half ago since my last treatment. Since then, I've had some bad days, but nothing as severe as I'd experienced in the time before ECT.
Dr. Serge Botsaris, cited in this article, has been my doctor for several years. He and his staff have treated me with ECT.
I'm not going to get into the argument about the safety or efficacy of ECT for anyone else. Each person, in close consultation with doctors, family, and friends, needs to make that decision individually. In my experience, I believe that I received a great benefit and, if needed, I would have the procedure again.
Two notes on side effects:

• The major risk, in my opinion, comes not from ECT itself, but from general anesthesia. All but one of my ECT treatments took place at St. Vincent Hospital. The other one was at UMass. There they used a different anesthetic. My O2Sat levels fell into the 30s. (Anything below 90 is usually cause for alarm.) I recovered without any apparent long-term effects. Subsequent treatments were uneventful.
• I did experience one curious type of memory loss, what I call geographic memory. After the ECT treatments, places I'd known well before were unfamiliar on first visits. Downtown Worcester, for example, might have been downtown Biloxi. That condition has improved as I build up new memories of these places.
  There may be other memory problems that I can't identify, but many of those could also be attributed to the depression itself or increased mileage on the brain.

I should also make clear that ECT, as with any of the other therapies available, is not a cure for depression. It's a treatment that relieves symptoms and allows the patient to get on with life. There is, to my knowledge, no cure for depression, only relief from symptoms and periods of remission.

[In the case that the link to the original is unavailable, I've saved a PDF version of the story here.]