Personally, I choose to believe my clinician, an experienced psychiatrist, who said bluntly to me "You don't want that. ECT makes you stupid." Loss of cognitive abilities is something I (and many techies) can't afford to risk.
Personally, I choose to believe my clinician, an experienced psychiatrist, who said bluntly to me "You don't want that. ECT makes you stupid." Loss of cognitive abilities is something I (and many techies) can't afford to risk.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S106474811...
https://psychcentral.com/lib/research-findings-on-memory-and...
> "...We aimed to examine whether long-term effects of ECT on discrete memory systems could be detected in patients with B[ipolar]D[isorder]... Compared with healthy subjects, patients had verbal learning and memory deficits. Subjects who had received remote ECT had further impairment on a variety of learning and memory tests when compared with patients with no past ECT. This degree of impairment could not be accounted for by illness state at the time of assessment or by differential past illness burden between patient groups..."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1911194/
I don't think there's sufficient evidence on the long-term effects yet and a high incentive for clinicians to reach for ECT as something that works when nothing else will.