Shandra Mutchie has suffered from mental illness for more than a decade, but after undergoing an electrical stimulation procedure, she said life doesn’t seem so bleak anymore.

“I saw changes immediately,” said the 28 year-old Fruit Heights resident. “It was like waking up in Oz where you see color again.”

Mutchie is being treated with electroconvulsive therapy at Ogden Regional Medical Center. The treatment, formerly known as electroshock, has been refined and is much safer than in years past, said Dr. Trent Suggs, director of psychiatry at the hospital. Patients with severe major depression, bipolar disorder and those who are resistant to medication therapy are eligible.

The procedure briefly stimulates the brain with small electric currents, inducing a short seizure while the person is under general anesthesia, Suggs said. The patient is also given a paralytic agent so the body does not actually experience the seizure, but rather, the seizure occurs in the brain.

“There is a very specific machine that delivers a very precise amount of electrical current that induces the neural seizure in the patient’s brain,” Suggs said. “This machine can be dialed into different energy levels so the minimal amount of energy is required to induce the seizure.”

Research has shown the procedure increases levels of catecholamines in the brain, which are the building blocks for all of the neurotransmitters that work in the brain, such as serotonin, norepinephrine, epinephrine and dopamine, Suggs said. These chemicals play a major role in mental illness.

Side effects are minimal and can include headache, short-term memory loss and sometimes body aches after the first couple of treatments.

“The only real side effects I’ve had is short-term memory loss and memory recall, but they are coming back,” Mutchie said. “The morning after I had the first procedure, I woke up and actually wanted to get out of bed and do things. I wanted to be productive again and I didn’t want to take my life.”

Mutchie said she has been struggling with mental illness since high school when she began to experience anxiety and insomnia. By the time she got to college, depression had set in and she felt hopeless and had a hard time getting out of bed. Her doctor diagnosed her with bipolar disorder, but the medication she was taking for it wasn’t helping.

“I was being medicated heavily for bipolar and this went on for years and years. It wasn’t helping at all,” she said. “After I got married and got new insurance, I had to find a new doctor. I actually saw a physician’s assistant at the University of Utah and he told me he didn’t think I had bipolar, so we had to start over from the ground up.”

After diagnostic testing, Mutchie was told she definitely did not have bipolar. Instead, she was told she was on the autism spectrum and that’s where the sources of her anxiety, depression, insomnia, paranoia and hyperfixation were coming from.

“It put my whole life in perspective and I knew this was chemical and not all in my head,” she said.

But even with a correct diagnosis, therapy and medication, Mutchie still didn’t feel well. She ended up in the hospital twice for severe depression. That’s when she was told about electroconvulsive therapy.

“They told me at Ogden Regional that I had treatment resistant depression and they wanted to try ECT on me. They said I would be their first patient. I was willing to try anything at this point,” she said.

Mutchie saw such remarkable changes, she has continued with the therapy.

Suggs said the first round of therapy consists of three treatments per week for a month as a means to curb the depression symptoms and hopefully move toward remission of the depression. Then the patient is tapered to weekly, then biweekly and then monthly treatment until a steady state is reached.

“The goal of maintenance is to stretch out those treatments to a maximum duration between treatments but not allow depression symptoms to return,” Suggs said. “ECT certainly does not have to be a lifelong procedure. Typically after a few months of maintenance, the patient can stop, continue with meds and outpatient therapy and see if they can manage without the maintenance treatments.”

Suggs said research has shown that some patients may never need another treatment during their lifetime while others may need periodic treatments. A few patients may relapse and have to start the series over again.

“Remission rates vary depending on age, condition being treated and previous failures of medications,” Suggs said, “However, generally speaking, some studies have indicated that depression remission could be as high as 50% for people receiving ECT.”

Mutchie said she is happy she agreed to the procedure.

“It’s been amazing for me. It softened my margin of error with suicidal ideation and I’ve been able to stay busy. I don’t go from zero to 100 anymore,” she said. “The treatment has given me color back in my world and patience to keep trying. I no longer feel like life would be better if I were out of the equation.”

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