'Mom blogger's' book describes journey back from 'death' — and new hope for treating depression by lisabelkin
Heather B. Armstrong did not literally die during an experimental treatment for her depression. Not even once, and certainly not 10 times, despite having written a memoir titled “The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live.” But during her suffering she had wished for death, and during the treatments, her brain wave pattern looked like death, and her recovery felt a lot like coming back from the dead.
“‘Our Lady of Perpetual Depression’ is currently the tagline on my website,” she said during an interview with Yahoo News in the sun-filled and comfortable Salt Lake City home she shares with her two daughters and her brand-new love. “Depression is absolutely a through line in my career.” In the fall of 2015, she agreed to serve as a guide to a visually impaired runner during the Boston Marathon the following spring. She was maintaining a strict gluten-free vegan diet at the time, and the relentless pace of training with what she now realizes was improper nutrition, plus the stress of single parenting, “put me in a hole I couldn’t get out of. I got worn out and down and just deeper and deeper and deeper into a depression.
She knew she needed help, she says, but feared that seeking it — potentially being hospitalized, certainly making it clear how fragile she was — would result in losing custody of her daughters. “I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize” having full custody, she says. “I was willing to live feeling sad as long as I had them in my care.”
There is an effective next treatment for these patients — electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, during which electric currents are passed through the brain while a patient is under general anesthesia, intentionally triggering a brief seizure. The resulting changes in brain chemistry are highly effective — a success rate of 75 percent — at reversing depressive symptoms.
Two decades ago, there were a few small studies using the anesthetic isoflourene, but those were stopped because the drug was found to dangerously decrease blood pressure, among other side effects. But propofol — when properly monitored by an anesthesiologist, which, Tadler stresses, was not the case for Michael Jackson — is considered a particularly safe and effective medication, and Tadler and a colleague, Brian J. Mickey, MD, hypothesized that it might be a better one for this purpose.
For her, it worked. She was the third patient in the trial, one of the six who responded well, one of the five who was still better six months later, and one of the three who remain depression-free today. It is dinnertime at the Armstrong-Ashdown household, and the shakshuka prepared by Pete Ashdown is delicious. He is a great cook, and she is no longer a vegan, and the two facts are not unrelated, as Armstrong and her girls moved in with the man she refers to on her blog as “Cowboy Hat” back in August.
Marlo and Leta are in their usual seats for what feels every bit the family dinner Between forkfuls of “special toast” , Leta mentions that she has nearly finished her mother’s book. “You are such a great writer. I love the way you tell stories,” going on to cite so many specifics that it’s clear she’s read carefully indeed. Armstrong stops eating and looks like she’s about to cry.
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