ECT with Kat
The Peripheral
Justin Evans
4.8 • 813 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2026
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Peripheral, host Justin sits down with Kat, who shares her deeply personal journey through treatment-resistant depression and her experience with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
Kat opens up about reaching a point where nothing else worked, leading her to ECT as a last-resort option. What followed was profound relief from her depression—but at a steep cost: extensive memory loss resembling amnesia, gaps in her personal history, and the challenge of piecing her life back together.
She candidly discusses:
The decision to pursue ECT and what the treatments were like
The devastating impact of memory erasure and retrograde/anterograde amnesia
Her long road to recovery, relearning her own life, and personal growth
Why she would never choose ECT again for herself
Her balanced perspective: not wanting to discourage others, as ECT can be life-saving for some people when other treatments fail
This episode explores the complexities of mental health treatments, the real human cost of side effects, and themes of resilience, acceptance, and moving forward after profound loss.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the peripheral. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about |
| 0:06.0 | electroconvulsive therapy, and it's commonly referred to as ECT. I speak with Kat. She opens up |
| 0:15.0 | about reaching a point where nothing else worked with her depression and ECT was used as a last resort. |
| 0:26.1 | What follows is a profound relief from depression, but at a steep cost. |
| 0:34.1 | She suffers from extensive memory loss, gaps in her personal history, and the challenge of piecing her life back together. |
| 0:44.9 | I want you to introduce yourself and just a quick summary on what we're going to be talking about today, Kat. |
| 0:51.4 | Yeah. I'm Kat and we're going to be talking about electroconvulsive therapy today. |
| 0:59.4 | That's quite a name, electroconvulsive therapy. |
| 1:03.8 | It is. |
| 1:04.9 | And I think from my generation, they used to call it electroshock therapy. |
| 1:11.8 | Is that? |
| 1:12.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:13.1 | I've heard a lot of people still call it that. |
| 1:15.9 | Yeah. |
| 1:16.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:17.6 | Is there much difference between the old way and the new way, or is it just a name change? |
| 1:22.9 | It's a name change. |
| 1:24.4 | I mean, they literally do shock your brain. |
| 1:26.9 | Okay. |
| 1:30.3 | All right. But I think electroconvulsive therapy is, you know, it's the medical way of saying it. It's like the proper way of saying it. |
| 1:37.8 | Yeah. We'll call it that from here on out. Yeah. And I can also shorten it to ECT from here on out. Sounds good. All right. Yeah. |
| 1:47.8 | So how do you know about ECT? It's been such a fun journey. I have, I did ECT as treatment for treatment resistant depression. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Justin Evans, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Justin Evans and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.