This episode deals with mental illness, depression, and suicide.

Please listen with care.

Previously on the deep end.

And DBS is not going to give you happiness.

It's not going to just be a device that turns on happiness 24-7. It's to get you out of the hole and be on solid ground.

So has the device made me happy? The device has made me disease-free. That's all that I needed it to do.

It has not taken away the typical emotions in life that I'm going to have

forever. And those are happiness, sadness, anger. I'm going to have those, and I'm going to have to

learn how to live with having those.

On the last episode, we heard how John had to make room for new emotions once his depression had lifted.

On this episode, we're going to talk not so much about depression, but about shame, the shame and the judgment of having a mental disorder. And all too often, the shame and the judgment of having a mental disorder, and all too often the shame and the

judgment of the treatment people seek.

We'll explore whether there's something different about changing our brains versus any other

part of our bodies.

This is the Deep End.

I'm Laura Sanders.

Like many who have struggled with a mental illness,

Emily Hollenbeck has plenty of stories of people not quite getting it.

She told me about some of these encounters, and one was particularly

bad. It was when she was going in for ECT. That's electroconvulsive therapy, and it's when doctors

send big doses of electricity into the brain to cause a controlled seizure. She was about to be anesthetized,

and her usual anesthesiologist wasn't around that day.

...