He lost his mind

Jonathan Cott forgot 15 years of his life after electroshock for depression. Now he's picking up the pieces.

By Oliver Broudy

Oct 17, 2005 | Jonathan Cott has suffered from depression since he was 17. It became worse as he got older, but it wasn't until the '80s, when Cott was in his 40s, that antidepressant medication became widely available. Throughout the '80s and '90s Cott tried at least 20 different drugs, and was eventually diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder.

This didn't stop him from pursuing a successful career as a writer. Cott is the author of 16 books of nonfiction, including a biography of a 19th century muckraker, a study of a woman convinced she led a previous life in ancient Egypt and an exploration of the mystical allure and superstition surrounding the number 13. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone since the magazine's inception, Cott is also an acclaimed music critic whose many contributions to the field include an interview with John Lennon four days before his murder.

This winning streak came to an end in 1998, when Cott's mother died. Her death set off a bout of depression from which Cott was unable to recover. "I had been truly seriously depressed a number of times in my life, but never to the extent of being 'clinically' depressed," Cott says. "I just didn't care anymore."

That's when the electroconvulsive therapy began. Cott was given 36 treatments over the course of the next two years. When he emerged from them, he could remember nothing from the years 1985 to 2000. Fifteen years of his life -- friends he had known, places he had lived, books he had written -- had been completely wiped out.

In an attempt to come to grips with what had happened to him and move past his loss, Cott set out to interview a range of experts on various aspects of memory, from fields as diverse as neuroscience and Tibetan Buddhism. He didn't limit his inquiry to personal memory loss but broadened it to include the role of the African storyteller in preserving cultural memory, the relevance of emotional memory in the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavsky, and the importance of remembrance in the Jewish tradition, among other fascinating subjects. The interviews are collected in Cott's new book, "On the Sea of Memory: A Journey From Forgetting to Remembering," and together present a complex portrait of the many faces of memory and the profound role it plays in our daily lives.

Today Cott continues to piece together his life, and to struggle to keep writing, despite the unspeakable toll the ECT treatments took on his mind. In an e-mail explaining how he manages to persevere, he quotes Emily Dickinson, "who knew a lot about highs and lows." "'Have I a word but Joy?' I always think of that when I realize how lucky I am to have endured and been somehow able to write about that electroshock experience, one that many others -- about 100,000 Americans every year -- are unfortunately enduring right now."

Salon reached Cott by phone at his home in New York.

In your book you quote Steven Rose describing ECT as "analogous to trying to mend a faulty radio by kicking it.

Yes, and I was the radio.

How exactly does ECT work?

They send an electrical current of about 200 volts for a fraction of a second through the frontal lobes of the brain, by means of electrodes connected to a machine that resembles a stereo receiver. But I don't remember that. I only remember receiving the anesthesia. I remember the feeling of falling off into unconsciousness, which was a beautiful feeling. But that's all.

You must have agreed to go along with it at some point.

Well, I was in a pretty distraught state, emotionally, and I think I had been talked into it by the doctors. They said I was in a really bad state and that I really needed to do this, and that there would be no serious side effects. I'd lose some memory but the memory would come back. This is what they tell patients. And when you're in a really disruptive state, like I was, it's very hard to be objective. I certainly hadn't thought about ECT treatments before. I didn't know they still gave them.

The last of the treatments happened seven years ago. Have you forgiven the doctors and moved on, or do you still feel angry?

I was angry, to begin with, that the doctors didn't really tell the truth about the possible damage that can occur, both cognitively and in memory loss. And I still feel angry about that. I believe that ECT does damage the brain. There's dispute about this, but there's increasing evidence to show that this is certainly a possibility. And there are many other people, not just myself, who suffer this kind of damage. I'm not prone to anger, but I do feel angry for the sake of other people. I really feel that ECT shouldn't be used at all except as a last resort, in the very final moments of emotional desperation, or mania, or catatonia.

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