10 - The Doll’s House

Summary

Sue was living a charmed life: financially secure, a stable marriage, a holiday home, and lots of holidays made possible as a result of early retirement. In March 2020 she and her husband became locked down in different countries for several months. Sue contracted Covid, and symptoms of long Covid followed. Symptoms of depression developed, and Sue started carefully planning how to end her life. Then she became psychotic, believing that she would become destitute and homeless, that she had infected the country’s Child Protection system with computer viruses and that her husband would cheat her out of her money. Three hospital admissions and a lot of medication later, she was still suicidal. At that point her psychiatrist suggested ECT. Sue’s first reaction was horror. She had always thought of ECT as throwing the furniture of a doll’s house in the air and hoping it lands in the right places in the right rooms – an unlikely outcome. She decided to go ahead and ‘getting all the furniture in the right place’ has given her life back. Her husband finishes the story with recollections of Sue’s psychotic ideas and his inability to do anything about them.