Husband with Major Depression and PTSD

Hi all,

My husband has had major depression for 23 years and PTSD for 13 years. The ups and downs of this journey is too long and painful to share in a couple of paragraphs.

He has tried over 30 different medications, as well as a period of time with nothing. He is currently having his 3rd lot of ECT. His last lot was 9 years ago and was very successful, however he couldn’t access maintenance treatments because of where we lived at the time and the effects gradually wore off.

We moved interstate 5 years ago to a regional area with limited support for mental health. That coupled with COVID restrictions and going through a terrible psychiatrist, meant he had a large gap with no support. We finally managed to get a psych over Zoom a couple of years ago and he was keen for hubby to try different things and labelled him as treatment resistant.

This year has been one of the worst for him. He spent 8 months with anxiety gradually increasing to the point of dry reaching every morning the second he wakes up, constantly jittery and disassociating for hours on end. So they put him on an antipsychotic again and back on diazepam, then a MAOI antidepressant. We’ve been down this road before and it was hell coming off it. He doesn’t engage, barely looks at me or talks. I feel like his personality has disappeared.

We got him into a treatment centre for treatment-resistant depression only to have it cancelled due to the new MAOI antidepressant he had been put on. So he has gone back to having ECT again. He’s had 8 treatments so far with minimal effect.

Does anyone have experience with maintenance ECT? It’s a 5 hour drive + overnight visit to do it every couple of weeks which I am happy to do, if it’s likely to work. Our other option is the treatment-resistant treatment which is only an hour away.

I also feel I have no one around me that actually understands the complexity of what I am dealing with and have been for such a long time. I ended up on antidepressants last time he had ECT because I was crying all the time. I was on them for 18 months and came off because I felt numb and hated it. Our children were younger and all still at home tho so I was also constantly busy and overwhelmed. But it was still a distraction.

Now I feel completely depleted, guilty enjoying the time to myself, as well as overwhelming sadness at the thought of him alone in his room without his family. We are a very close family and he loves and misses his children too. It just that he is in a clinic a 5 hour drive away - so we can’t just pop in and see him or take him out. I just spent 3 x nights near him so I could take him out and spend time with him.

I am so depressed, I have no motivation or energy and don’t want to go back on antidepressants but I don’t know what else to do. I feel like my personality is slipping away as well. We have had a bit of trauma in our family this year so it’s understandable. Everyone keeps telling me to make sure I’m looking after myself and I don’t know how to do that. I know how to look after others but not me and now I’m a shell of what I used to be. Has anyone got any suggestions? Thank you.