Future Human
The Unlikely Revival of Electrocution Therapy
For patients like me, an unexpected way to help treatment-resistant conditions
When I first told my friends I was going home for a few months to get electrocuted, they thought I was insane. I think some of them wondered if I was literally insane, given that electrocution-related therapies are often associated with psychiatric institutions. These days when I see my friends, they often eye me sideways. Is Siddhi mad? Is the electrocution helping? What’s wrong with her, anyway? But given that for me, the treatment was a last-ditch effort at treating an incurable condition, I wasn’t bothered by how extreme it seemed to some people.
Since I was a teenager, I’ve struggled with chronic pain — the result of repeated shoulder dislocations from my earlier years in gymnastics. I was also a double bassist, and though my injuries had never been particularly debilitating, they left me with a tremor in my right hand that made a career path in music untenable. By the time I was in college, five years later, I had fibromyalgia — debilitating fatigue, widespread pain, and an inability to regulate body temperature. The onset was sudden — I was halfway through my undergraduate degree when I woke up one day and couldn’t move the right half of my body. My mobility…
