“Then something beat down and took hold of me, and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.”

—Sylvia Plath, describing ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, in The Bell Jar, 1963. As quoted by Jonathan Cott in On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering, 2005.