At the Bedside: How electroconvulsive therapy at UTHealth Houston helped one woman reclaim her life

At 59, Karen Vine Fuller had tried everything — more than 30 medications, and years of psychotherapy — but none of it could lift the heavy depression that had overtaken her life.

She stopped writing, stopped going to church, stopped driving. Her lively, outgoing, bubbly personality that once filled a room was nowhere to be found.

Karen remembers this feeling first occurring at the age of 12 — when she discovered her mother with self-inflicted wounds on her wrists. Her mother died the next day. Her mother’s sister died by suicide before Karen was born. 

“I know what it’s like to have somebody try to commit suicide, and unfortunately, depression runs in our family,” Karen said. “I'm normally a very upbeat, happy person, but when my son went to college, I got very depressed. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t drive, and I wasn’t going to church. I didn’t want to repeat what my mom had done.” 

Desperate to have her life back, she turned to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) at the UT Physicians Interventional Psychiatry Clinic under the supervision of Joao De Quevedo, MD, PhD, a John S. Dunn Distinguished Professor and the director of the Treatment-Resistant Depression Program in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. She was happy to find that her medical insurance covers the treatment.

“Medications are designed to make the brain process information more efficiently, and they don't always work. The ECT procedure resets brain function related to mood,” De Quevedo said.

Though often misunderstood due to outdated portrayals, today’s ECT is safe, precise, and performed under anesthesia. During the procedure, controlled electrical stimulation induces a brief seizure, typically lasting 20 seconds to two minutes.

This controlled activity allows natural, healthy neural patterns to re-emerge, De Quevedo said.

“When you pass an electric field through the brain, all the neurons fire simultaneously. This is the process that heals the brain,” De Quevedo explained. “ECT is creating new neurological links. Each time you go down the same path of one link, it becomes stronger and stronger. Over time we believe they are regaining the pattern that was supposed to be normal for that person.”

Karen began her first sessions hopeful but cautious. Before each session, Karen and De Quevedo take time to pray together, asking for peace, clarity, and healing. 

Karen started treatment at the end of February 2025, and a few days before Easter, she said she started to feel like herself again. 

“I threw a Cinco de Mayo party to celebrate,” said Karen, who is writing again, teaching at her church, and planning a cross-country trip.

There is one moment in particular that stood out to De Quevedo: the day Karen baked cookies for the office staff, something her husband noted she had not done in years.

“Even though she didn’t have a fast response to ECT, she continued believing the treatment might work, and it paid off. We typically expect to see patients experience a response to treatment after six to 12 weeks. She had a delayed response, but a beautiful response,” De Quevedo said. 

While she is still completing maintenance ECT therapy, Karen says this is the best she’s felt in years. De Quevedo says that the frequency of the treatment sessions will continue to taper off as her brain adapts and retains the healthier pathways that ECT stimulated. 

Karen is sharing her journey to break the stigma around ECT and encourage others not to wait years to pursue help for themselves.

“People don’t talk about suicide, and you don’t want to, but so many people deal with depression. So, I want people to be brave and talk about it — especially when I found something so wonderful as ECT that has been a blessing to me,” Karen said. “Be brave, know that depression is just another ailment that you can get like diabetes or having a heart attack, and the ECT is like how they shock someone’s heart. They’re shocking your brain and resetting it.”

De Quevedo says that people don’t need to wait years to receive this treatment.

“The patients that come to us are in despair. They probably would have benefited from starting it years ago,” he said. “Studies show, in the course of a depressive episode, the sooner you do ECT, the more likely it is to work.”

“Everything’s been great at UTHealth Houston. Everyone’s been very nice — the whole staff, from the people that buzz you in the door to the nurses that prep you, and the anesthesiologists and the residents in the actual room,” Karen said. “Dr. De Quevedo is always smiling and is very upbeat. He has a great bedside manner and makes the whole process so easy.”

For more information on the UT Physicians Interventional Psychiatry Clinic, call 713-486-2621.