Janet Frame (August 28, 1924 - January 29, 2004)
She needed ‘treatment’— electro-convulsive therapy at the Seacliff hospital in Dunedin.
Every part of this therapy was horrific to her. The sleek, cream-painted machine with its knobs and lights; the smell of methylated spirits, rubbed on her temples so that the shock would take; the grey woollen socks she would compulsively wear on treatment days, ‘to ward off death’; the stifled, choking cries of other patients; and the shock itself, a trap door dropping open on darkness. As she came round afterwards her tears kept falling ‘in a greif that you cannot name’.
Excerpted from The Economist