(Skip to the last paragraph if too long)
Summa summarum: Anhedonia, blunting, sexual dysfunction, blockage for 7 consecutive years. Nothing has been able to penetrate though my (consummatory) blockage yet. I decided that I will try ECT as a last resort and then finally give up in case it does not work and consider myself permanently disabled. No more ''oh, but have you tried PTX-456 Robocop Juice?''. This decision will hopefully give me some peace of mind.
The issue with ECT however is that where I live, it has to be performed in an inpatient setting and requires a clinic stay of up to 6 weeks. Psychiatric clinics in Germany oftentimes do not provide an environment in which treatment resistant cases receive a treatment and assessment that is tailored to their respective needs and symptoms. A lot of doctors do not even know how to properly assess anhedonia at all, let alone the blockage level kind that does not respond to any substances and CBT. I have also read a multitude of anecdotes of anhedonic patients who get misunderstood by medical professionals - the same has happened to myself, even in outpatient settings.
To be quite fair, I also don’t want to give up my autonomy as a patient, given the amount of knowledge I’ve gathered surrounding this and similar conditions, and the thought of staying at a hospital for over a month is just extremely eerie to me.
This is why I thought about getting ECT in the Netherlands, where outpatient ECT is generally possible. I just have no clue at all how I should go about this. Has anyone ever traveled within the EU to get ECT and how was your experience? Most importantly, is it possible to get that covered by insurance, especially since ECT is generally possible in the county I live in.