CHAPEL HILL - Jack Gregory says he lived one step from suicide until he found a way to ease his severe depression. He let doctors run an electric current through his brain.

Since starting electroconvulsive therapy in March 2006, Gregory, 62, has found a degree of stability that eluded him when he relied on antidepressants and talk therapy.

"Literally, I was ready and willing to kill myself two-and-a-half years ago," Gregory said as he was prepped for a treatment under general anesthesia in Chapel Hill early this month. "This can be a life-saving therapy for the right person."

Electroconvulsive therapy, discredited in a previous incarnation as "shock therapy," has gained acceptance from patients and doctors alike in recent years. As the means of administering the electric current have grown more sophisticated and less harmful, the benefits of the treatment have become more apparent, especially for people suffering depression.

The Mayo Clinic estimates that 100,000 people a year undergo the treatment in the United States -- a number that has roughly tripled in the last 25 years.

"It's becoming a treatment of next resort instead of a treatment of last resort," said Gregory's psychiatrist at UNC Hospitals, Dr. Michael A. Hill.

Electroconvulsive therapy enters its eighth decade this year: An Italian doctor developed its use in 1938. Doctors don't know its exact mechanism, Hill said, but an electrically stimulated seizure can affect the brain the way restarting affects a computer.

The therapy is still controversial. Last month, the American Psychiatric Association agreed to a new review of its literature on electroconvulsive therapy, known as ECT.

"There are still some researchers and practitioners who think the treatment is just absolutely terrific with no problems, and others that feel it has significant problems, but not enough to keep them from doing it," said Dr. Vaughn McCall, a Wake Forest University psychiatrist who is editor of the academic Journal of ECT.

The treatment's inability to prevent recurrences is one point of contention, McCall said.

"The second is the realization that cognitive problems from ECT may be more problematic than was recognized even 10 years ago," McCall said.

And there remains a stigma. The treatment has long been portrayed as a form of torture, with flailing patients strapped to gurneys and involuntarily subjected to jolts of electricity while awake, as depicted in the 1975 movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

"It used to be done without anesthesia," Hill said. "Using electricity to generate seizures while the patient is awake is a brutal kind of treatment."

Jack Gregory, who is under general anesthesia during treatments, has no regrets.

"I don't think it's for everyone," he said, "but for people with deep, dark, down depression, it can be very effective."

A career comes apart

Gregory had a successful career in local and network television for years before he came to Raleigh in the late 1980s as a sports anchor on the former WPTF-TV, Channel 28.

After leaving the station in the early '90s, he took a series of jobs and tried to start his own business. The early 2000s brought a contentious divorce and a one-year suspended sentence on a drug charge.

Gregory was out of control and in deep trouble. He watched through a cloud of depression as his life -- marriage, family, job and all -- got crushed under the weight of his mental illness and substance abuse. Friends and former colleagues who remembered him as hardworking were saddened by his decline.

He went through more than a dozen hospitalizations and several suicide attempts.

"Before March 2006, I was on medications and doing talk therapy, but I was going belly up every other day," Gregory said. "I was bouncing off the walls."

By March 2006, he was ready for something -- anything -- that could help him deal with his mental illness. Gregory agreed to take part in electroconvulsive therapy at UNC-Chapel Hill's Department of Psychiatry.

ECT at UNC, Duke

At UNC-CH, doctors oversee 30 to 45 electroconvulsive treatments weekly. The treatment continues to evolve, but it's not the subject of as much research as behavioral drugs, Hill said.

"It's been studied for years, but the reality is, since the drug companies aren't involved, there isn't a lot of money available for ECT," he said.

Duke Medical Center performs 25 to 30 treatments a week, said Dr. David Steffens, head of the division of geriatric psychiatry at Duke.

"We have quite a number of people whom ECT has successfully pulled out of a severe depression, who now require maintenance ECT to ensure that the depression doesn't reoccur," Steffens said.

Side effects can include short-term memory loss, sore muscles and headaches. Some former patients and a few professionals have worked actively against the therapy, charging that it leaves permanent damage and memory loss.

"Every time that ECT has been rigorously studied, it doesn't pan out that there should be a great concern about permanent brain damage or memory loss," Steffens said, adding that doctors cannot ignore the risk of memory loss.

The American Psychiatric Association and the National Institute of Mental Health are on record supporting the treatment for patients whose severe illness resists other treatments.

Trade-offs in therapy

Treatments using electric stimulus usually begin with a course of six to 12 sessions, scheduled three times a week for a month or so. Some patients, such as Gregory, return for maintenance treatments.

"What the field is focused on in recent years is to try to improve the success rate while minimizing side effects," Hill said.

"We are looking to use the lowest amount of electricity -- the less energy you use, the better," he said. At most, he noted, electroconvulsive therapy uses about a third of the amount of energy that typically jolts a heart patient during defibrillation.

At the holding area, Gregory talked about his broadcast career, about the wreck his life became and about how electroconvulsive therapy has worked for him. In hospital gown, he went through what has become a familiar process during his monthly treatments: getting ready for the IV muscle relaxant and other preparatory work that precedes the electric stimulus.

"I had my reservations about doing this," he said. "The stigma about this kind of therapy is really unfair. The ECT has gotten me to the the point where I have learned things about myself I never knew."

He said 2007 was the first calendar year in at least five in which he had no psychiatric hospitalizations. Richard Wynne, pastor of St. John's Baptist Church in Raleigh, said he remembers Gregory's trials before he tried electroconvulsive therapy.

"When he first became a member, there were times that we knew he was depressed," Wynne said. "He would be so depressed that he'd take his medication and when it didn't work, he'd take more of it. He ended up overdosing."

Gregory now talks to people with depression about electroconvulsive therapy, hoping that others with the illness might be able to retreat from the brink, too.

"I will have these obsessions or diagnoses for the rest of my life," he said. "With the technology available to me now, I will have a better than even chance of stability."

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.