Paris Jackson Reveals Her Electroconvulsive Therapy Journey: 9 Sessions, Memory Loss & Recovery

Paris Jackson doesn’t really do the guarded celebrity thing when it comes to her mental health — never really has. So when she sat down with Jay Shetty on his “On Purpose” podcast and started talking about electroconvulsive therapy, it wasn’t exactly out of character. It was still striking, though. At 28, she described reaching a point in her depression where this felt like the last option left on the table, and her account of it has people talking about a treatment most only know from movies.

A Last Resort After Years of Trying Everything

She’s talked before about the substance abuse and self-harm that shaped a lot of her teenage years — that part isn’t new. What is new is just how long the list of things she’d already tried turned out to be. Medications, five different treatment facilities, CBD, dialectical behavior therapy, ketamine, transcranial magnetic stimulation, even lidocaine injections into nerves in her neck — Hola! USA laid out the full run of it in their coverage. None of it stuck, by her account.

Electroconvulsive therapy only entered the picture after she came close to another suicide attempt. Close enough, she said, that it scared her into trying something she’d probably have avoided otherwise. By that point she felt like she’d run out of other doors to knock on.

What Happened During Treatment

The details she gave were surprisingly specific. She has a fair number of facial piercings, so those had to come out and get swapped for plastic before each session. Hospital gown, general anesthesia, a bite guard — pretty clinical, all things considered. Her doctor apparently made a point of telling her it isn’t the “barbaric” ordeal pop culture likes to show, mostly because patients are unconscious for the actual procedure now.

That didn’t mean it was painless, though. The first couple of sessions were bad — the medical team hadn’t yet worked out the right dose of pain relief for afterward, and she came out of the very first one in serious head pain. Nine sessions total, spread across three weeks. She says it helped, and credited it with supporting neuroplasticity in the brain, but the side effects weren’t small. Memory loss hit her the hardest. Whole visits from friends, gone — she has no memory of conversations that she has actual proof took place.

Why She Ultimately Stopped

Here’s the thing that made her walk away, even with results: the maintenance requirement. According to TMZ, she was given two options going forward — stay on certain medications indefinitely, or keep coming back roughly once a month, essentially for life. Neither sat well with her, so once she felt stable, she stepped away from electroconvulsive therapy for good.

It’s also bled into her art. The cover of her upcoming album, “Happiest Day of My Life,” reportedly pulls directly from that period — an image that echoes the procedure itself, bite guard included. Not exactly subtle, but that seems to be the point. Rather than boxing that chapter off, she’s using it.

Putting Electroconvulsive Therapy in Context

The public image of this treatment has always lagged behind the reality by a few decades. Old films didn’t do it any favors. The Week pointed out that modern electroconvulsive therapy is done under full anesthesia and usually only comes up once other options — medication, talk therapy — have already been tried and haven’t worked, or when someone’s safety is at immediate risk. It’s a later-stage tool, not a starting point, which tracks with how Jackson describes arriving at it herself.

What seems to have landed with people isn’t just that she tried it — it’s that she didn’t dress it up. She talked about what helped and what genuinely hurt, without turning it into either a horror story or a miracle fix. That’s a more honest picture than most portrayals bother giving.

A Broader Recovery Story

These days Jackson says she’s been sober for several years and has leaned toward a more holistic approach to managing her mental health, alongside ongoing work around her OCD. Talking openly about electroconvulsive therapy, instead of keeping it tucked away, fits a pattern she’s stuck with for a while now — she’d rather put the uncomfortable parts on the table than pretend they didn’t happen.