Ruth starts with details from her childhood, when she tended to be a perfectionist and had obsessions around contamination. Ruth suffered with episodes of depression herself, but they were short lived and didn’t require treatment. Her severe depression started while on a long travel in two continents. She developed delusions of guilt and was receiving messages, resulting in an admission to a hospital in Canada, and then permitted to fly back home under sedation. Several years later, after severe social stressors, she relapsed and remained depressed for several years. She was again psychotic, believing that she had ‘killed the world’ and eventually became almost mute. Her sister, aware that their grandfather had received ECT, researched the topic and felt that it should be tried, especially after listening to a talk by Dr Sherwin Nuland, who had ECT himself. It was him who used the phrase ‘rising like a phoenix’, which was chosen as the title of this chapter. Ruth had twenty-three sessions before she felt better. She describes in detail her memory problems. She has since followed Sherwin Nuland’s lead by talking about her ECT experience publicly.