Shock Treatment: Still Sparking A Controversy

The once hotly-debated practice of ECT or Electroconvulsive Therapy is currently out of fashion in favor of an increasingly diverse array of drugs. Nevertheless, it is still being performed on about 100,000 people in the United States every year. I read this on Wikipedia so it must be true.

According to the page, ECT is a psychiatric treatment in which

seizures are induced by passing electricity through the brain of an anaesthetized patient…to induce a bilateral tonic clonic seizure (a seizure where the person loses consciousness and has convulsions)

The word is that it has a 70% success rate of at least temporarily treating manic depression, but the conclusive evidence is still out as to the reason why it has worked, or the mechanism behind how it works at all. In the majority of cases of ECT patients there is reported memory loss, both short-and long-term; the patients may simply be forgetting why they were depressed in the first place.

The practice of introducing controlled and regulated bursts of electricity to one’s noodle began in 1930, allegedly inspired by an Italian neuropsychiatrist’s visit to a slaughterhouse, where he witnessed pigs receiving jolts to the head to render them unconscious and therefore easier to deal with. To be fair, he was already experimenting with zapping dogs with electrodes—one on the head and one on the asshole; but his treatment was always killing his test subjects. When he saw that the slaughterhouse put both electrodes on the head, he refined his methods. ECT swiftly became a very popular treatment for a wide variety of behavioral symptoms, ranging from depression to epilepsy to homosexuality to post-partum depression.

Many notable celebrities have undergone this form of treatment, including such luminaries as Lou Reed, Judy Garland, Dick Cavett, Ken Kesey, and Ernest Hemmingway (who blew his brains out with a shotgun shortly after his treatments). However, due to increasing public awareness and skepticism on the patients’ parts as well as from within the medical community, it has been greatly discontinued. However, in recent years in some areas of the world, it has begun a comeback. In Australia, for example, the reported numbers of patients receiving ECT has doubled inside of the last decade.