Sorry, my fault with the link. I thought it would go directly to the "Show All" results.

You can do a search without being a registered user. If someone (e.g., Kambuckta) wishes to enter their own personal experience with being electroshocked, that person would have to register first. But there is a "list all" link on that page that the rest of you can use without registering, which will let you browse the stories of the ECT recipients, positive and negative.

Read the stories. ECT is most commonly administered to mental patients who have not responded favorably thus far to neuroleptic or antidepressant medication. Sometimes it is administered to mental patients for no apparent reason. On occasion it is even administered purely as punishment. The site with the stories is not an advocacy/activist web site, as attested to by the presence of stories from people who say ECT "saved their life".

I have no objection to the use of ECT on consenting patients who are fully informed. "Fully informed" includes being told that the procedure may cause permanent brain damage *. "Fully informed" includes being told that although it does not afflict everyone who undergoes the procedure, permanent memory loss, both short-term (time frame before and after procedure) and long-term (entire life's history of events plus acquired skills and knowledge etc) would appear to be a risk. "Fully informed" means being told that to the extent that it works (and results are mixed), it works through an as-of-yet unexplained mechanism and that it may be that the remission in depression symptoms cannot be separated from the memory loss, i.e., that (as one pro-ECT testimonial put it) "electroshock let me get past my depression by causing me to forget what I was depressed about".

These are things that have not been proven to be true by the research, but some of the research tends to support those conclusions and personal experiences as described by those who had had the treatment tends to bear that out.

Voluntary consent means just that: no quid pro quo arrangements such as "You don't have to consent to ECT but we won't release you if you don't".

Voluntary consent means by the patient, meaning no ECT for children who are "consented for" by administrative fiat. IMPO, children should not be electroshocked period, end of story.

* Yes, actual observable tissue death. Read what Dr. Peter Breggin has documented on it. Breggin is quite transparently an activist of course, but he does cite his research data. He quotes one researcher (Karl Pribriam) who (circa 1974), after seeing a series of brains in autopsy and comparing those of ECT recipients to nonrecipients, said the overall shrinkage and apparent tissue damage readily observable in the ECT victims was such that if he had to choose between receiving a small lobotomy and an ECT series he would go with the small lobotomy. Yes, 1974 was over a quarter century ago, but why should the burden of proof be on our side in this case? If someone stated that they had a new variation on a procedure that in its original form was known to be dangerous, and claimed that the variation is probably safer for this and that reason, wouldn't you normally respond with "OK, do you have clinical data analogous to the data on the original procedure showing that the variation does not cause the damage"?

Most of the changes implemented in ECT since circa 1950 can be summed up as follows: the shock is administered preferentially to one side of the brain instead of bilaterally, although they still do the bilateral type if they have trouble inducing seizures the other way -- the claim is that this is less dangerous and this may be true, although probably not so "true" as to make it 'safe'; and, second, the patient is paralyzed with a muscle-paralyzing agent (a derivative of curare) which turns the otherwise-violent muscle spasms from the terrifying sort that can break bones to much milder twitches and jerks. The paralysis is so strong that respiration ceases and patients must be artificially respirated during the procedure. Many people believe that far less current is now used than was used in the olden days. This is not necessarily true. They use a different "wave" called "brief pulse", for the most part these days, but the amperage has been increased and the actual amount of electricity passed through the brain, measured in joules, is actually more than was prevalent in the early years of ECT.

Finally, consider the presence of euphoria as it is noted to occur across the board in various brain-damaging events:

oxygen deprivation
vascular insufficiency / dementia (aka "hardening of the arteries")
general paresis (tertiary syphilis)
inhalation of volatile chemicals, "huffing"

So, here in the form of ECT, we have a procedure used predominantly to lighten up the moods of intractible depressives. It is known to correlate with permanent memory loss. It works by applying electricity to the brain, and research exists showing that the process does do brain damage. And the people who administer it say they don't know how it works, but it works (at least fairly often, at least in the short term). Doesn't that make you very very very suspicious that the way it works is by inducing a little brain damage and subsequent euphoria of that common sort?

I offer you folks the use of Occam's Razor on that one.

 

See my prevous post on this same thread

 

Original SDMB thread Psychiatrists: Glorified Drug Dealers?

 

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