New England School of Nursing
The Contradictions of Electroconvulsive
Therapy:
an Effective Treatment That Has a Stigma
and Is Clinically Underused
May 18, 2009
Electroconvulsive
therapy is also known as electroshock or ECT and is a well established, though
controversial psychiatric treatment in which seizures
are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for a therapeutic effect. ECT
has been the subject of major controversy, receiving extensive negative media
coverage and has faced legal obstacles in certain places (Bustin, Rapopor,
Krishna, and Matusevich, 2007). Today, ECT is most often used as a treatment
for severe major depression which has not responded to
other treatment, and is also used in the treatment of mania (often in bipolar
disorder), catatonia, schizophrenia and other disorders. Elderly
depressed patients are the most  likely to
be receiving ECT for major depression (Bustin et al, 2007).
  While electric
eels were used to ease headaches and camphor-induced seizures were used to
treat psychosis as early as the 16th century, the history of ECT starts in the 1930s
and gained widespread use as a form of treatment in the 1940s and 1950s (Shives,
2007). Today, an estimated one million people worldwide receive ECT every year;
usually in a course of 6-12 treatments administered 2 or 3 times a week. ECT has
been shown clinically by research to be the most effective treatment for severe
depression, and to result in improved quality of
life in both short- and long-term. The American Psychiatric Association
and the British National
Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence have concluded that the
procedure does not cause brain damage in adults. Certain types of ECT have been
shown to cause persistent memory loss, whereas confusion
usually clears within hours of treatment. Informed
consent must be attained as a standard of modern electroconvulsive
therapy (Wikipedia, 2009).
