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Shock treatment is a type of therapy for patients with serious mental
illnesses. Shock treatment makes the patient temporarily unconscious. Doctors
use it alone or along with psychotherapy.
The first widely used forms of shock treatment were insulin shock therapy
and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Both forms were used for treating
severe mental illnesses during the 1930's and 1940's. Since 1950, doctors have
used ECT almost exclusively.
When doctors first used insulin to produce unconsciousness, they hoped it would
cure schizophrenia. But the treatment helped only in some cases, and it often
produced only temporary improvement. For these reasons, and because it is
difficult to administer the treatment safely, it is not often used today.
Electroconvulsive therapy was introduced a few years after insulin treatment.
ECT produces convulsions, or seizures, in a patient. The simplest and most
common method of administering ECT consists of passing an electric current
through the patient's brain for a fraction of a second.
Although ECT is simple to administer, it must be adjusted to each individual
case. The number of treatments varies, but most patients receive about three a
week, with a total of 6 to 10 treatments over a two- to three-week period.
Doctors determine the amount and the duration of the electric shock by
monitoring the patient's brain waves to be sure that a seizure is produced.
Pretreatment medications and general anaesthesia are usually given so that the
patient experiences no discomfort and neither feels the electric current nor
consciously experiences the seizure.
The most important use of ECT is to treat hospitalized patients who remain
severely depressed and suicidal in spite of drug treatment and psychotherapy.
ECT frequently restores these depressed patients to a normal mental state. The
reasons it does so are unknown.
ECT is controversial because it has sometimes been used as a punishment to
control violent or uncooperative psychiatric patients. In addition, ECT often
causes temporary amnesia, and some doctors claim that it also produces long-term
memory loss.
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