I have two friends whose lives were literally saved by ECT. Both these people had been on various medications and psychotherapy for many years, with little long-term improvement.
I didn’t have time to factually refute his claims at the time. I have a busy life off-line. I will come back and discuss his posts more in the morning, when I have time.
I did not “crassly write off” his position. I merely pointed out his agenda. I happen to think it’s important for anyone taking advice from someone to know what their underlying biases are. He’s really the only one in this thread thus far who has a serious posting record on this issue, so I referred the OP to it. I would have done so for any other poster with such an extensive history on the issue at hand. Especially when the opinions offered are so relentlessly biased to one point of view.
The same applies to Breggin’s reputation. When reading his works, it’s important to know two things: one, he has a relatively extreme anti-medication/ECT bias, and two, he makes a lot more money than the average psychiatrist off of those books. Whereas ECT is not a lucrative medical treatment. No doctor gets rich off of pushing ECT either in private practice or in the public fora. Why? Because it’s not done very often and the general public impression of the treatment is quite negative.
Details and citations to follow sometime tomorrow.
Those “biases” can and often are formed because someone has studied an issue and reached conclusions based on facts and rational thought. Saying that someone is biased because of bad experiences–without actually addressing any of the arguments they make–implies that their conclusions are based purely on their own emotional reactions to events and not on rational thoughts. Sorry, but saying “he’s biased because of his bad experiences” and walking off (supposedly to address what he actually said at a later date) is a crass tactic.
When you say “He’s biased because of bad experiences” and walk away, you’re writing off his knowledge, research, experiences with other psychiatric survivors, and rationally formed positions because he’s been a victim of psychiatry. That’s rude and insulting.
Furthermore, pretty much everyone is biased. Psychiatrists tend to be biased in favor of psychiatry, given that it’s how they make a living and that they have a great deal of their time and money invested in the profession. Patients who’ve been fucked by psychiatrists tend to be biased because, well, they’ve been fucked by psychiatrists. Patients who’ve had good experiences with psychiatry tend to be biased in favor of it.
And you know what? It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the substance of a person’s arguments.
Really? You don’t have an extensive history of posting on psychiatric issues? I recall seeing you pop up quite a bit in such threads.
Liz Spikol. The Shocking Truth Spikol is a columnist for the Philadelphia Weekly, and a manic depressive.
Ragiel
I find you utter faith in the system shocking and somewhat frightening.
Metacom
I can’t get your link to work.
Conurepete
Unless this relative is so thoroughly nonfunctional and depressed that you can’t leave him alone for more than ten minutes for fear he’ll bite through the arteries in his wrists, I’d recommend against ECT.
Nuts. It was working last night, the search must have timed out or something.
It was a link to section 5150 of the California “Welfare and Institutions Code,” which allows police officers and certain other designated persons to commit people for observation and treatment for a 72-hour period (not including weekends and holidays) if they have “probable cause” to believe the person is a danger to himself or others, or “gravely disabled.” “Treatment” includes “whatever treatment and care his or her condition requires”.
They do, thoughtfully, require that a person medicated during such a hold be given written and oral information on the effects and side effec
Delete the aborted last sentence, it wasn’t meant to be.
In a pathetic attempt to bring this thread back into IMHO territory:
I have a friend with schizophrenia. The symptoms and the effects they’ve had on his life (his schizophrenia debuted very early) have brought on depression. Medications keep him functioning semi-normally, and he’s also tried ECT. In his words:
“It did nothing for me.”
So amidst the tales of joy and horror, here’s one data point that says precisely nothing. He noticed no effect worth speaking of.
ECT is usually most effective for people with severe, major depression. Its role or effectiveness in treating schizophrenia is more unclear. It seems to only be of much help in schizophrenic symptoms such as catatonia. Your friend was probably not in a group that responds to ECT.
Metacom, I understand that this non-working link is intended to reference the California statute which permits police officers and emergency personnel to take a person showing probability of posing harm to a hospital for evaluation. That covers emergency treatment, which is not synonymous with imprisonment or forced hospitalization.
In order to be a candidate for this treatment, the person has to be doing something significantly threatening to cause alarm, e.g. slashing his wrists, running into traffic, or throwing furniture out the window. Moreover, if he has a home to go to or someone who can calm him, that’s first choice. Once admitted to the emergency room, that person has to be seen by a physician within a specified period of time and has to have a physical evaluation. If he’s delirious from meningitis or paranoid because of Alzheimer’s disease, that can get immediate attention. If he’s on drugs, he can be kept quiet while they wear off. If nothing is going right and he’s still in danger of jumping off bridges, even after 72 hours, then the hospital needs a court order to begin treatment.
Wonder why that’s not being used to track down quietly psychotic people and force them to be treated? Police and EMTs have their hands full taking care of acute problems. ER doctors are trying to keep ahead of heart attacks and gunshot wounds. Nobody has time to go after people who are not in danger. Nobody goes out hunting for people who skip their blood-pressure or diabetes pills either.
You may wish to check out the criteria in your state for involuntary admission to a psychiatric unit. They’re pretty strict. As they should be.
DocCathode, I know how psychiatrists assess their patients because I am one. I know what emergency psychiatry procedures are, because I’ve done that. I know what is considered dangerousness by the law, because I’ve had to assess for that too. This isn’t faith, it’s reality testing.
Being forcibly confined to a hospital and treated (including treatment with drugs, which the California statute explicitly allows) isn’t “synonymous” with forced hospitalization? That’s funny in a Todd-Solondz-movie sorta way.
Yet another flat-out lie.
Per the California statute, a person can also be involuntarily incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital for “evaluation and treatment” if they’re “gravely disabled,” which includes (but is apparently not limited to) being unable to take care of “food, housing, and clothing needs.”
In no state that I’m aware of are rules of evidence applied to “dangerous to self and/or others” (the old standard) let alone “gravely ill and in need of treatment” (the widespread new, looser standard). In both cases, the unspoken codicil is “…in the unsupported opinion of the psychiatrist .”
It doesn’t take much. Shankar Vedantam of the Washington Post got this juicy quote:
And Stuart A. Kirk of the LA Times opines
I have had ECT and I am willing to talk about both the good side and the bad.
My experiences were in the early 1960’s and they were not as scarey as what AHunter3 described because I was put to sleep before each treatment. I didn’t even know that I was receiving shock therapy until after several sessions and I became less lethargic and more curious. So even then, the treatments were physically painless.
They did leave me intensely confused – even about my own identity – for very short periods immediately after some of the sessions.
I remember very few details of my stays in the hospital when I received treatments. The ECT wipes out most of the memory of events surrounding that period. The treatments also wiped out much of my memory of details involving my life for about a three year period. It is very dream-like.
I still have terrible short term memory problems, but that may be due to many factors including continuing low grade, long term depression, long term medication, and age.
I don’t know what the laws are now, but I was not consulted about being placed in the hospital nor did I give permission for the ECT. (I was in my late teens and early twenties.) My parents made the decision. They did not have Power of Attorney. I was unaware of any court procedings and was taken directly from my college dorm to the hospital a hundred miles away.
I don’t think I put up any resistance. When you are that depressed you are like a leaf floating downstream.
I’ve been with my current psychiatrist for fifteen years. I see him about once a month for 20-30 minutes. We focus on what is happening in the present. He is a man of compassion and personal and professional integrity.
Medication with a little counselling works for me. Counselling without the right kind of medication did not work. The last fifteen years have been a hell of a lot easier to survive than the first thirty years as an adult with depression.
But if the medicine stopped working and the old anguish returned, I would try ECT again. It could not possibly damage the brain as much as the really mindnumbing deep depression does.
ECT does not transform you into a drooling idiot.
I see just the opposite coming from the profession. They freely admit that human emotions are not something that can be understood – at least at this point – with great precision and to a scientific certainty. I have never heard a psychiatrist claim otherwise.
AHunter3, I can at least understand where your grievances against the profession come from and appreciate the stand that you take and the service that you provide. But can you ever admit that millions of us have been helped? Or do you simply not believe us? I needed and wanted help and I finally found it in a psychiatric professional. When I say that he saved my life, I’m not being flippant about it at all. And I have no reason to belief that others are either when they talk about their doctors or the medication.
Just as you want psychiatrists to leave you alone and allow you to be who you are, maybe you could consider that for some of us, certain medications allow us to be who we really are.
Yes, they have helped millions of people. And I didn’t mean to sound flip when I’ve spoken of folkd who have had ECT (in this thread) or psych meds (mostly in other threads) and have said "Psychiatric treatment saved my life.
As you, and Q.N. Jones earlier in this thread, note, I have a rather narrow and intense focus when it comes to these issues. While I want that fully informed consenting people have the option of turning to psychiatry, and while I’m not trying to hide the fact that there are many people (quite a few on this board) who have had very good experiences with the MH system and wonderful results from the treatment they’ve received, I do tend to think that most folks who solicit opinions about MH services don’t get to hear the flip side. Or that when they do, it’s from someone with an auxiliary agenda like Tom Cruise and the Scientologists (band name?).
Really, the folks I spend most of my time contradicting and debating are not folks who say “but it can really help and my experiences, like those of many other people, were and are overwhelmingly positive”. It’s the folks who say “They’re scientific now, all that critique stuff is outdated, the published naysayers are crackpots, it never gets done without your consent, it would be irresponsible to not turn to psychiatry if you think you might need it, they’ll certainly help you”, and so forth.
'In some previous SDMB thread I can’t find (!?) I put a link to an ECT experiences website where hundreds of people who are or were ECT recipients posted about their experiences, and it was a spectrum from good to bad. Wish I could find it and repost the link here.
I’ve never taken AHunter3’s stand as anti-psychiatry. He’s anti- *FORCED * psychiatry. There’s a huge difference between the two and he’s dead right. Just because a person’s physical or mental state is inconvenient for you doesn’t make it OK for society to eliminate that person’s civil liberties. It’s not a crime to be nuts any more than it’s a crime to have cancer.
I’m sorry, but if you come out of the treatment not caring about the fact that you’ve lost great swathes of memory, then yes, that does qualify as drooling idiocy. I was mostly responding to this post by don’t ask:
If that’s not drooling idiocy, then what is?
In some cases, losing great swaths of memory is a fair tradeoff. This evaluation does not make one a drooling idiot.
I have recently read about TMS as a possible replacement for ECT.
Yes, but on the other hand, the OP had not mentioned anything about forced treatments. AHunter3 was the first to bring this up in post 11. I get the feeling that AHunter3 tends to automatically associate psychiatry with involuntary commitment and forced medication and forget people who get into treatments voluntarily because they really feel sick.
It’s true that psychiatry is not as scientific as other medical branches. That’s not the practitioners’ fault; it’s just that mental diseases don’t have obvious causes. I think that most psychiatrists do this job because they think they can help. There are jerks, incompetents and sadists everywhere, of course, but I don’t think that they are especially attracted to psychiatry.
So yes, we should think about the “flip side” and not forget that psychiatric treatments are still somewhat experimental, in that they don’t always work, they can cause serious side effects, and even when they work, we don’t really know why. On the other hand, AHunter3 should also think about the other side and remember that there are people who really felt bad because of their mental state, went to get helped (or maybe even had help forced on them, in some cases I think it may be necessary) and feel better now. He says he thinks about them but I’m not sure how much he realises they exist. And he should also think before jumping in psychiatry threads. Sure, it’s a good thing that he hear the view that is “suppressed by the Establishment” or whatever, but, just as an example, if the OP doesn’t talk about involuntary commitment, there is no need to bring it up.