The broken bones and restraints are from the days before they used sedatives and muscle relaxants. That article you cite is 30 years old and very biased. Look, I am not saying that ECT is a walk in the park…but neither is severe depression. If you saw someone who was very close to you in the midst of it and then recovered after the ECT treatments, your view of it might change quite a bit.
Oh, dear Og, not the ECT tinfoil hattery as well. When will this bizarre meme finally die?
You mean, links you agree with. Thanks for the heads-up about the date of the last article, though. Here’s a fresh one. “Safer” does not necessarily mean “safe.” And while I’m glad your relative improved, I’m sure there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that showed lobotomy was a good idea too. I think that in thirty years we’ll look on new-and-improved ECT as the lobotomy of our day–perhaps beneficial for a few, but by and large a barbaric practice.
I mean really. You’re pumping electricity!!! Into the brain!!! This is right up there with dwarf bone-breaking and botulism for wrinkles. Think about it.
Here’s where I check out. This is clearly devolving into something not even remotely related to evidence-based debate over psychiatry, if ever it was. Might as well be sparring with Scientologists.
Do you think there is no chance that ECT might be regarded as less than a miracle in the coming decades? I’ve admitted that it does some good for some people; I just think the side effects outweigh the good things and that the potential for abuse makes it a less-than-optimal treatment option. Why are the ECT supporters so confident in the safety of the procedure? Haven’t “medical miracles” ever been discredited?
Dude, you have no freakin’ idea what you are talking about. We are talking about someone who was in a hospital terrified, seeing “filaments” in the walls, obsessively terrified about simple everyday things (like clean laundry). Within a few weeks, she was back to going to see plays and movies, cooking and entertaining, reading, enjoying her grandchildren…and, to be honest, several weeks after the procedure, I couldn’t see any cognitive/memory impairments from her pre-depressive state whatsoever.
I’m beginning to see what you mean, Loopydude. People will believe what they want to believe.
And I could probably pull an anecdote that shows ECT is a dangerous. Oh wait, I can. The plural of anecdote is not proof. Do you honestly believe that ECT has NEVER harmed anyone, that its outcome is ALWAYS good? You accuse me of hearing what I want to hear, but from where I stand you’re doing the exact same thing. And you’re not even admitting to the possibility of harm, while I’ve stated the possibility of benefits.
Fine, if somebody wants to shock themselves, be my guest. But I don’t think that the approval process is strict enough, and I don’t believe all the benefits and risks are laid out to the patients fully enough before they begin the procedure. There are enough dissatisfied customers of ECT that lead me to believe this. And I don’t care how many nondepressed grandmothers there are as a result of the procedure, if even one person suffered ill effects or felt they were pressured into it, then that needs to be taken into account. I honestly believe that the hit-to-miss ratio on ECT, if it were applied to a non-mental illness-related procedure, would cause it to be banned or at least reviewed a LOT more seriously than it is currently. I think its shoddy record is allowed to continue because the people receiving it are by and large disenfranchised and not taken seriously. You may disagree. But don’t you dare call me a Scientologist or say that I’m not hearing your side. I’m reading your links. I just don’t agree with them.
You have to take into account that ECT patients usually have severe clinical depression which, in case you have never seen it first hand, makes someone look and act like truly like death. They tend to resemble a person in a nursing home during their last days of life. It is completely non-functional. These aren’t people that just feel a little sad.
Also take into account that ECT is rarely used as a front-line treatment. Doctors usually try medications, talk therapy, and light therapy before ECT.
ECT has improved tremendously over the last few decades and the risks are fairly low. Your fallacy is that you don’t take into account that many of these patients will suffer irrevocable harm and possibly even death if they don’t get a successful treatment. You have to weigh both sides of the risks to the patient before you can say if ECT is appropriate for a patient or not.
The same way you explain “Well, after a while sometimes the drugs just stop working, and you have to ajust the medication, try some different things, different doses…”
Yep. Did you know they also use it on our HEARTS too? Imagine that!
:dubious:
I seem to remember you saying in a Pit thread not long ago that you were raised with the meme that mental illness is a sign of weakness, and that you still have to struggle with this. Might this not be coloring your opinions here?
Once again, ECT is used rarely, and only in extreme cases. Lobotomies are NOT performed anymore, and to compare the two is quite ludicrous.
I agree. davenportavenger is completely ignorant of the reality surrounding severe mental illness as are many of the others. I was thinking about the defibrilator comparison too. It has risks but it saves lives when nothing else can. Don’t worry about the long-term consequences of using your fire extiguisher if your house is about to burn down with your family in it.
I swear some of these people are judging mental illness by their friends that got Prozac from the student health center doctor. It is not always that way and it gets much, much more dire. There is no way that someone could spend a day in a psychiatric lockdown ward without having those views shattered.
It is also not fair to single out psychiatric drugs because we don’t have a full understanding of what they do. The human brain is the most complicated thing in the known universe. It could range from many years to many hundreds of years before we have it all tied together.
This isn’t unique to psychiatry. Other fields have findings all the time that are similar. Take an aspirin a day to protect your heart. “How does that work exactly down to the lowest level of detail?”. We don’t know. It just correlates well with the data. Most circulatory drugs are that way. Should we wait to we can model everything down to the sxubatomic level before we treat diseases using what statistics tell us?
Try this the next time your computer has a bug or crash. Try to research the lowest level of detail including the operating system, drvers, bios, and hardware. You say: “Rebooting/reinstalling solved the problem, I am all set?” That is not what you are requiring from psychiatric resaerchers. They just want an effective solution. It doesn’t matter if it comes from drinking pink KoolAid as long as good research studies show a scientifcially valid positive outcome. It is the same thing earlier people did to try to come up with treatments for various diseases. It is Ok for the theoretical framework to lag behind the practical findings.
A similiar statement could be made that your positive experiences with psychiatric care are colouring yours. Pretty much everyone in this thread has had experiences that influence their opinions. And unless he offers up his own experiences as evidence of something, I don’t see how they have a place in the debate (same as your experiences).
Given that they both “work” by causing brain damage, I’d say a comparison between the two is appropriate. Obviously ECT isn’t as bad as a lobotomy, but that doesn’t mean it’s “ludicrous” to compare the two.
It’s a completely bogus comparison. The impending death of someone with a heart attack is FAR more immediate then the possible suicide of someone with depression.
There most certainly is a way. Other people have had different experiences and have formed different opinions then you.
It’s also the same thing they did to come up with lobotomies, insulin comas, metrazol injections, and sterlization programs. Those things all “worked,” in that they produced an outcome that the doctors (and society) wanted and were endorsed by the brightest minds in psychiatry at the time.
[QUOTE=Metacom]
It’s a completely bogus comparison. The impending death of someone with a heart attack is FAR more immediate then the possible suicide of someone with depression.
[QUOTE]
People think that severe depression means that someone is just really, really sad. It isn’t that way at all. “Depression” refers to the fact that whole body and brain systems are shutting down. It is caused somewhere in the nervous system but that doesn’t mean the person has conscience control over it.
The immediate threat of heart stoppage isn’t important. The person is dead in any practical sense and there may be some spontaneous recovery or no recovery over time. There is no way to know but there is a treatment that will help them get better fast and the risks are low but not nonexistant.
[QUOTE=Metacom]
There most certainly is a way. Other people have had different experiences and have formed different opinions then you.
[QUOTE]
Time to pay the piper on this one.
Who has spent a significant time on an adult lockdown psychiatric ward and come to the conclusion that:
A) Severe psychiatric disease are just misinterpreted human actions within the normal range.
B) There is no such thing as a psychiatric illness
C) All patients will just snap out of it on their own given time.
D) People can choose not to have a psychiatric disorder if they try hard enough
E) People classified with severe psychiatric illnesses can be cured if you put them in the right environment.
Answer point by point if you know someone.
Truly, the money phrase.
In the early 1960’s I was twice given a series of ECT without my consent. The series lasted for about a two week period. At first they were every day and then maybe every other day. I don’t remember. I mostly remember being told. I was about nineteen or twenty.
Unlike what was pictured in the movies of that time, I was put to sleep first. I didn’t have any idea what was going on until I asked why I had sticky spots on the sides of my head. That I remember asking.
I lost a lot of my memory of my early twenties. I have memory problems now, but I don’t know how much is related to the meds that I take now and how much is because of the confusion that depression causes.
Anything would have been better than the “double depression” that I was living with.
The former Director of Mental Health for the state that I live in told me that the amount of electricity that is used for shock treatment now is considerably less than it was in the 1960’s. I would not hesitate to use it again if other methods stopped working.
I have found both the scientific data and the anecdotal information to be helpful in the fight against ignorance in this thread. I suspect that many of us tend to project from our own experiences. That’s understandable, isn’t it?
But it can be carried too far. Just because some have been mistreated, misdiagnosed, and mislabeled doesn’t mean that all are being abused by our psychatrists, live irresponsible lives, or take unneeded medications.
Metacom, considering the pain I went through with my depression, I’d almost rather have suffer a fatal heart attack than EVER go through that again. EVER.
If electric shock therapy had been my ONLY option (thank god it wasn’t), I would have done it. As it is, therapy and Paxil did it, and now I used Paxil to treat my anxiety disorder (OCD). Do you have OCD? You can’t reason with it. You can even KNOW your fears are irrational-that’s the thing. You know it’s completely ridiculous, but you can’t stop it. And even then, I often had “pure obsession”, which was the obsession without the compulsions. Basically, the compulsion is to try and rationalize it away, to sit there and analyze it to death, which only feeds into it and makes it worse.
And then to have people like Ahunter3 come waltzing in and state, “Nope, it’s not a chemical imbalance, people, it’s just a part of your personality, some quirk of life if you will”, well, that’s just insulting. It’s no different from some religious wacko who once told me that if a person is depressed, it’s because God WANTS you to be that way, it’s part of his plan.
Well, no. No it’s not. I can joke about my OCD, and such, and I can manage it now. But I don’t ever, EVER want to go through what I went through before being diagnosed again. I can’t imagine anyone else WANTING to go through that kind of pain.
Um, no. The body and brain aren’t shutting down, at least in any medical sense that I’m aware of. Are you speaking metaphorically? 
It’s not caused in the nervous system. The causes are unknown, but environmental factors play a huge role, and there may be genetic factors that increase one’s risk. I’ve never heard it seriously argued that depression is caused by something that occurs in the brain (that isn’t a result of an environmental stimulus).
Except on Zoloft commercials, of course.
The immediate threat of death is important. With someone who’s heart has stopped, that person will die within minutes if it’s not started again. If someone has severe depression, that person isn’t going to die if their prevented from killing themselves. Depression simply isn’t as immediately threatening to health as a stopped heart.
That’s not “paying the piper” that’s “stuffing the strawman.”
So we’ve moved on from SSRI’s to ECT?
ECT is a big deal. It should not be undertaken lightly. Modern techniques dramatically reduce the risk, and certainly make it look prettier, but there are often lasting effects on memory that are poorly understood. But the main indication is severe debilitating recalcitrant medication-resistant depression, and that is a pretty damn big friggin deal itself. Used for that indication the benefits are often great enough to warrant the risks. It is one of the most effective interventions available.
Now if you are going to claim that its “hit to miss ratio” does not justify its use, then I’d ask you to back up that claim with more than anecdotes. The procedure has lots of stigma attached, some real significant adverse effects, but it works and for some is a life saving procedure.