Electroconvulsive Therapy Explained

Electroconvulsive Therapy Explained

I was nauseated the first time I observed the practice of electroconvulsive therapy. I thought it was horrible that doctors had to resort to inducing seizures. It seemed barbaric. Then again… so is surgery.

But modern ECT is nothing at all like the portray in the movies. Patients are under general anesthesia. Muscle-blocking drugs prevent the body from having convulsions. The electrical stimulation of the brain lasts just a few seconds. The whole procedure is finished in a few minutes.

And it turns out that ECT is amazingly helpful for people with severe forms of depression. It has a 90% success rate for the melancholic subtype of depression. The success rate for medications is less than 15%. And psychotherapy just doesn’t work for these kinds of very severe depressions.

In this lecture, I explain how ECT came to be. I discuss how it was horrendously misused for the first 40 years of its history. I explain what happens during ECT and discuss its most important side effects.

The lecture was given at the May 26, 2020 meeting of the SZconsult learning community. Check out SZconsult.org for more information.

SZconsult is a free consultation + education service offered by Northeast Ohio Medical University. It's open to any clinician who wants to learn more about schizophrenia-spectrum illness, or who wants to tap into the collective wisdom of the learning community to find answers to clinical problems.

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