Who invented electroshock therapy

A Cleveland psychiatrist who was active then once told me that the doctors and nurses used to chase the patients around the room to get them to take Metrazol. Ironically, given that ECT would become iconic as a frightening treatment, the Italian researchers who proposed using electricity instead were searching for a safer, more humane and less fearsome method of inducing the seizures. Their colleagues, internationally, believed they had succeeded. Within only a few years of its invention, ECT was widely used in mental hospitals all over the world.

Many depictions of ECT in film and television have portrayed the therapy as an abusive form of control. There is probably no fictional story that so haunts our consciousness of a medical treatment. There is no question that ECT was benefiting patients then, but there is also a lot of evidence from that period showing that ECT, and the threat of it, were used in mental hospitals to control difficult patients and to maintain order on wards.

ECT was also physically dangerous when first developed. Now there are ways to mitigate those dangers. Current practice, known as modified ECT, uses muscle relaxants to avoid the physical dangers of a seizure and anesthesia to avoid pain from the electricity.

These modifications were learned early, but it took a while for them to become standard practice. He would have been able to witness all of this. This was not a major part of ECT practice, but this is not a comfort to gay people who received the treatment, for whom it could be traumatizing.

But it survived in the social memory of the therapy. By the s, the evidence that ECT was very effective for treating depression was robust. But there were also good reasons for patients to fear ECT. These reasons, combined with widespread revolts against authority and conformity that flourished in the s, also gave rise to a revolt against medical authority — the anti-psychiatry movement.

In its most extreme versions, the anti-psychiatry movement rejected the very idea of mental illness. But physical treatments, and most especially ECT, aroused its strongest rejections.

Most advocates of anti-psychiatry — even those who questioned the very reality of mental illness — were supportive of talk therapy. This provides another clue about why ECT occasions such deep divides. It evens raises questions about who we are, and what a person is. ECT use declined in the s and s, but revived starting in the early s. Meduna L. Z ges Neurol Psychiatr.

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