What is electroshock therapy?

Electroshock therapy is a medical procedure used to treat mental diseases. Treatment, also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), consists of short explosions of electricity administered by the patient's brain. Sometimes it is used to treat severe depression when antidepressant drugs are not used.

Italian neurologist Ugo Cerletti began to examine the benefits of 1938 electroshock therapy. He noted that pigs that are about to be hit were unconscious to facilitate the process. Cerletti concluded that this procedure may be useful for patients who suffered from mental illnesses. Only a year after Cerletti performed this discovery, therapy was introduced into the United States.

Over the next three decades, hundreds of thousands of patients have been subjected to ECT to treat different conditions, including depression, schizophrenia and even homosexuality. By the sixties, however, she began to find her credibility as a treavardly questioning. Psychotropic drugs were widely used as a treatment of mental illnesses andAntidepressants were considered to be a more humane form of treatment than the pumping of the brain. It shows some promising results for patients that antidepressants have not helped, leading to new interest in treatment. According to research conducted by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), ECT has about 30% higher success in the treatment of depression than medicines.

APA statistics have shown that a patient suffering from severe depression can be brought back to normal health in just three weeks using electroshock. The 1990 report claims that this therapy is the safest and most effective treatment of severe depression and in 1998 100,000 shocks were performed in America.

Electroshock therapy has gone a long way from the procedures used in the first days, but many people still associate it with negative depictions in a number of popular films and books. Peter Bregen, a psychiatrist and author, is a very loud opponent of ECT and claims that undergoingThe procedure is similar to playing Russian roulette with the brain. Proven side effects include memory loss, cognitive problems, headaches, muscle pain and nausea.

Use this type of therapy is the individual. In most places, ECT can only be done legally with the patient's consent. This cannot be forced to someone as a treatment and written consent must be provided to the patient or court measure.