Shock treatment is a type of therapy for patients with serious mental illnesses. Shock treatment makes the patient temporarily unconscious. Physicians use it alone or along with psychotherapy (see Psychotherapy ).
The first widely used forms of shock treatment were insulin shock therapy and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Both forms were used for treating severe mental illnesses during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Since 1950, American doctors have used ECT almost exclusively.
When physicians first used insulin to produce unconsciousness, they hoped it would cure schizophrenia. But the treatment helped only in some cases, and it often produced only temporary improvement. For these reasons, and because it is difficult to administer safely, the treatment is no longer used in the United States.
Electroconvulsive therapy was introduced a few years after insulin treatment. ECT produces convulsions, or seizures, in a patient. The simplest and most common method of administering ECT consists of passing an electric current through the patient’s brain for a fraction of a second. This form of treatment is also called electroshock.
Although ECT is simple to administer, it must be adjusted to each individual case. The number of treatments varies, but most patients receive about three a week, with a total of 6 to 10 treatments over a two- to three-week period. Physicians determine the amount and the duration of the electric shock by monitoring the patient’s brain waves to be sure that a seizure is produced. Pretreatment medications and general anesthesia are usually given so that the patient experiences no discomfort and neither feels the electric current nor consciously experiences the seizure.
The most important use of ECT is to treat hospitalized patients who remain severely depressed and suicidal in spite of drug treatment and psychotherapy. ECT frequently restores these depressed patients to a normal mental state. The reasons it does so are unknown.
ECT is controversial because it has sometimes been used as a punishment to control violent or uncooperative psychiatric patients. In addition, ECT often causes temporary amnesia, and some physicians claim that it also produces long-term memory loss. But there is little evidence to support this claim.
