Is ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy) right? or even legal? I thought it was used in the 70's and stopped?

Question

anyway. the reason I ask is because I am a mental health student nurse and next week I am due to observe a treatment of ECT. I was quite shocked to hear my mento tell me this because I thought it was a very bad way of treating patients as I believed it was unethical, painfull and can cause long term damage. I didn't want to refuse because I want to make a good first impression as this is my first hospital placement...I just need to know if other hospitals use this treatment and if it is ok to do so

Answer 1

i assisted with ect in the 1970s and have personally seen the results of this treatment. i have mostly seen very good results. i have seen it help young people, and even a 65 year old woman full of anxiety and it worked well for her. for most people it helped a great deal but there were always some people that it did not work for. even in 1970 ect was the last resort when everything else failed. it did have some side effects, such as memory loss, but were usually short lived. today the treatment is better on how they do ect. and now, as then it is the last resort after medication, counseling, and all other avenues have failed. sometimes it takes a series of treatments for it to work. although it is probably a very frightening experience to go through for the patient, it has probably done more good than harm. hope this helps, u have picked one of the most rewarding jobs, good luck

Answer 2

I did ECT in October and it is the worst thing that I could have done. It is legal, and they have a totally different way of doing it today than in the 1970's. My memory is gone and about 1 month ago, I overdosed, I strongly beleive that my overdose was caused by the ECTs. You really wont see anything that will really scare you, there is no shaking , they just put the person to sleep and place electrodes on the persons head. good luck though. I dont think it will be as bad as you think.

Answer 3

My dad, who is bipolar, had ECT during an involuntary hospitalization in the 1950's. He said it saved his life. He also said that he would rather die than go through it again.

At the time my dad had ECT, it was one of the few things the psychiatric medicine community had to offer people who were bipolar or who were deep in clinical depression. There are many more medications available now to treat these conditions, so thankfully the need for ECT is much diminished. However, there are some patients whose treatment is intransigent to medication and for these ECT is a last-resort treatment.

Here are some websites devoted to information about ECT:

http://www.ect.org/
http://www.psycom.net/depression.central.ect.html
http://www.medhelp.org/lib/ect.htm
http://www.ectjournal.com/pt/re/ject/home.htm;jsessionid=FtTfvX2MM5g29Gz4D7bGNSXNh9pH8mXn8zz9jBBbX70FZTqV5NBS!-1996709112!-949856145!8091!-1

Answer 4

Yes it's legal and it's done very differently than it was in decades past. It can offer relief from depression when all else has failed. The biggest complaint is memory loss.
From what I understand, it is not painful and I certainly wouldn't say it's unethical. I mean, we're not talking about a lobotomy!

Answer 5

Yes, they still do ECT, but it's much different than it used to be. The after effects are nothing like the brain-damage they used to get from this decades ago. It's still used as a last resort, but it is helpful.