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by astockwell 844 days ago
Careful, that was literally the exact same selling point of Electroconvulsive therapy 80 years ago.
4 comments

So...there's a distinction:

Electroshock therapy for behavioral modification in schools: bad

Modern Electroconvulsive therapy under anesthesia: actually effective and arguably lifesaving for severe clinical depression.

> Electroshock therapy for behavioral modification in schools: bad

Is that just violent punishment / torture by another name?

Yes, that's why it was banned in Massachusetts, if I recall, there were state schools/institutions that were using it way back when.
Shocking!
In Massachusetts? Not sure I'd use that word. Look up the Fernald Institute.
Lack of human experiments and anesthesia
If you've got a better treatment for a case of severe depression that's resisted all other attempts at therapy and medication, we're all ears.

If not, I suggest we leave it up to the patients and their doctors to determine whether or not ECT is improving their lives, or not.

SAINT protocol tCMS from Magnus Medical https://www.magnusmed.com/

Not available to everyone yet.

ECT therapy is AWESOME. It can treat depression and mood disorders, and it can help with severe epilepsy.

It was falsely maligned in the "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", because it can _look_ upsetting. However, even when it was done without anesthesia, it caused amnesia so patients didn't remember the procedure itself.

I have someone in my family history that underwent electroshock therapy, and by all accounts was only traumatized and destabilized further by the ordeal. YMMV, I guess.
I remember reading the comparison, that all modern psychiatric treatments can be thought of as banging a misbehaving car engine with a hammer.

Sometimes it helps, if the hammer is hitting just the right place. Often it does nothing, letting the underlying disease to progress. And in distressingly many cases, it can harm patients.

This absolutely applies to the ECT.

So because the patient cannot recall the traumatic events, they're not thought to be experiencing that trauma, or taking lasting effect from it?
Yep.

That's also how dissociative sedation works. You don't remember being sedated, and you are not (psychologically) traumatized by medical procedures happening during it. I had it several times for minor oral surgeries, and it's great.

And the modern ECT is also done under deep sedation.

How long after the event do you think it makes sense for this erasure to happen? Like, let's say that you are going to experience something absolutely traumatic but you know next week you won't remember it... is that also ok?
Yes? You are basically describing every surgery.
Not really though. Surgery typically uses anaesthesia that makes you not experience it in the first place, which is different than forgetting the trauma.

I don't think the human memory is well understood enough to say for sure whether consciously forgetting something means that there aren't still effects of your body having experienced the trauma in the first place. The mind, it would seem, goes deeper than conscious recollection, and perhaps beyond the brain.

Plenty of children abused before they can remember it still have exhibited signs of harm from the trauma.

Yes, those are taken far too lightly as well.
I'm reminded of this particularly beautiful TED Talk... https://www.ted.com/talks/sherwin_nuland_how_electroshock_th...