[quote=ucodegen][quote=jstoesz]
Oh, and EST here is some research for you…Not quite like “one flew over the cuckoos nest” anymore…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy%5B/quote%5D
I know two people who were treated by ECT (not called EST).. and they were never the person they were before the treatment. One committed suicide a few years later. Patients treated with ECT became more like a withdrawn shell of their former self. ECT can be viewed as an aversive training, much like severe/brutal punishing of an animal. After the punishment, they tend to go around cowering.
My personal belief is that ECT is a form of quackery put forth by psychologists who saw Skinner’s experiments (basically aversive training) and presumed it could be blindly applied to humans. It is a relatively easy form of ‘treatment’ where the psychologist doesn’t have to find the root cause for a problem in the patient, instead the psychologist presents the patient with the scenario of their psychosis and then zap..
BTW: The other person that I knew was treated by ECT was a young girl at the time, about 13, who my family suspected was raped and her psychosis at the time was her process of trying to cope with being raped by her father. From the time of her treatment on, she basically had to live in an assisted care facility; this from a former introverted by straight-A student.[/quote]
To counter this, I know a person who was treated by ECT. She was the most loving, funny, smart and wonderful person I know until her husband passed away. After that her mind began spinning out of control and she reverted to infancy unable to function as an adolescent no less an adult. She feared everything and was unable to sleep as her mind ruminated out of control. The doctors reccomended ECT to snap her out of it and it was my decision to make whether to proceed. I researched it thoroughly as all I could think of was Jack in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Full of fear, I decided it was the right thing to do. It worked wonderfully. Not only did it bring her back to where she was before her husband passed but she was actually able to think better and more clearly than she had been in many years. That was 19 years ago and she remains in the great mental health that ECT restored for her. Not a day goes by that I am not thankful for what ECT did for my mother who celebrated her 80 birthday last Summer.
