[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 Patients treated with ECT became more like a withdrawn shell of their former self.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]
I know little or nothing about ECT (I thought it was still called electro shock therapy). It does seem rather quackish, but many things about psychiatrists seem rather quackish…
I am an ME who loves the simplicity of mechanisms for their cause and effect. I have little love for pills, because the cause and effect is so muddled up in the myriads of unknown side effects. Psych meds scare the bejesus out of me. So needless to say, I find ECT even more ridiculous.
I only brought it up because I thought a previous poster had “one flew over the cuckoo nest” visions of lobotomies and ECT’s.
I think most modern medicine has a tendency to hype the positive and overlook the negative. But I guess I have stepped into a field that I know little about (my wife ridicules me constantly for my distrust of medical studies).
