Electroconvulsive Therapy

Carrie Fisher has done an excellent job of reinventing herself as ... Carrie Fisher, evolving from ingenue actress and geek pinup to salty, tell-it-like-it-is writer and humorist. And as Just Carrie Fisher she has a lot to say, mostly about her odd but compelling life, and enough to add a Part 2 to her memoirs. "Shockaholic" follows 2009's "Wishful Drinking," a bestseller that Fisher also turned into a one-woman show. The title is a clue to the reason Fisher says she wrote the book; a few years ago she started undergoing electroconvulsive therapy to treat depression.

Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, has been used to jolt severely and persistently depressed patients from their disabling mood state for more than seven decades. And while the treatment is considered highly effective, psychiatrists and mental health researchers have long scratched their heads over the question of just how the practice works to banish crippling depression, sometimes after just a few sessions. They are clueless no more. A new study sheds light for the first time on what ECT therapy does in the brain.

Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, has been used to jolt severely and persistently depressed patients from their disabling mood state for more than seven decades. And while the treatment is considered highly effective, psychiatrists and mental health researchers have long scratched their heads over the question of just how the practice works to banish crippling depression, sometimes after just a few sessions. They are clueless no more. A new study sheds light for the first time on what ECT therapy does in the brain.

Carrie Fisher has done an excellent job of reinventing herself as ... Carrie Fisher, evolving from ingenue actress and geek pinup to salty, tell-it-like-it-is writer and humorist. And as Just Carrie Fisher she has a lot to say, mostly about her odd but compelling life, and enough to add a Part 2 to her memoirs. "Shockaholic" follows 2009's "Wishful Drinking," a bestseller that Fisher also turned into a one-woman show. The title is a clue to the reason Fisher says she wrote the book; a few years ago she started undergoing electroconvulsive therapy to treat depression.

As a licensed clinical social worker and co-producer of a documentary in production on the ex-psychiatric patients' rights movement, I find your article, "A New Image for Shock Therapy" (Sept. 15) disturbing. Thousands of former psychiatric patients nationwide have been organized now for more than 20 years. They and their organizations are readily available, but no statements from them appear in your article. Consistently, and with no demands for anonymity, they have vigorously disapproved the use of shock (electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT)

"It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient," Ernest Hemingway remarked famously after receiving electroshock therapy for depression in 1961. Forty years later, a new study finds that the cure rate for the controversial treatment is far from brilliant, even when combined with drug therapy.

The country's largest professional group of psychiatrists announced elaborate guidelines Thursday for the use of electroshock therapy, the controversial treatment for severe depression that is experiencing a resurgence in medical practice. The guidelines drawn up by the American Psychiatric Assn. were described as among the most detailed ever issued to explain how a therapy should be used--testament to rapid advances in the science of shock therapy and to public pressure for accountability.

The electrical current throbs from one side of the skull to the other, scrambling circuits along the way, inducing a brief seizure. When it's over and the anesthesia wears off, patients often are subdued, confused, sometimes unsure of where they are or why. Then, sometimes, the remarkable happens: Severely depressed people find that the darkness has lifted; they feel better than they have in years. Others are left distraught. They've been shocked -- and feel no better than before.

Electroshock therapy, the controversial psychiatric treatment that led to the removal of Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton as the 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee, received a limited endorsement Wednesday from a federal advisory panel, which said that the procedure can be "life-saving" for certain persons suffering the most severe forms of depression.

The electrical current throbs from one side of the skull to the other, scrambling circuits along the way, inducing a brief seizure. When it's over and the anesthesia wears off, patients often are subdued, confused, sometimes unsure of where they are or why. Then, sometimes, the remarkable happens: Severely depressed people find that the darkness has lifted; they feel better than they have in years. Others are left distraught. They've been shocked -- and feel no better than before.

"It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient," Ernest Hemingway remarked famously after receiving electroshock therapy for depression in 1961. Forty years later, a new study finds that the cure rate for the controversial treatment is far from brilliant, even when combined with drug therapy.

As a licensed clinical social worker and co-producer of a documentary in production on the ex-psychiatric patients' rights movement, I find your article, "A New Image for Shock Therapy" (Sept. 15) disturbing. Thousands of former psychiatric patients nationwide have been organized now for more than 20 years. They and their organizations are readily available, but no statements from them appear in your article. Consistently, and with no demands for anonymity, they have vigorously disapproved the use of shock (electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT)

The country's largest professional group of psychiatrists announced elaborate guidelines Thursday for the use of electroshock therapy, the controversial treatment for severe depression that is experiencing a resurgence in medical practice. The guidelines drawn up by the American Psychiatric Assn. were described as among the most detailed ever issued to explain how a therapy should be used--testament to rapid advances in the science of shock therapy and to public pressure for accountability.

Electroshock therapy, the controversial psychiatric treatment that led to the removal of Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton as the 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee, received a limited endorsement Wednesday from a federal advisory panel, which said that the procedure can be "life-saving" for certain persons suffering the most severe forms of depression.

They used to call it "Edison's medicine" or, with a touch of gallows humor, a "Georgia Power cocktail" ? the practice of hooking mentally troubled patients up to an electrical current and jolting them until they went into convulsions. Pioneered in the late 1930s, electroshock therapy, as it was more commonly known, was a scientifically crude practice that often left patients dazed and disoriented, sometimes with broken bones. For many it became a symbol of the callousness that often characterized the treatment of the mentally ill. But that was then.