Word: electroshock
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...Surgeon General's report argues that "there are virtually no absolute health contraindications" for electroshock. It notes that psychiatrists have revised their technique for delivering the electricity in the past generation so that less power is needed and, consequently, fewer side effects result. For his part, Hartmann says he has often gone to work around noon after morning electroshock sessions. "The people in the office are just agog that you can add two and two, that you're not drooling," he says. "But my concentration was actually improved, and I felt so much better." Hartmann says the memory problems...
...course, uninformed medical consent is a problem not exclusive to electroshock, and judges can force other kinds of treatment as well. But electroshock is an unusually retro procedure, one that some psychiatrists avoid. According to the Surgeon General, the response rate for electroshock is an impressive 60% to 70%--about the same as today's superpills, including Prozac and its kin. But that fact itself embarrasses some psychiatrists, who would rather not think of themselves as well-educated electricians. Not all psychiatric residents learn electroshock. Younger psychiatrists are more ambivalent about it than older ones, according to a 1999 survey...
...when performed properly, psychiatrists say, electroshock is simple, safe and looks a lot more boring than its cinematic counterpart. Curtis Hartmann, 47, a Westfield, Mass., lawyer who has received about 100 electroshocks since 1976 to help control his bipolar illness, knows the procedure well. Hartmann fasts the night before, a routine practice before general anesthesia. He leaves his home around 4 a.m. and drives to nearby Holyoke Hospital. He goes to the second floor and turns left toward the short-stay surgery unit. His body is prepared for electroshock in three ways: an anesthesiologist puts him to sleep; a chemical...
Before Italian researchers first tried electricity in 1938, doctors used chemicals to induce the frightening, painful seizures. Electricity worked faster, but the pain of uncontrolled convulsions remained. Patients fractured their spine, bit their tongue, broke bones. Consequently, the devils who ran some asylums used electroshock as punishment. In many circles, it retains a frisson of barbarity. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath reinforced the image. "It was a brilliant cure," Hemingway wrote sarcastically in the days after his electroshock and before shooting himself, "but we lost the patient...
Hartmann quotes that line in his fascinating, not yet published memoir, Life as Death. He knows some people don't respond to electroshock, and he understands the risk he takes when he undergoes it (his most recent treatment was last summer; he currently takes medications). A tiny number of patients die: the National Institute of Mental Health says the figure is 1 in 10,000, about the same as any procedure involving anesthesia. Antishock activists cite Texas statistics from the mid-'90s, saying about 1 in 320 electroshock patients died in the two weeks after treatment, though the deaths weren...