I knew many of the
activists who campaigned against electric shock therapy in the 1960s
when the entire society turned against this form of mental treatment.
Regrettably I gave them office space, but I never gave them funds.
They used Ken Kesey's electro-shock images from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in their campaign.
I
recently had a close friend who went into a deep, year long suicidal
depression. He had had a psycho-therapist for ten years who he
continued to see very often during the increasingly severe depression.
The doctors at Kaiser Medical tried all four kinds of anti-depressants
and more than three in-house lock-ups. Nothing worked.
(One time he took 50 sleeping pills, 40 of his anti-depressants and 45
of his anti-anxiety pills and didn't die; he was pretty much a zombie
for two days.) Finally his doctors, but not his psycho-therapist,
favored electro shock.
I looked it up,
its called ECT, electro-convulsive therapy these days. I helped
finally get my friend into ECT and drove him to and from his 11
treatments. ECT is a very brief treatment, with the electric intensity
of a 100 watt light bulb applied to the brain for 30 seconds. A few
hours are scheduled to make sure there are no adverse effects. The
only common effect is loss of short term memory. Sometimes this loss is
funny. My friend often thought he had lost his watch, keys, phone etc
after treatment, but he had never brought them. He forgot his address
and always wanted to know his occupation. I made him write down phone
and computer passwords which he often needed.
Short, poignant and very important summary. Electro-convulsive therapy worked where nothing else came close.