Information AboutShock Therapy |
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Shock therapy is the deliberate and controlled induction of some form of physiological state of Shock in an individual for the purpose of Psychiatric treatment. Shock therapy was an attempt to produce these same changes artificially and under controlled conditions, so that psychic recovery might be induced. Although once common, with advances in psychiatric Drug s, shock therapy is now reserved for only severe cases of Depression and Bipolar Disorder that do not respond to other kinds of therapies, such as Psychotherapy or drug-based treatment. Although once used for the treatment of Schizophrenia , it is now generally regarded as being ineffective for that purpose. HISTORY Physicians have noticed for thousands of years that a person's Mental State sometimes changes dramatically following recovery from physiopathological shock or Brain Seizure s, whether induced by a Head Injury , an intense Febrile Illness such as Malaria , or chemically induced loss of consciousness or convulsions. In the time of the Roman Empire , for instance, Electric Fish were used to provide electric shocks to ill patients. For example, Scribonius Largus used it in AD 47 for treating persistent Headache s. It is said that the Emperor Claudius himself was one of his patients. Other instances of medical use of shock therapy were Paracelsus , who used seizures induced by Camphor to treat psychosis in the 16th Century ; Drs. Jean LeRoy ( France , 1745 ), Robert Whytt ( London , 1751 ) and Leonard Yealland (London, 1917), all of whom used weak (non-convulsive) faradic electrical shocks to treat various "nervous, hypochondriac, or hysteric" cases as well as men suffering " Shell-shock ". With the rise of more biological explanations for mental disease, at the end of the 19th century, the search for biological treatments also increased. In a short decade between the 1920s and the 1930s, several methods were discovered by scientists who started to experiment with shock-inducing techniques. Due to the absence of any other effective therapeutic approaches to mental disease, in the next two or three decades shock therapy became one of the most widely used tools of psychiatry. Hundreds of thousands of patients were subjected to it, including many important personalities, such as writers Ernest Hemingway (who shot himself after undergoing ECT treatment at the Mayo Clinic ) and Janet Frame , poets Sylvia Plath (who also later committed Suicide ) and Robert Lowell , performer Paul Robeson , rock star Lou Reed , film actresses Frances Farmer , Vivien Leigh , Clara Bow and Gene Tierney , pianists Vladimir Horowitz and Oscar Levant , talk show host Dick Cavett and politician Thomas Eagleton . Though popular in the first half of the 20th Century , shock therapies are now considered too risky, and only electroconvulsive therapy is used today. FORMS OF SHOCK THERAPY
MECHANISMS OF ACTION The mild effectiveness of most forms of shock therapy indicate that a generic (i.e., the growth of new Neurons ) in some areas of the brain which are involved with the control of Emotion s and Memory . Since chronic depression is associated to a neuron loss in the same areas, this might explain the therapeutic effect. Some antidepressive drugs, such as SSRI -based therapy (e.g., Fluoxetine , a.k.a. Prozac), might also share the same mechanism of action. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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