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Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a controversial therapy used to treat certain mental illnesses such as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, depressed bipolar disorder, manic excitement, and catatonia. [1] These disorders are difficult to live with and often very difficult to treat, leaving individuals suffering for long periods of time.
By 1940, the procedure was introduced to both England and the US. In Germany and Austria, it was promoted by Friedrich Meggendorfer. Through the 1940s and 1950s, the use of ECT became widespread. At the time the ECT device was patented and commercialized abroad, the two Italian inventors had competitive tensions that damaged their relationship ...
In the 1940s and 1950s ECT machines used sine-wave current and patients were given a shock lasting a fraction of a second. [15] Views on ECT were generally positive in the early days of its use. The Ministry of Labour ran a recruitment campaign for psychiatric nurses featuring a picture of someone undergoing ECT. [18]
[2] [3] [21] During the war years in the 1940s, electroconvulsive therapy would become a fixture in psychiatric centers in the U.S. and abroad. [5] Impastato served the war effort as a psychiatric examiner, even as his practice during that period expanded rapidly into large offices on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and a private out-patient clinic.
Frances Farmer, American film actress, who described standing in line with other girls at mental hospital waiting for shock treatments in the 1940s. Carrie Fisher, American actress and novelist [18] Fisher speaks at length of her experiences with ECT in her autobiography Wishful Drinking. Janet Frame, New Zealand writer and poet [19]
It was introduced in 1927 by Austrian-American psychiatrist Manfred Sakel and used extensively in the 1940s and 1950s, mainly for schizophrenia, before falling out of favour and being replaced by neuroleptic drugs in the 1960s. [2] It was one of a number of physical treatments introduced into psychiatry in the first four decades of the 20th ...
In an attempt to treat those patients diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia, Bender employed electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) after finding that the practice was successful in other applications. ECT was used in an experiment in Paris on children and adolescents in 1940 and showed positive results.
The 1940s was the decade when psychosurgery was most popular, largely due to the efforts of American neurologist Walter Freeman; its use has been declining since then. Freeman's particular form of psychosurgery, the lobotomy , was last used in the 1970s, but other forms of psychosurgery, such as the cingulotomy and capsulotomy have survived.