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Shock therapy describes a set of techniques used in psychiatry to treat depressive disorder or other mental illnesses. It covers multiple forms, such as inducing seizures or other extreme brain states, or acting as a painful method of aversive conditioning. [1] Two types of shock therapy are currently practiced:
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.
In 1927, Sakel, who had recently qualified as a medical doctor in Vienna and was working in a psychiatric clinic in Berlin, began to use low (sub-coma) doses of insulin to treat drug addicts and psychopaths, and when one of the patients experienced improved mental clarity after having slipped into an accidental coma, Sakel reasoned the treatment might work for mentally ill patients. [3]
[24] The New York Times described the public's negative perception of ECT as being caused mainly by one movie: "For Big Nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, it was a tool of terror, and, in the public mind, shock therapy has retained the tarnished image given it by Ken Kesey's novel: dangerous, inhumane and overused". [25]
Gene Tierney, American actress [50] Townes van Zandt, American country singer-songwriter [51] David Foster Wallace, American writer [52] Mike Wallace, American journalist [53] Tammy Wynette, American country singer and composer, who described having a series of shock treatments for depression in her biography. [citation needed]
Cardiazol convulsion therapy was soon replaced by ECT all over the world. [7] Cerletti and Bini were nominated for a Nobel prize but did not get one. As a trace origin, galvanism may have been a more primitive form of ECT such that James Lind was among the first to suggest electroshock therapy for insanity in the late 1700s. [8]
Aversion therapy is a form of psychological treatment in which the patient is exposed to a stimulus while simultaneously being subjected to some form of discomfort. This conditioning is intended to cause the patient to associate the stimulus with unpleasant sensations with the intention of quelling the targeted (sometimes compulsive) behavior.
The new "heroic" physical therapies devised during this experimental era, [29] including malarial therapy for general paresis of the insane (1917), [30] deep sleep therapy (1920), insulin shock therapy (1933), cardiazol shock therapy (1934), and electroconvulsive therapy (1938), [31] served to galvanize a profession which had been both ...