Electroconvulsive Therapy Argumentative Essay

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a somatic therapy, or a type of psychotherapy designed to engage a person’s body, invented in 1938. It’s one of three types of shock therapies that has been historically used in psychiatry. The other two types of shock therapies, insulin shock therapy and metrazol shock therapy, were established first and influenced the development of ECT. Understanding the history of shock therapies as a whole contextualizes the invention, use, and public and medical opinions of ECT. While both proponents and opponents of ECT agree on some key details of the history, there are factors each side tends to ignore or include in favor of presenting a specific narrative. The history of ECT is oft-debated and has been used as a

The media often framed the use of ECT as part of a grand battle against mental illness, and in viewing treatment this way, side effects or dangers of treatment were seen as somewhat inevitable quote-unquote “casualties” of this fight (Hirshbein & Sarvananda 4). Further, evidence of ECT’s success represented a triumph of man and science over seemingly incurable disease, a feat so magnificent it made people more willing to dismiss potential consequences. From the point of view of practitioners, ECT benefited them significantly in multiple ways. First, their success and the idea that they were able to cure such a seemingly hopeless condition improved the reputation of psychiatry as whole. Its tendency to calm erratic patients also bettered the atmosphere of psychiatric hospitals, as the patients undergoing this treatment were often violent or dangers to themselves (Hirshbein 149). This, along with the treatment’s apparent success, helped practitioners justify its use. While they were aware of side effects, such as memory loss and confusion, they also noted that patients undergoing ECT tended to have better outcomes than those who did not. Some patients were even able to leave the inpatient hospitals, which was considered the best possible outcome.

The first, a film from 1948 called The Snake Pit, features a benevolent psychiatrist doing his best to cure the main character (Hirshbein & Sarvananda 4). ECT is among the therapies he tries, and eventually, the psychiatrist is successful. While the movie portrays the doctor-patient dynamic in a way that clearly shows the psychiatrist has all the power, neither the doctor nor psychiatry itself is portrayed as a malevolent force. The second movie, a 1975 film titled One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, uses much more dramatic and horrific images of ECT, showing a patient undergoing the treatment without anaesthesia (Hirshbein & Sarvananda 9). Unlike in The Snake Pit, ECT is portrayed in this film primarily as a method of control exerted over the patient by the psychiatrist. These movies show a shift in the way the media portrayed ECT and psychiatry as a whole, especially the power dynamics between doctors and patients. For most people, the only exposure they had to ECT was through the media, so movies such as these greatly impacted the public perception of the treatment and psychiatry at