Technological Persuasim

Technological enthusiasm is the excitement and anticipation of the ways in which technology can improve life in a society. During the 1950s lack of information and dependence on the media allowed journalists and filmmakers to greatly color the history of the ECT and contributed to its function as a fear device. This embodies Ulrich Beck 's risk society in which communities " are at the mercy of social institutions: weather services, mass media, cabinet offices, officially determined tolerance levels, etc."(Beck 1987). Today this technology has become an effective method for treating mental disorders due to the rise of accessibility to information as well as the awareness of risk society. This paper will discuss the role of technological enthusiasm

This limited presentation of information would only be further expanded on during the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s. According to Beck" the everyday knowledge about the danger, which in decisive respects is a sort of fourth-hand knowledge, in others is based on personal evidence opposed to scientific and legal definitions."(Beck 1987). By this time ECT had become a widely accepted psychiatric practice and had answered it 's ECt 's largest criticisms of the time, the primitive lack of anesthesia. Despite the certain misuse of this practice shortly after its founding this public outrage did not surge until the 1960s when these practices had largely become discontinued,"there is no question that ECT was benefiting patients then, but there is also a lot of evidence from that period showing that ECT, and the threat of it, were used in mental hospitals to control difficult patients and to maintain order in wards" ( Endler, 1988). This campaign was led by flower children, journalists, and unintentionally filmmakers "the antipsychiatry movement is being propagated by journalists and critics whose views of psychiatry are unflattering despite the abundance of scientific advances that are gradually elucidating the causes and treatments of serious mental disorders"(Nasrallah, 2011). Most notable in the ECT 's fall from grace was the film portrayal in One Flew Over the Cuckoo 's Nest which widely signified a turning point for ECT as popular culture and the antipsychiatry campaign began to perpetuate images of fear and abuse. Both the novel and the film "mingled ECT and lobotomy together in a grisly depiction of what one would not want to happen if one fell into the clutches of psychiatry"("The History of ECT:" 2004). This film portrayal gave fire to an already rapidly spreading antipsychiatry movement which sought to condemn horrific psychiatric practices of the past such as the "use of physical and/or chemical restraints for violent or actively suicidal