The Director of Mental Health at the World Health Organisation, Dr Benedetto Saraceno, has said on the public record that ECT without consent should be prohibited. In terms of human rights, he compares involuntary ECT to the practice of "direct" ECT, which is ECT without any anaesthesia, a truly barbaric practice that occurs in many countries but is not permitted in Australia. Invountary ECT, however, is routinely carried out throughout Australia and, as Sam Westgarth's article shows, is increasing at an alarming rate.

Thanks for breaking the silence on this, Sam.

ECT works.

It has side effects. None of this is particualrly revelatory

It looks pretty weird - in a past life I was involved in its adminstration.

It is safe as any other procedure undertaken after a person is rendered unconscious - that is, there are always risks of anaesthetic death -

My mother has had ECT. I felt it a better option than having dead mother at the time.

The author writes as though all the side effects are visited upon all the subjects all of the time. Nothing could be further from the truth.

ECT can be administered irresponsibly - the problem does not lie with the form of treatment itself but with a health system that will allow for the indiscriminate adminstration of any number of treatments, and ECT is only one of them, in a poorly scrutinised system.

I am with Sneekeepete.
It works.
A friend of mine suffers from schizophrenia and was institutionalised as a result of her failing to take her medication. Many different treatments failed to produce any improvement to her mental condition.
Thanks to ECT, administered under anaesthetic, which was tried as a last resort, we now have her back again, functioning normally, although still receiving fortnightly injections from the district nurse.

David

With respect, this article is an outstanding example of the “sheep” (and somewhat alarmist) approach to a very serious health issue. I make the following observations:

1. “One in four Australians suffer from some kind of depression….the Australian public has cause for concern.”

The correct figure is 1 in 5, which is across a lifetime, not at a given point in time (as this seems to infer). “Some kind of depression” covers a wide range of situations and diagnoses, only a very small proportion of which would be potential candidates for ECT treatment.

2. It is debatable whether a person with serious (or even moderate) depression has the ability to give “informed consent”. It is not a simple case of saying “yes” or “no”. Mental capacity in most cases will be significantly diminished by the effects of depression, including confusion, memory loss etc.

3. A medical specialist is under no obligation to explain his or her treatment recommendations to a semi-informed journalist.

ECT is a last-resort form of treatment that isn’t well understood, granted. However, the point that has been completely missed here is that the forms of depression that make people a candidate for ECT is also “barbaric”. It is vastly worse than one would imagine. My experience resulted in a shift from an IQ of around 135-140 to an IQ of perhaps 85-90. Some days I struggled to tie my shoes.

Where severe symptoms persist and have not responded to other forms of treatment, it is not even remotely humane to leave patients in a state of intense pain when successful (if imperfect) treatment is available.

As an undergraduate, a psychology professor noted that signing one’s informed consent for ECT while in a “healthy” frame of mind is likely to be an valuable protective strategy for anyone sliding into “the abyss”, should the question arise at a later point in time. Having suffered reasonably serious depression, I’d prefer skin burns and memory loss to that frame of mind every day of the week and twice on Sundays

The attempt to link modern ECT to the horrific scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is risible. It's like comparing modern surgery to a back-alley amputation by a 19th century barber.

I suggest that Edward, an inpatient at a psychiatric ward, perhaps isn't the most reliable source of an informed, balanced opinion on ECT. He probably also thinks Satan is communicating with him through the pages of the Financial Review.

And just quickly, Eljay, you mean "implied", not "inferred".

Sancho said: "And just quickly, Eljay, you mean "implied", not "inferred"."

Picky, picky! I was about to fire off a similar note about the use of imply/infer, recently. Yes, in its original usage, one implies something with one's words and another draws an inference from them, but the dictionaries I consulted seemed of the view that the weight of common usage rendered either acceptable. Anyway, that is far from the worst linguistic crime I have seem committed on this forum.

Anyway, to the point. This article is some of the worst drivel I have seen served up on OLO. I am no expert on ECT but the standard of writing/research/"journalism" is apalling. To wit:

"As reported with the use of the contestable “Tazor”"

Did you mean "Taser?" Did you mean detestable?

"I decided to help her seek some sort of third party."

Third party what?

"If the current were not limited to the head and were not in such short spells, it would kill you instantly."

Yeah - but it IS limited to the head and it IS in short spells. So what is the point? That is like saying that if you tried to defibrillate someone's heart by hooking them up to the mains instead of using an AED, it might kill them. Yes, it might well! So what!

"It is well known that the practice causes the destruction of memory synapses in the brain resulting in amnesia."

So what is a memory synapse, Sam? Is it different to any other synapse in the brain? Do you even know what a synapse is?

As for referencing Wikipedia in an article about something scientific - just ludicrous. And while we are at it, the fact that one guy committed suicide after ECT, proves neither causation nor generalisability. So why mention it?

And all of the above in addition to what other have already pointed out.

Sam if you want to be taken seriously as a "freelance journalist" you better pick up your game a bit. This is pseudo-scientific babble.