Question: What is shock theropy?

Alice Jones Bartoli answered on 15 Jun 2011:

Shock Therapy – or electric shock therapy (EST) is a rather controversial treatment for psychiatric disorders, mainly used these days for depression when everything else has failed.

Several decades ago, it was used much more routinely with all kinds of mental illnesses, and as a method for ‘curing’ people of things like being gay or being autistic. If you’ve ever seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, you’ll see an example of the sort of thing that used to happen. One problem with EST is that it’s been abused horribly in the past, and so people are understandably wary about it now. There is also a concern that it’s associated with memory loss, which could be a pretty big problem for the people that it’s trying to treat.

Another possible problem with shock therapy is that no-one really understands how it works. Some theories include allowing the brain to ‘forget’ why the person is depressed, punishing the brain for its depressive thoughts, and increasing the amount of certain brain chemicals which might improve mood and mental functioning. The truth is that no-one knows for sure how and why it works.

Shock therapy is extreme, and I think I’ve made it sound quite negative, but it does work for some people – some people do say that it helped them to survive some very severe depression. We just don’t know why…