What is having ECT like?

Lucy Tallon describes her own experiences of ECT in a recent article in The Guardian and says the experience is nothing like it is portrayed on screen, for example recently in the programme Homeland. See Lucy’s article here . The photograph is from Homeland.

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How ECT works

A team of Scottish researchers ( Perrin et al. , 2012) have produced evidence that ECT decreases connectivity in the brain of depressed patients, leading to a reduction in symptoms. They used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to scan the brains of nine patients, all of whom had severe clinical depression and had not responded to drug therapy. […]

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ECT – good or bad?

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has been arguing in favour of ECT as a safe treatment for severe mental illness, according to a short piece in the current issue of the BPS magazine The Psychologist. The APA claims that ECT is effective 80% of the time and there is no evidence for any associated brain […]

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