ABSTRACT
In the mid-twentieth century in America, electricity combined with convulsion in electroshock. Originating in the same Mediterranean region that had nurtured the uses of amber and the electric eel, electroshock came to dominate the repertoire of European and American somatic therapies for mental disease. And, despite professional, legal and lay challenges to the treatment during the decades of the 1960s-1980s (see Chapter 4), the use of electroshock continued throughout the twentieth century and into the new millennium (see Chapter 5).The Electroconvulsive Century
EST is a treatment that brings together the head and brain of the patient with the electrical machine. Electrodes are placed on the patient’s head either unilaterally (one electrode) or bilaterally (two, generally on the temporal lobes but sometimes on the back and front of the head); an electrical current is passed through the brain, generating an epileptic seizure in the patient. While early EST treatments were generally bilateral, psychiatrists experimented with unilateral placement during the 1970s and 1980s, returning to bilateral placement (in many cases) by the late twentieth century (Pearlman, 1991: 132).The Birth and Triumph of Pushbutton Psychiatry
There were different types of electroshock developed during the 1940s-1960s in America and Europe, including glissando EST (Steinfeld, 1951), a method that incorporated a gradual rise in current flow from zero to preset coordinates (Impastato et al., 1957: 381), and Multiple-Monitored ECT (MMECT), in which multiple seizures rather than a single seizure are induced during the coma (Mielke et al., 1984). There was also regressive EST, described by Abrams (1986: 26) as “conducted at some American hospitals
during the fifties. [It] entailed daily treatments. . . . So intensive a regimen rendered the patient profoundly disoriented, unable to speak or remember, incontinent . . . the therapy was based on the naive theory that if a neurotic patient regressed to an infantile state, his personality could be restructured by means of psychoanalytic techniques as he gradually returned to normal.”
