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Michelle Brinkley
Jane Blakelock
English 2100
February 24, 2015
How does Electroshock Therapy affect women in the U.S.?
Electroshock therapy is a topic that is not talked about a lot in the United States but is
actually something that is happening. It is more common to find electroshock therapy being used
for women more often than for men. Electroshock therapy is a legal medical treatment to help
people with mental illness. Most people do not know about electroshock therapy and it is
important for people in our country to be enlightened about this topic and it should be looked
into more in depth than it is or has been. Electroshock can have positive, but mostly negative
effects on the patients.
When electroshock therapy was introduced to the American population through
magazines, the treatments exemplified the growing power of medical practitioners over disease
and mental illness. For the most part, magazine accounts of electroshock treatments in the 1940s
and 1950s enthusiastically described the possibilities of improving very ill patients. One Science
News Letter article explained that these treatments restore to sanity the living dead affected by
the dementia praecox form of mental illness (Hirshbien). This shows that people who were
really for electroshock therapy understood that this was a new good thing that would help the ill,
but they did not fully understanding what it meant and the long term effects on peoples lives.

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Electroshock therapy consists of patients being shocked by volts causing the patients brain to
have something that is like a seizure with hope of the outcome of being that the patient is
healed or better. The voltage that the doctors use depends on the age and the sex of the patient

(Daalen-Smith). For the past four decades, people receiving electroshock therapy have usually
been given a general anesthetic, a very powerful muscle relaxant to prevent fractures, and
oxygen because the muscle relaxant renders natural breathing impossible. Some statistics show
that the patient will usually undergo 6-12 treatments within the span of 2-3 weeks. Women are
more likely to get this treatment and more commonly elderly women. About 70 percent of
electroshock therapy survivors are women and 50 to 60 percent of the women are over the age of
60. This information seems to trend throughout other articles as well. For example, 100,000
people in the United States receive electroshock therapy per year. The majorities of the patients
are female and are elderly (Breggin). The fact that most recipients of electroshock therapy are
women and are older seems alarming and makes you think that there must be a reason for this
outcome for mostly women or elders.
This has to affect elder women greatly. Some patients report how they feel after their
treatments. Most report that the treatment did have short term effects, positive outcomes lasting
about two weeks. The majority also reported that they had memory loss and a lot of it including
major events like weddings of family members and other important events that should be
remembered. This is a very problematic issue because not being able to remember big events in
patients lives can cause problems not only in their life but even in their career as well. Peoples

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lives have been ruined due to the loss of memory, in their family and occupational lives. Some
cant even remember simple things like turning off the burner or remembering their way around
the kitchen (Breggin). People have also reported feeling dumber. A college student named Sally
was depressed and received electroshock therapy treatment and after the treatment when she
returned to her normal life she dropped out and said she felt dumber and felt as though she
couldnt comprehend things like she used to (Ejaredr). This really shows the negative effects
that electroshock therapy has long term.

These days electroshock therapy is most often prescribed for people with depression.
People with severe depression often get this treatment when their other medications do not work
or when they make their depression or problems even worse. There are also doctors that often
have been prescribing this treatment automatically without trying any other type of treatment
options. Psychiatrists who perform this therapy are protected from lawsuits from patients with
brain damage (Breggin). There for electroshock therapy can cause brain damage and cause
people to forget even events from their childhood. This is a very scary thing to think about. It is
almost as though you have lost part of yourself, your childhood, and you only remember part of
who you are. It is very interesting that electroshock therapy is still a legal treatment even though
it can cause brain damage. People seem changed or different from who they were before the
treatment. There are many things that make them different, like being clumsy and cannot
think or voice their thoughts (Breggin). This seems like a serious problem. Ruth is a 47year-old woman. She was interviewed or looked at for research in the
middle of a series of shock treatments but was unsure if shed had four or

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six. Her mouth was dry and she was very weak. She explained that despite
significant opposition by friends and family to her having electroshock
therapy, she agreed to it in hopes of getting better. In addition, Ruth
explained that shed had shock therapy in the past for long-standing
depression but became very manic and signed herself out after five
treatments (Daalen-Smith). This shows straight forward how it effects people
in a negative way. Memory loss, weakness, and results from past treatments
of being manic which seems alarming.

On a positive note some doctors find electroshock therapy to be very beneficial in some
situations. Postpartum Psychosis (PPP), which is a mental condition, occurs in 2 out of 1,000
women who have recently birthed a child. This condition includes symptoms that consist of
delusions, mood swings, and confused thinking that can be harmful to the mother and infant. It is
very unhealthy and requires serious and immediate treatment (Babu). There are not a lot of
research studies on indications, safety, and advantages of electroshock therapy in postpartum
psychosis. One review suggests that the use of electroshock therapy as first-line treatment for
postpartum psychosis is a good choice considering the concerns about medication exposure to
the nursing infant. I think that doing this for women who are nursing is a good idea and the
results seem good as well. It appears to be an effective treatment under these circumstances and
the mothers can still nurse without harming the infant. Electroshock therapy in this situation
could save these peoples lives and the mother can still see the baby when she is not getting

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treatment. But as always this could have some negative affects considering the memory loss and
such.
There is also another type of electroshock therapy that some doctors use. Maintenance ECT
(mECT) is the long-term therapeutic use of ECT in a lower adjusted frequency (e.g., monthly),
with the aim of preventing disease recurrence (2, 5) (Dahan). After ECT (electroshock therapy)
was introduced mECT (maintenance electroshock therapy) was introduced shortly after and was
applied in order to maintain remission after receiving regular electroshock therapy.
experience suggests that C/M-ECT could reduce the likelihood of re-admission by decreasing the
severity of RC, thereby providing a cost-effective treatment (Amino). A patient that had received
electroshock therapy started receiving mECT to keep his life stable. Attempts to stop mECT
consistently led to symptom recurrence and, in the absence of suitable alternatives, resuming
mECT was warranted (Dahan). This shows that maybe after every patient receives electroshock
therapy they should start receiving maintenance electroshock therapy to keep them well and to
prevent their disease or whatever problem they were having from recurring. M-ECT is mostly
used for people who dont like to take medications. ECT and MECT are good options for
elderly patients, particularly those who are drug refractory, medication-intolerant or medically ill
(Rabheru and Persad 1997). (Kucia). This shows that mostly elderly people receive mECT
because they dont like taking medications. More doctors should look into using mECT after
electroshock therapy for their patients so that they do remain healthy and well after treatment.
As you read there are positive and negative effects on the pateints who are effected by
electroshock therapy. There has to be a better solution other than electroshock therapy to help

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heal people with depression or other mental illnesses, but it has not been figured out yet.
Electroshock therapy is really affecting peoples lives in a negative ways and very rarely it looks
like it turns out a positive outcome. It may help short term but the negative affects long term out
way the short term and make it seem that electroshock therapy is not worth the damage and is not
always the best solution for people with mental illness.

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Works Cited
Amino, Kaichiro, Shigemasa Katayama, and Makio Limori. "Successful Treatment
with Maintenance
Electroconvulsive Therapy for a Patient with Medication-resistant Rapid
Cycling Bipolar Disorder." : Psychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences. 65.3 (2011):
299-300. Web.
Babu, Girish, Thippeswamy Harish, and Prabha Chandra. "Use of Electroconvulsive
Therapy (ECT)
in Postpartum Psychosis-a Naturalistic Prospective Study." Archives of
Women's Mental Health. 16.3 (2013): 247-51. Print.
Breggin, Peter. "ECT Damages the Brain: Disturbing News for Patients and Shock
Doctors Alike." Ethical
Human Psychology & Psychiatry. 9.2 (2007): 83-86. Print.
Breggin, Peter. "Electroshock: Scientific, Ethical, and Political Issues." International
Journal of Risk &
Safety in Medicine. 11.1 (1998): 5-36. Print.
Daalen-Smith, Cheryl Leslie Van. "Waiting for Oblivion: Women's Experiences with
Electroshock." Issues in Mental Health Nursing (2011): 457-72. Print.
Dahan, Eyal, Evgenia Or, Avi Bleich, and Yuval Melamed. "Maintenance
Electroconvulsive
Therapy for a Neuroleptic-Intolerant Patient with Disorganized Schizophrenia."
(n.d.): n. pag. Web.

Ejaredar, Maede, and Brad Hagen. "All I Have Is a Void: Women's Perceptions of the
Benefits and Side
Effects of ECT." International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine 25.3: 14554. Web.
Hirshbien, Laura. "History, Power, and Electricity: American Popular Magazine
Accounts of
Electroconvulsive Therapy, 19402005." Journal of the History of the
Behavioral Sciences. 44.1 (2008): 1-18. Print.
Kucia, KRZYSZTOF ARTUR, RADOSAW STEPACZAK, and Beata TRDZBOR.
"Electroconvulsive Therapy
for Major Depression in an Elderly Person with Epilepsy." World Journal of
Biological Psychiatry. 10.1 (2009): 78-80. Web.

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