When we look back a couple of hundred years
we are very critical about the way that the mentally ill were treated. At the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London in 1770 you
could have paid a penny to watch the depressed and the manic being bled, beaten, soaked in cold water and blasted with electricity.
In a standard ECT session electrodes are attached to one or both sides of the patient's
head and something like 80 to 100 volts are applied to the head for up to a second at a time. That amount of electricity provides
a big enough current to light up a 100 watt light bulb. Not surprisingly, perhaps, in a human being it causes a brain seizure
which can be traced on an electroencephalogram.
While being given the treatment patients are usually anaesthetised and given a
muscle relaxant. Without the muscle relaxant contractions can be so severe that bones can be fractured or teeth chipped. An
electrocardiogram is sometimes used to monitor the beating of the heart and some doctors give oxygen to reduce the risk of
brain damage.
After the electric shock has been given, patients slowly regain consciousness but
usually remain groggy and confused for a while. Sometimes patients complain that their ability to remember events from the
past disappeared. Author Ernest Hemingway was convinced that ECT erased his personal experiences and ruined his career as
a writer.
By the 1960s there was growing disquiet about this type of treatment. Despite a
lack of convincing evidence showing that pumping electricity into the brain did any good, a number of experts had decided
that it could do harm. Many patients told how they had been held down or tied down and given huge doses of electricity which
had sent them into violent convulsions. It all sounded terribly barbaric - more like something from a mediaeval torture chamber
than a twentieth century hospital.
Then, in 1975 the film `One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' was released. In the book,
based on Ken Kesey's book, actor Jack Nicholson was seen receiving electric shock treatment. This reinforced the idea that
electric shock therapy was cruel, barbaric and outdated. The amount of public pressure on doctors to stop giving electric
shocks to psychiatric patients increased for a while. But then psychiatrists started to argue that they had nothing else to
offer in the place of ECT. And the popularity of the technique began to rise once more.
All the Ect machines shown on this page can be found at..
The Stephen Beaumont Museum of Mental Health
Fieldhead Hospital,
Ouchthorpe Lane,
Wakefield,
WF1 3SP
tel: 01924 328654
With artefacts from the sister asylum to High Royds, The Stanley Royd former West
Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum.
The equipment shown is a comparable illustration of some earlier treatments used at
High Royds.
Free Admission and worthy of a visit.
All images Copyright, www.silverstealth.co.uk
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