ECT (electroconvulsive therapy)

Conflict regarding memory loss in 1970s & 1980s in context of Americans’ preoccupation with “memory and heritage” re fragmentation/fragility of American society: “. . . the memories that former ECT patients complained about the most were those that reflected participation in the American public. . . . While psychiatrists measured treatment outcome and side effects through standardized assessment tools and statistics, disaffected patients countered with individual stories” (Hirshbein II, 158). During this period, ECT researchers did attend to patient feedback after treatment, but “ECT researchers had little use for patient narratives but rather wanted to manage subjective reports with rating scales, assessment instruments, and statistics” (155). By late 80s and early 90s, ECT practitioners were “more vocal about the benefits of the treatment – and less apologetic about its side effects.” This changed over the last decade owing to “articulate and sobering first person accounts of ECT and its memory side effects” [which’ “began to challenge the dichotomy between the pro and anti-ECT camps” (159). The “gender component of the debate” = after feminist movement, many women “no longer interested in having psychiatrists interpret their thoughts or feelings (Tomes, 1994). Yet, ECT required women to surrender their own narratives – and sometimes portions of the memory of those narratives – in order to try to recover from depression” (160). . . . “And, as with protobacco insistence on specific evidence, ECT providers’ increasingly stubborn unwillingness to consider the abundant evidence of cognitive side effects of ECT (albeit generated without randomized controlled trials) appears increasingly irrational and/or strongly biased” (161).