From Mad in Canada: Ugo Cerletti, an Italian physician, is usually credited as the first psychiatrist to use ECT on a person who was suffering from mental illness. That was 1938. More than 80 year later, ECT is still being used. For many, this fact tends to be a stunning (pun intended) revelation. It’s quite common for those who have had little to no contact with mental health care to view shock therapy as a brutal and antiquated part of psychiatry’s history, and to believe that it’s no longer in use. In fact, ECT “is still used on approximately a million people annually”.
Read the entire article here.
