Lately I've been seeing a building rhetoric grow in popular media outlets that suggest electroshock therapy as a cruel and inhumane practice, even though it isn't designed to be so. If you ever met a violently-shaking schizophrenic or a severely distressed bipolar individual who's completely disassociated from reality (and has been so for days, manically cycling through a series of brain traumas that cannot correct themselves on their own), it's easy to point fingers around the medical community that treats the sickest kinds of people living among us.
It's illogical to assume that currents targeted to specific areas of the brain (that are already shutting down) would be overly harmful, since a severely dysfunctional brain is significantly handicapped to begin with. We run on electricity! All lifeforms on earth are held sway under the same natural principles of Applied physics, and our bodies (with brains) are no different. Would you ask a heart patient to remove his or her life-saving pacemaker just to suit your irrational fears about electrical currents and the mechanical devices made to heal them?
It seems cruel when I phrase it that way, right? And it is. We should be open to any healing practice that has years of solid science backing it. I know mental illness is scary. We've all been victimized by chronic abuse, most often at the hands of the seriously disordered, and isn't that reason enough to keep these kinds of helpful methods around? Any empirical scientist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence) would read the same data that I did, to come back to the same place. If it works, it works. Who are we to question someone else's healing? Let. It. Be.
Forget what you've seen in those old movies (based on better books) about cuckoo birds, insane nurses, and wrongfully-imprisoned Indians who seem harmless until they're violently tripped off. When was the last time you stepped over a homeless individual on the streets, yo? Like, yesterday, New Yorker?! We're confronted with illness every day. It ain't just hype when you confront damage like that, is it? It's real. People need understanding; not fear and ignorance. You need to heal. It's time.
Know the facts, first:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
- http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/electroconvulsive-therapy/basics/definition/prc-20014161
- http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/electroconvulsive-therapy
- http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/ect
- https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Treatment/ECT,-TMS-and-Other-Brain-Stimulation-Therapies
