Saying depression is a “temporary change in behavior” is like saying pneumonia is a “temporary change in respiration.” It’s insulting and dismissive and indicates you don’t really care very much about this issue.

Depression kills people. ECT has serious side effects but it is also has proven efficacy and, if administered properly, is never fatal. All medicine involves this sort of cost-benefit analysis and in cases of severe drug-resistant depression, where there is a high risk of the patient dying in the short term, ECT is the only alternative.

While the parent comment isn't all that helpful, I suspect they meant "...in exchange for a temporary change..."; in other words, not that that depression is temporary, but beneficial effects of ECT are.

> Saying depression is a “temporary change in behavior"

That ain't how I interpreted the above comment.

> but it is also has proven efficacy

Right, but at what cost? It seems very much like something that just replaces one problem with another, at best (and at worst, introduces more problems while the existing ones don't go away).

But hey, as long as it's voluntary, who am I to judge?

> But hey, as long as it's voluntary, who am I to judge?

If we are talking about very severely depressed you can't trust them to weight the risks and benefits in their own favor, so the physicians have so big overwhelming influence on their decision that it can't be argued otherwise.

That's kind of what I was underhandedly getting at, yeah.

And when applied to more debilitating conditions like schizophrenia, "consent" is even more wibbly-wobbly.

You're lucky to never have been at a place in your life where that sounds like it's worth trying.

Maybe it's just me but I think I'd actually prefer suicide over the "possible" (but quite common) mental handicap that ECT will cause.

And please note that psychiatrists lie. Technically it may be the truth what they say, but it is a disgusting lie through deception. Yes it is quite rare for a single ECT treatment to cause permanent memory loss or "severe" loss of function. What they "forget" to tell you is that an ECT regimen is not one treatment, but 7 to 20 individual sessions. Mathematically you can say that (1-(1-p)^20) is a hell of a lot larger than p. Intuitively you can say that it only works BECAUSE it does damage. So without at least some loss of function there is no benefit to it at all). It is also not so rare for the treatment to be abandoned, by the way, because the particular loss of function has medical consequences.

They also say it doesn't hurt, except that is patently false. When you have a medical operation doctors will use 3 sedatives, not just one. They use something akin to GHB that prevents the formation of memories, a muscle relaxant (prevents you from moving) and something to actually sedate (depress neural activity). For ECT they use a muscle relaxant and GHB. So ECT doesn't hurt in the sense that afterwards you don't remember. They would use a sedative, except with those it doesn't work. The working principle of ECT seems to be extreme pain and trauma, and they merely prevent you from remembering that. They explicitly don't prevent extreme pain. We know it's extreme because it used to be done without any sedation at all, so there's no shortage of patient testimonies on the subject.

Psychiatrists still want to use it because it is effectively the only medical treatment that can result in permanent change in behaviour. Nearly everything else (or let's say everything legal/moral) only results in change while the treatment continues, like antidepressants. If the treatment is stopped (voluntarily or not, say because of money issues) all effects stop in a matter of hours to weeks.

And yes, I think it should be outlawed. Also the modern forms. That psychiatry has no answers for problems is not new.

Suicide is a temporary change in behavior.