In general, deeply depressed people interpret and perceive even language and visuals differently, in more negative and cynical lights, its hard to consciously teach yourself to constantly perceive the opposite or think in a more positive way, perhaps just stimulating ALL nuerons helps calibrate paths that otherwise were not favored other neuronal pathways highly utilized by depressed people.
To be honest, I've seen more people in my life die from going from antidepressents to street heroine than I have people from ect. I am not ready to say ect is safer than antidepressants. It's also to be noted antidpressants its a multibillion dollar industry of which a very few very rich families make a ton of money and also sell the same drugs for heroine overdoses, many heroine addicts of which came from being cut off from abusing antidepressants, 1/3rd of all heroine addicts actually so...
when you compare ect therapy to a massive opioid epidemic that makes a few people rich, and all of the violence that has encompassed the heroine drug dealing industry, I would say ect is potentially a safer option.
It has a stigma because of how it was originally used.
I would still though be interested in psychadelics over ect but shrooms can cause permanent damage and impacts everyone differently as well so both are hard to streamline I imagine.
This is why I label ECT scorched earth. It risks significant self-damage in what is often a last resort. I'm not dismissing it as a useful treatment, I'm saying it is broad and unfocussed as a result of our inability to do any better, to come up with a better tactic that doesn't risk wholesale destruction of the person. If it was a real war, perfect knowledge of the enemy might allow a less destructive strategy: the same applies here. But there are no medical treatments that don't carry significant risks. It's all a balance, with escalating risks taken when less risky options don't work.
Many smart people choose ICT because of freedom it offers. Although biological/medical research looks interesting, i would not want to do it because things like this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
(even trivial questionnaire research is plagued by impossible board reviews)
The story you linked to is exactly this situation. They showed up on the doorstep with nothing but a vague idea and no clue on how a project like this was supposed to be organized-- details they could have learned in an hour or two.
Research with human subjects is not something you can approach with an MVP, move fast and break things approach. (Also a resident doctor is still literally in training. Needing someone above that level to oversee the process is by no means unreasonable, and a PI is not the same as giving that person credit for the research: The person that wrote this blog could still have received first author placement.)
I've had to work with IRBs and I've heard the same committeee described as a nightmare to work with, or a breeze. The difference I've notice is that people who are organized about it do fine. The rest get basic things wrong, raise those red flags, and have a hard time as a result. If you do not, for example, fully describe the data you will use and how it will be used in your initial submission then an IRB must be conservative and assume a general lack of care for such things.
Stakes are much higher. There are no "build it in a weekend" projects with human research subjects. You need to be willing to put in at least a few weeks of lit review, proposal organization before you get ready to submit something for review. If a person doesn't have the discipline for that then no serious project they undertake in any profession should be trusted, even when that isn't required.
Do you think closing a VC deal would be any less stringent? Would you show up on their doorstep without even knowing how their pitch process worked and expect to be welcomed with open arms? Of course not.
However it's important to keep in mind that
1) Memory loss is often very short term, or temporary.
2) losing the ability to hold down a job is a non-issue for patients who may end up out of work on disability
3) Many antipsychotics and mood stabilizers come with their own memory issues and other side effects... There's always a trade off.
4) We need better treatment methods. To say ECT is a shotgun approach is an understatement. It's a scorched-earth approach where you hope the ashes end up fertilizing a new crop.
5) It's a tragedy that many of our best and brightest STEM minds pursue an education that leads them to jobs optimizing ad-tech or hustling for an exit plan to get rich. Theranos duped so many people in part because everyone wanted to believe big tech could be more than this. Which at least means that if you're in it for the big payoff then you should find something with the same potential for human impact only, you know, not a massive fraud. If you do that, you'll bank a lot more money than in finding the next SaaS that provides an incremental improvement on an existing product category.