Dr Shock will be in Edinburgh Scotland the next couple of days. Attending the Scottish ECT Accreditation Network Meeting from SEAN. Will try to keep you posted but posts can be irregular the coming week. ..read more »

ECT: The Story of Two Women from Laura Piraino on Vimeo. A documentary style animation exploring the experiences of two women with clinical depression and modern electroconvulsive therapy. Animation By Laura Piraino. Music By Ben Cleek. An incredible good visualization of someone suffering from psychotic depression. Impressive animations. ..read more »

A superb location (the Grand Marina), in a beautiful town (Barcelona) full of sunshine (31°). A perfect setting for the 3rd Annual Meeting of EFFECT. Highly interested and highly interesting clinicians from all over the world attended the meeting to share experience and gain knowledge. Read the program and a short summary of the lectures on Electroconvulsive therapy ..read more »

Electroshock or Electro convulsive therapy is often depicted negatively in Hollywood films. It encourages stigmatization and discourages patients from its use. So if your About To Have ECT? Fine, but Don’t Watch It in the Movies: The Sorry Portrayal of ECT in Film. You can read more about electroshock in Hollywood productions in this prior post on this blog. If you want some information on video from patients while they are actually undergoing this treatment or want to see an excellent lecture about ECT please have a look at: 9 Videos on ECT. In newspapers when comparing newspaper reports on ECT and .....read more »

I don't think I've taken a blog to discuss ECT and it's uses in modern society, but let me just say it is used in the psychiatric community when depression is resistant to the plethora of anti-depressants that are handed out today. It's an ever continuing cycle and when the meds run out or no longer work, ECT is introduced into the client's regimen. At some point, I will write more of an expose on ECT, but for now I just want to stick to my experience. A nice account of ECT by someone undergoing this treatment. She even posted some .....read more »

Born in 1942 into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, the teenage Lou Reed was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy to "cure" his homosexuality. He worked as a house songwriter for Pickwick Records before finding cult fame with art-rock band The Velvet Underground. Post-VU, he released a succession of acclaimed albums, most significantly 1972's 'Transformer', whose themes of drug use and cross-dressing chimed with the mood of the glam-rock movement spearheaded by his friend David Bowie.Since recent I am participating in the update of the guidelines for ECT in The Netherlands. That gave me the privilige to meet patients treated or being .....read more »

In the years 2006 and 2007 the rates of usage of ECT in Edinburgh were only 0.82 and 0.88 patients per 10 000 total population. This is approximately a third less than the rate in 2005, and three-quarters less than the rate in 1993For comparison in Belgium in 2000, the ECT rate was 4.8/10,000 inhabitants. By 2006 it had increased to 6.6/10,000 inhabitants. In Spain in 2007 the ECT rate, measured in patients per 10,000 inhabitants, was 0.61. In Portugal in 2007 the ECT-rate was 0.5-1.2/10.000 inhabitants. In The Netherlands in 2000 it was 0.22 per 10.000 inhabitantsThe authors suggest .....read more »

Despite calls for a ban on the use of ECT without anesthesia, doctors in Baghdad say they often have little choice.For months the therapy has been administered without anesthesia because the hospital's anesthesiologists all fled the city. The World Health Organization has called for a ban on all ECT therapy without anesthesia.ABC News has a slide show about A Day in a Baghdad Psych Hospital ..read more »

Vermont, USA (With an interview of Anne Donahue)Vermont hospitals bring back ECT therapy to treat depressionUSAInfraPsychECT in the elderly, a cochrane reviewECT for Schizophrenia, a cochrane reviewAUSTRALIAAustralia, the black dog instituteSANE, AustraliaBetter Health Channel, AustraliaGREAT BRITTAINECT Online, Great BrittainSEAN, the latest information on ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy) in Scotland.THE NETHERLANDSHulp Gids, The NetherlandsPatienten voorlichtingRelated posts on this blog:9 Videos on ECTVideo lecture on ECT ..read more »

Found a new recent blog called Electroconvulsive Therapy, all about.... you guessed it.It has a recent post on cognitive side-effects with ultrabrief stimulus. The results were presented as a poster at the European congress of psychiatry of the AEP in Nice, France, 4-9 April.We concluded that bifrontal and unilateral ultra-brief pulse ECT are effective treatment techniques that do not cause measurable cognitive side-effects or cognitive complaints.The author also has a blog called: A day in the life of a shrink. It is in Dutch or should I say Belgian. ..read more »