Can popular culture stop demonizing electroconvulsive therapy - ECT - it's an effective treatment for severe mental illness these days not a fucking torture device
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TV: ECT is awful! Look at this man being tortured to death in a chair! Reality: ECT can be amazingly effective and involves anaesthetic and muscle relaxants
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Replying to @GidMK
True, but as a skeptic I also think skeptics need to avoid falling into over generalisation ourselves. Some people do benefit from ECT. But abuse of ECT hasn't 100% stopped, not even in Oz. Also some small % who eventually benefit find it very distressing initially.
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Replying to @streetsyourtown @GidMK
These points might not need adding if we had excellent, equitable mental health care for all who need it, but we're a far way from that yet, so there are quite varied patient experiences of ECT out there.
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Replying to @streetsyourtown
Yeh but those criticisms could be applied to most mental health treatments equally, and yet you don't see people being force-fed drugs or CBT with nearly the same frequency
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Replying to @GidMK
Not sure if you're saying ECT is more commonly given as a pressured/coerced treatment than the others here? CBT being a go to for chronic illness, when diagnosis hasn't been properly worked through yet is becoming a pretty common problem.
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Hm? No, I'm saying there are issues at every level of the mental health system so picking ECT out doesn't really make sense except as a throw-back to the 70s
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