A close friend of mine was given ECT and did experience the full horror story. She lost portions of her memory (there are still several months that are foggy for her) and on one occasion received burns from poorly placed electrodes. So my immediate reaction is to argue against this treatment.

However my friend had also not been given a formal diagnosis (she is now believed to be bipolar) and was on the receiving end of the "mud on the wall" theory of medicine. Her story may say more about the poor treatment of mental health problems on the NHS (I'm in the UK).

In general I think that it's a treatment that should be considered, but only when other treatments aren't going to be effective, as in this case.

I hope the author's son has as good a recovery as possible. This must have been a horribly traumatic experience, I can't imagine how bad.

I'm thankful to the author for writing and publishing this. It took courage, and it makes absolute sense now why she would have left this information out of the original article.

I sympathize with the Catch-22 of requiring patient signatures to authorize treatments when those treatments are rarely used except on patients who are so ill as to be virtually incapable of signing their names, much less deciding what treatments they want or need. And also with the terrible burden placed on family members to decide for their loved ones whether gambling on memory loss and other unknown consequences is an acceptable risk, given the alternatives. No one wants to have to do that type of emotional Calculus. And no one but no one wants to have to defend their choice to a public primed to react with some serious knee-jerking at the mere mention of ECT.

(On a side note, it seems to me that /One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest/ has done a lot more harm than good for the seriously mentally ill, given both the bias against ECT it engendered as well as the closure of many longterm facilities that followed in the film's wake and left thousands upon thousands of our mentally ill citizens perpetually homeless).

I do wish, given the anti-pharmaceutical perspective of the original article, however, that the author would have included the name of the drug that her son took after the first rounds of ECT failed, by themselves, to create a sustainable improvement.

Firstly -

love and hope for an eventual happy outcome for your son and for you.

Secondly - a very informative, moving and beautifully-written account - you're a gifted writer.

if shooting electricity into your brain was good for you, it would be illegal.

For the past three and a half years I've struggled with a neurological disorder most closely resembling Tourette's Syndrome (before that my condition was rather mild and did not require medical attention). For those of you unfamiliar with TS, it is usually accompanied by many other conditions, 50% of those with TS also have OCD, for example.

In addition to the disorders themselves, many of the medications used to treat them are absolutely miserable to be on. I've slept 23 hours a day for weeks at a time, and when awake, rocked constantly and compulsively with anxiety and depression.

For the past three months or so I've been functioning as normal people do...but I've also finally found a medication that works for me (I've been on 11 different prescriptions since a trip to the emergency room in 2004). I also take 225 mg of Effexor a day, which is an eye-popping dose.

Should my current medication stop working, I would certainly consider electroshock therapy before going back to medications like Haldol or Orap.

It seems to me that the previous article (which I read) was rather dishonest, since it knocked the antipsychotic drugs without saying what the actual effective treatment was.

I have seen ECT done many times and have assisted with the procedure more times than I can remember, although this was all decades ago.

The first time was a miracle. A man in his 60's who had Parkinson's disease had developed paranoid delusions as a result of his medication. Antipsychotic medication creates symptoms that mimic Parkinson's disease, and guess what, the reverse applies too!

Because of his Parkinson's disease he could not be given antipsychotics, so was given a course of ECT two times a week, and after three treatments he was as right as you or I and saying things like "I can't understand why I thought everyone was plotting to kill me."

Very gratifying. I wish I could say that all ECT is as successful. It often works quite well for a while, especially when the patient has a psychomotor retardation depression (is all slowed-up). Unfortunately the effects are often not long lasting and "maintenance ECT" has to be given to keep up the improvement.

It is a useful treatment for some people who cannot take other drugs because of other medical conditions, and is surprisingly safe as long as the anesthesiolgist knows what he/she is doing.

The patient is given an anesthetic (usually a barbiturate) and a short-acting muscle relaxant (a drug like curare to paralyze the body so the limbs don't shake during the seizure and possibly break (especially if the person is older and has fragile bones.)

The patient usually goes a bit blue in the face by the end of the seizure, during which a bit of facial twitching is seen, and not much else, but is quickly "bagged" and given some lungfuls of oxygen until the muscle relaxant has worn off and the patient is breathing for himself.

So it works, but the main problem is that no one really knows why, and I don't think insurance companies are too keen on paying for it.

The worst side effect may be long term memory loss, so this is absolutely not a treatment that you want to try for the fun of it, but if your life is already unbearable, then you might have nothing to lose.

The movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest depicted ECT being given to a Jack Nicholson with a personality disorder, which is a not an appropriate usage, but really people should stand up and tell the truth about what they see and know, so the author should be applauded for coming clean at the second attempt.