Covid-19 has severely impacted all health system resources,
including ECT services, which have the difficult responsibility of
deciding when ECT can be postponed or avoided, versus when it is
urgently or emergently needed.
The below two articles discuss this issue of how "elective" a procedure ECT is:
Is Maintenance Electroconvulsive Therapy Always an Elective Procedure?: Weighing Medical Versus Psychiatric Risk
Kellner, CH.
ECT Today: The Good It Can Do. Psychiatric
Times, Sep 15, 2010. Accessed on Mar 22,
2020. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/electroconvulsive-therapy/ect-today-good-it-can-do
This comment was sent in by Max Fink
ReplyDeleteRe: Alan Stone
Education in psychiatry in the 1950s was faith dominated, in the beliefs that Bleulerian and Freudian psychotherapies and concepts would solve emotional ills. Being psychiatrically trained at Harvard's (or Maryland's Chestnut Lodge) was the epitome of every trainee's goals. (My final psychiatry training year was in 1952 at Hillside Hospital in Long Idsland.)
The leading flagship institutions were dominated by rigorous orthodoxies that the newly experienced psychotropic drugs and ECT were unethical. Alan Stone, a most esteemed psychiatrist and legal scholar, describes the cruel care offered many patients -- the rejection of ECT for a melancholic woman, and in his military experience, inappropriate regressive ECT for soldiers in a leading American military hospital.
These shameful and unethical stories remind us that psychiatry education and faith based beliefs dominated our profession in the second half of the 20th Century that led to today's hundreds of imaginary DSM and ICD classification labels that are without systemic bases, test verifications nor offer effective treatments. Surely, the remarkable efficacy and safety of ECT should encourage early effective treatments despite the present world crisis.
Max Fink