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Jonathan Sadowsky , Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy . Abingdon and New York : Routledge , 2017. Pp. 172. ISBN 978-1-138-69696-9 . £110.00 (hardcover).
I had only just finished reading Jonathan Sadowsky's Electroconvulsive Therapy in America when I happened across a prime example of the mythology of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in a local museum. In a glass-fronted cupboard sat a rather grubby and rough-around-the-edges ECT machine; propped up next to it was a card informing the visitor that ECT was commonly used in Victorian asylums alongside other 'horrific' physical therapies. ECT didn't arrive on the scene until the 1930s, yet is regularly erroneously associated with the Victorian asylum, where perhaps it is seen to be more at home. 'Mythology' is, I think, as apt a word to use for this phenomenon as 'misconception'ￂ -ￂ indeed it is a term Sadowsky himself uses when charting perceptions of ECT. For the majority of people, ECT conjures up images of shabby treatment rooms, patients being held down by teams of straining assistants, and the wards of decrepit asylums and mental hospitals. Yet for some it will conjure up images of a rather more modern environmentￂ -ￂ perhaps somewhere they visited as an outpatient just a week or so ago. And for some of these people, ECT will be credited as a treatment that has spared them a life lived within the walls of a psychiatric hospital, a therapy that has restored their autonomy and sense of self.
These differing opinions of ECT are...