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Comment by retsibsi | Hacker News Reader

It has that 'barbaric and probably pseudoscientific treatment that we surely abandoned 50 years ago' feel, doesn't it? But I remember reading in this SSC post (at point 7) that it actually works well, and isn't quite as scary as it sounds, although the long-term effects are still uncertain: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-...

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Memory loss is a very real problem with ECT. Most professionals downplay this and I find that a bit disgusting.

This is an anecdote, but I believe relevant.

I studied psychology as a mature student. One of the other adult students on my pre-degree course (kind of equivalent to community college I guess) had been a train driver. After two suicides on trains he was driving he'd developed clinical depression and been treated with ECT. This was around 2002, so it would have been the modern 'safer, targeted form of ECT'.

Ultimately despite an enormous amount of academic support on our programme he had to drop out. His permanent memory issues - a form of anterograde amnesia, were so bad he couldn't function academically, even at the limited level required to pass the course.

Depression is awful, monstrous, indescribably horrific and dehumanising. Losing ones mind, to me that's worse. As Hemingway said after his ECT (right before he committed suicide), "It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.”

EE here.

Electricity disrupts nerves. For better or for worse.

Its very artificial to help, and not solve the root problem. But, it does 'something'. And in Medical, something has a potential use.

Its really grasping at straws to solve this person's problem, but sometimes it helps.

Labotomies are still done too. They are now more scientific and are used to control things like eplilepsy, but still involve cutting/burning through brain to sever connections.

Nobody performs lobotomies anymore — haven’t since the ‘70s. You’re thinking of corpus callostomies, which sever hemispherical connections in order to limit the spread of epileptic signals. While they prompt fascinating questions regarding neurological integration of the self, they don’t cause the cognitive, emotional, or behavioral changes lobotomies do.

That is one form. There are also therapies, occasionally in the frontal lobe, that use much smaller electrical devices to heat sections of brain to sever connections. Some also use lasers. It is all about cutting connections, a direct evolution from the dark days.

Kind of OT, but talk of lobotomies reminds me of this classic question and answer from The Straight Dope [1]: "In medicine, what’s the difference between an -ectomy, an -ostomy, and an -otomy?"

[1] https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/607/in-medicine-wh...

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