What comes to mind when you think about Electroconvulsive Therapy [ECT]? For many, visions of the old-fashioned shock therapies that required patients to wear a helmet covered in electrodes and endure large amounts of voltage come to mind. It’s often thought of as something from the Stone Age of medicine and is barbaric at best. What you might not know is that ECT is not only still in use today, but it is often prescribed more often than you might think.
Statistics About ECT
1. Some studies have found that the fatality rate in ECT treatments is as high as 2.9 per 10,000 patients. Others have found fatality rates to be as low as 4.5 per 100,000 patients.
2. Up to 40% of ECT patients in New York receive treatments based on court orders. In Manhattan, up to 70% of the treatments that are given are court ordered.
3. According to statistics from California, 1 in 50 people who receive an ECT treatment have some form of memory loss afterward.
4. The amount of people who have memory loss according to APA data: 1 in 200.
5. People are more likely to receive ECT between the ages of 50-69 more than any other age group. This accounts for nearly half of all treatments.
6. ECT is rarely a first-time treatment option in youth – only 35 kids between 16-19 years of age received a treatment in the last year.
7. Over 100k treatments are given every year and that only includes information from hospitals that track this data.
8. Most ECT recommendations come from a minority of consultants. In one region in the UK, 15% of the consultants were responsible for 40% of the ECT treatments that were given.
9. When other medications are not used to treat mental health conditions, the success rate of an ECT treatment may be as high as 90%.
10. The relapse rate for ECT patients after 6 months: 70%.
11. A national survey of ECT survivors in 1995 found that 13.6% described their experience as “very helpful”, 16.5% “helpful”, 13.6% said it had made “no difference.”
12. For women who had an ECT treatment that they did not consent to having, half of them described the event as damaging. Only 8.6% said that the experience was very helpful.
13. The number of people diagnosed with manic depression after an ECT treatment: 1 in 2.
14. More than 35% of people who receive an ECT treatment are later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
15. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, over 80% of depressed patients who receive ECT respond well to it.
16. In the UK, nearly 20% of people who were offered ECT and refused it were not given any alternative form of treatment, even though their symptoms qualified as a diagnosable mental illness.
17. According to one survey of ECT patients, 55% of them felt that they had not regained their normal memory function three years after receiving their treatment.
18. Memory loss of any kind is responsible for up to 93% of all reported complications of ECT.
19. Nearly 18% of those receiving ECT during a 3 month period in 1999 did so without providing consent in the UK.
ECT works by delivering a shock to the mind that creates a seizure. In many ways, it seems to reboot the entire brain so that it can lift the veil of depression. It might even be able to reconnect nerves or neuroconnections that have stopped functioning properly for some reason. Many doctors talk about ECT as the human equivalent of turning a computer off and then turning it back on again. It might even change the levels serotonin and dopamine in the body.
Although ECT is often used to treat depression, especially severe cases that involve delusions or suicidal ideation, it is also used to treat conditions that produce mania. It’s also been used to treat bi-polar disorders in severe cases. With up to 12 treatments over the course of a few weeks, ECT is remarkably safe and performed under close medical supervision. Muscle relaxants and general anesthesia are administered before the treatment occurs.
Are you thinking about asking your doctor about ECT? Do you want to know more about what ECT might do? Here are the statistics that you’re going to want to know.
Additional Important Facts to Know
How good is ECT? How damaging could it be? No one can really say, especially if you’re looking at ECT from an American perspective. The procedure is so unregulated that dentists have to follow more rules that an ECT treatment provider.
The one real issue that comes up when considering ECT is how often it is used as a forced treatment. With so many complications that can come up with this treatment, it is almost unconscionable to force people into such a treatment. Memory complications can easily last for up to 3 years past the procedure date. There are also other issues, such as poor circulatory health, that could actually end up causing someone to die during the procedure that is being forced upon them by the court system.
It is also interesting to note that although medical researchers state that there are high rates of success with ECT, those who have this procedure done to them think quite the opposite. In every demographic, a majority of patients feel like the therapy was detrimental to their overall quality of life. Maybe the success rates that are being looked at are in regards to patients who are suicidal deciding not to commit suicide. It is probably pretty difficult to be depressed or upset about something when you can’t recall anything about your life in the first place!
Does ECT benefit some people? It probably does. With some specific conditions where medication and therapies like CBT don’t seem to be working, ECT might be the right course of action to take. It should always be with patient consent, however, because the risks of side effects are so great. If more than half of people report long term complications, then the risks of the procedure must not be greater than the rewards. Unfortunately it seems that the risks are just too great in many cases.