Electroconvulsive Therapy's Shocking Origins

30 Morbid Minutes

Society & Culture, True Crime, History

4.8 • 731 Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, electroconvulsive therapy is still used to treat those struggling with severe depression, bipolar II, schizophrenia, and other treatment-resistant disorders. An estimated 100,000 people are treated annually across the U.S. Nevertheless, ECT carries stigmas due to its tarnished and sordid history, marred by inhumane and forced procedures, torture, and wild experimentation. We investigate ECT’s controversial past, how the practice has been abused, and how it’s evolved since. Go to http://earthbreeze.com/30mm to get 40% off when you subscribe. Go to http://babbel.com/30mm to get up to 55% off your subscription. Follow us on Social: https://twitter.com/elysewillems https://twitter.com/JessicaVasami Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:30.6	This is a rooster teeth production. Content warning. Mentions of suicide.
0:38.7	What do Judy Garland, Carrie Fisher, and Ernest Hemingway have in common?
0:43.0	They all have received electro-convulsive therapy, aka shock therapy.
0:48.6	Welcome to 30 Morbid Minutes.
1:03.9	Yeah. morbid minutes. This is the podcast where we explore topics of a morbid, macab, dark, and downright
1:08.7	grisly nature.
1:09.9	I'm Elise Willems.
1:11.9	And I'm Jessica Vasami.
1:18.0	In 1963, a writer and poet Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical book mirroring Plath's own life and events like her personal breakdown. In the Bell Jar,
1:23.5	the lead character, Esther Greenwood, slips into a debilitating depression following one unfortunate summer in New York.
1:30.4	Her normally vivid worldview turns into a mounting hopelessness.
1:34.1	Upon her return home, Esther is psychiatrically evaluated.
1:37.8	She is encouraged by her doctor, Dr. Gordon, to seek electroconvulsive therapies.
1:43.1	Esther's account of the experience is detailed as such.
1:46.7	Dr. Gordon was in locking the closet. He dragged out a table on wheels with machine on it and rolled it behind the head of the bed.
1:54.0	The nurse started swabbing my temples with a smelly grease. Dr. Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into
2:02.7	place with a strap that dented my forehead and gave me a wire to bite. I shut my eyes. Then something
	...

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