Electroshock as Means for Social Control

Abstract

144 fter more than 80 years of clinical experience, electroconvulsive therapy A (ECT)—the induction of grand mal seizures as treatments of severely ill patients with psychiatric disorders—continues to raise strong emotions with doubts of its efficacy and fears of its adverse effects. To these criticisms, Jonathan Sadowsky, Professor of Medical History at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University sees the treatment as a means of social control. He comes to this subject with prior writing on the history of madness treated in Nigeria in the colonial era. He begins by quoting the “whee” of Sylvia Plath and the failure of her first course of treatment. A recurrence was successfully treated. In the history of trials of electricity in medicine, the induction of seizures using electric currents was developed in fascist Rome in 1938 by Professor Ugo Cerletti as replacements for those induced by chemicals in Budapest 4 years earlier by Ladislas Meduna. The first electric inductions were remarkably facile and safe to apply, and the technique was quickly brought to America by prewar European émigrés. By 1941, 42% of American psychiatric hospitals had ECT machines. Although Sadowsky doffs his hat to the treatments' usefulness in relieving severely depressed, manic and psychotic patients, he focuses his interest on its social impacts. In his third chapter, he considers “ECT has been used as a mechanism of social control: 1) ECTas a tool for maintaining order and hierarchy on the wards of mental hospitals; 2) ECTas a tool for gender conformity, and 3) ECTas a tool for the enforcement of sexual norms.” The enthusiasm aroused by the successful and quick treatment of long-term hospitalized psychiatric ill is compared with the publicly praised limited benefits of psychoanalysis. The conflicts encouraged public anti-ECT movements in the