Shock treatment for depression is making a comeback, and it no longer resembles a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Electroshock therapy, or ECT (the acronym stands for
electroconvulsive therapy) has been used to treat severe depression for
decades, but the serious side effects of the procedure, including
short- and long-term memory loss, have long relegated it to last-resort
status.
Widely used in the 1940s as an improvement on frontal lobotomy, ECT took a back seat to drug therapy with the advent of Thorazine in the ’50s. Now, decades later, a Pennsylvania startup called Neuronetics is completing the first full-scale clinical trials of transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS.
The procedure promises to treat depression as quickly and
effectively as electroshock without damaging mental function. If the
positive results of the trials are confirmed, TMS could be available to
patients in the United States in as little as six months.
Elizabeth Svoboda
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