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What Happened the First Time Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) Was Used on a Human?

It was disturbing, shocking and inhumane

By Yana BostongirlPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
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What Happened the First Time Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) Was Used on a Human?
Photo by Jon Butterworth on Unsplash

April 11th, 1938 was the date when Italian neurologist, Ugo Cerletti acquired his first human guinea pig to test the first-ever Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) device that he had developed with his colleague, Lucio Bini. The police had found a vagrant wandering the streets of Rome and had delivered him to the Clinic of Mental and Nervous Diseases in the hopes that he would get help there but that was not exactly what happened.

According to an article published by Psychology Today, the doctors who worked at asylums were already aware that symptoms of epileptic patients seemed to improve after they had had a seizure. Following his experiments with the drug Metrazol, a stimulant, Portuguese psychiatrist Ladislas Meduna observed a diminishing of symptoms in his patients after deliberately inducing the seizures. He discovered that the symptoms in his patients drastically reduced after these episodes.

This was known as convulsive therapy. However, Metrazol (withdrawn by the FDA in 1982) was known to produce violent thrashings in the victim sometimes causing spinal fractures and sometimes causing them to develop intense dread which even drove them to suicide.

In the 1930s, Ugo Cerletti had an idea at the butcher's when he noticed that the pigs were electrocuted to induce a coma-like state before being slaughtered. He and his team initially practiced electroconvulsive therapy on dogs without much success initially. This was because the placement of the electrodes, one in the mouth and another in the anus, led to cardiac arrest in the dogs. Later on, after the sacrifice of many dogs in the name of medicine, they realized that placing the electrodes on either side of the head was far more effective in delivering electricity without being fatal.

This is an excerpt from an article that speaks about Cerletti and his team's experiments that he carried out on dogs: When Cerletti began testing this idea on dogs, however, he realized how dangerous the approach might be: about half of the animals subjected to electrical shock died of cardiac arrest. What’s more, Cerletti’s group was using stimulation of around 125 volts to cause convulsions in dogs—and death in humans had been reported after as low as 40 volts.

By the time the perfect human guinea pig suitable for his type of experiments appeared, Cerletti considered himself to be ready to proceed with his experiments on humans.

The first time Cerletti tested electroshock on a human, he made three attempts according to an article. What began at a tentative 80 volts, increased to 90 and 110 volts which exceeded what was considered safe for humans at that time.

Fortunately, the patient did not die. In fact, he showed so much improvement that he was able to be reunited with his wife who was frantically searching for him.

Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini were nominated for the Nobel prize for their work.

Since then, the field of Psychiatry has seen several new treatments such as anti depressants, lithium which diminished the popularity of electroshock treatments. Another reason for their declining popularity in the 1960s and the 70s was the "anti psychiatry" wave that condemned electroshock treatments as inhumane and harsh. However, it started regaining traction in the 1980s.

ECT has since come a long way from how it was first administered in the 1930s. This is how the article in Psychology Today describes the advancements: "ECT's discovery as an effective treatment for severe mental disorder represented the first real hope for patients once considered to be untreatable, and it continues to offer many patients relief from otherwise unrelenting and debilitating psychiatric symptoms."

A version of this article was published on NewsBreak.

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About the Creator

Yana Bostongirl

Top writer in This Happened to Me on Medium and avid follower of Thich Nhat Hanh. Yana loves to write about life, relationships, mental health and all things she has a passion for.

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