Talk:Electroconvulsive therapy

I think something about the history has to be in the beginning paragraphs, for there will be many people not having the least idea when it became available--I can imagine they might guess anyway from 1800 to 1960. It would also be useful to say about when the various key improvements came about.

There are of course, many other fictional and real examples. An interest one is Nash; because of his intellectual stature, there were great efforts by his family & friends to prevent ECT being used and it wasn't. Instead they used insulin shock; am I right that it has very similar effects? Probably it would be useful to indicate not only that 30% even today have persistant memory loss, but what proportion have profound memory loss--the material available to laymen tends to underplay this.

But undoubtedly you've thought of all this, DavidGoodman 22:50, 1 November 2006 (CST)

Please go ahead. I'm certainly no expert on this -far from it; I approached this just to try to pare the article down to a neutral and verifiable core. My gut instincts are (for all health articles) to carefully avoid claims about efficacy and risks except those summarised by systematic reviews or policy statements.Gareth Leng 11:44, 6 November 2006 (CST)

We seem to now have at least 1 neurologist, and probably several psychiatrists, on board, and I will very gladly leave it for them rather than try to get the right wording, or use theright statement:}DavidGoodman 20:40, 6 November 2006 (CST)

Fine, I'm done with this - the references still need thinning out and checking. My role here stops at this partial clean up of the WP original.Gareth Leng 11:09, 7 November 2006 (CST)