Latest news with #electroconvulsivetherapy
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
The Sleep Room by Jon Stock review – the psychiatrist who abused female patients
In a hospital in Waterloo, London, in the mid-1960s was a psychiatric ward full of sleeping women. Suffering from disorders ranging from post-partum depression to chronic anxiety to anorexia, the residents of the 'sleep room' were sedated and woken only to be washed, fed or subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). All were under the supervision of psychiatrist William Sargant, who at the time was hailed as a pioneer. Sargant claimed that a combination of enforced narcosis and ECT could fix disturbed minds. Failing that, the treatment would be surgical lobotomy. The Sleep Room is author Jon Stock's gripping account of a scandal in which female patients were denied dignity and agency by a man who wielded absolute power over their bodies. The book is ably narrated by actors Richard Armitage, Antonia Beamish and Celia Imrie. The latter's contributions are unusually personal since, at 14, Imrie had been hospitalised with anorexia and was put under Sargant's care. In her remarkable and haunting testimony, Imrie remembers Sargant as 'tall with an evil presence'. Though she doesn't believe she had electro-shock treatment, she witnessed a woman in a neighbouring bed going through it, recalling a 'huge rubber plug jammed between her teeth; the strange, almost silent cry, like a sigh of pain, she made as her tormented body shuddered and jerked; the scent of burning hair and flesh'. Stock's book paints a grim picture of the medical establishment's attitude to mental illness. Sargant's ward was finally closed in 1973. In the weeks before that happened, he destroyed most of the case records. He was never investigated and died in 1988 with his reputation intact. Available via Little, Brown, 11hr 48min BookishLucy Mangan,Penguin Audio, 6hr 59min The Guardian's TV critic reads her memoir in which she looks back at a life shaped by literature. My Next BreathJeremy Renner, Simon & Schuster Audio, 6hr 35minThe American Hustle actor's memoir recalls his accident in 2023 when he was crushed by a snow plough, leading to surgery and months of rehabilitation.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
The Sleep Room by Jon Stock review – the psychiatrist who abused female patients
In a hospital in Waterloo, London, in the mid-1960s was a psychiatric ward full of sleeping women. Suffering from disorders ranging from post-partum depression to chronic anxiety to anorexia, the residents of the 'sleep room' were sedated and woken only to be washed, fed or subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). All were under the supervision of psychiatrist William Sargant, who at the time was hailed as a pioneer. Sargant claimed that a combination of enforced narcosis and ECT could fix disturbed minds. Failing that, the treatment would be surgical lobotomy. The Sleep Room is author Jon Stock's gripping account of a scandal in which female patients were denied dignity and agency by a man who wielded absolute power over their bodies. The book is ably narrated by actors Richard Armitage, Antonia Beamish and Celia Imrie. The latter's contributions are unusually personal since, at 14, Imrie had been hospitalised with anorexia and was put under Sargant's care. In her remarkable and haunting testimony, Imrie remembers Sargant as 'tall with an evil presence'. Though she doesn't believe she had electro-shock treatment, she witnessed a woman in a neighbouring bed going through it, recalling a 'huge rubber plug jammed between her teeth; the strange, almost silent cry, like a sigh of pain, she made as her tormented body shuddered and jerked; the scent of burning hair and flesh'. Stock's book paints a grim picture of the medical establishment's attitude to mental illness. Sargant's ward was finally closed in 1973. In the weeks before that happened, he destroyed most of the case records. He was never investigated and died in 1988 with his reputation intact. Available via Little, Brown, 11hr 48min BookishLucy Mangan,Penguin Audio, 6hr 59min The Guardian's TV critic reads her memoir in which she looks back at a life shaped by literature. My Next BreathJeremy Renner, Simon & Schuster Audio, 6hr 35minThe American Hustle actor's memoir recalls his accident in 2023 when he was crushed by a snow plough, leading to surgery and months of rehabilitation.
New York Times
27-06-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Max Fink, Champion of Electroconvulsive Therapy, Dies at 102
Max Fink, a psychiatrist and neurologist who advanced the acceptance of electroconvulsive therapy as an option for treating severely depressed patients who do not respond to drugs or psychotherapy, died on June 15 in Westfield, Mass. He was 102. His death, at a senior living community, was confirmed by his son, Jonathan Fink. Dr. Fink believed that electroconvulsive therapy was a potent treatment — and shouldn't be considered a last resort — for patients who are suicidal or suffering from delusions. 'Many severely depressed patients are maintained for weeks, for months and even years on antidepressant drugs,' he told a conference on depression in Philadelphia in 1988. 'Are we not unfair when we do this to our patients when ECT remains an active and excellent treatment?' He first witnessed the use of ECT in 1952, on his first day as a neurology and psychiatry resident at Hillside Hospital (now Zucker Hillside Hospital, a part of Northwell), in Queens. One by one, he watched as five patients — under restraints, with rubber bite-blocks in their mouths and electrodes applied to their temples — received enough electrical current to induce a grand mal seizure. 'Observing a full grand mal seizure in each patient jarred me,' he wrote in 2017 in an unpublished memoir for Stony Brook University in New York, where he worked for many years. But over the next few months, he continued, 'I had learned that ECT effectively reduced suicide thoughts, relieved negativism, aggression, depressed and manic moods. Of the hospital populations, the patients treated with electroshock improved the most.' Although Dr. Fink was convinced of ECT's positive effects, others in the psychiatric profession weren't. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
