With each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.
I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done. 

In  Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, one of the main themes discussed is the mistreatment of the mentally ill throughout the mid twentieth century. Esther must involuntarily go under Electroconvulsive Therapy for treatment for her serious depression for an extended period of time. Rather than improving her condition, this "treatment" drives her to contemplate suicide. A treatment that was supposed to help her, Esther viewed as a punishment.

The use of electric shock and also Insulin shock therapies started in the 1930's by Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini who eventually received Nobel Prizes for their discovery. The use of chemicals like Insulin were eventually replaced by electric current, and today Electroconvulsive Therapy is still used. Because of the lack of antidepressant drugs at the time it was used much more widely than it is today . In the earlier years of its existence, no anesthesia or muscle relaxers were used, plus the amount of current was much higher than used today. The use of electricity to treat depression and other psychiatric disorders like Schizophrenia has been one of the most controversial psychiatric treatments over the past decades and is still debated today though now it can only be administered  with the consent of the patient.

Electroconvulsive Therapy or ECT for short involves a brief amount of electric current being administered to the brain to start a temporary seizure. After the prescribed number of doses the patient is considered to be healed, but often with many adverse side effects. Most commonly known of  these effects is memory loss and confusion. Even advocates of the treatment do acknowledge that there is some permanent memory loss from during the time period from a few days to a few weeks before the treatment. Although among many there has been successful healing with this technique, there are also a considerable number of patients who have found this processes terrifying and distressing. And while the practice of ECT continues to grow safer and more efficient, my overwhelmingly negative impression of it for reading The Bell Jar still has a strong influence over me. The mixed reactions I have read about this treatment continue to bewilder me, so in a future installment I will go into more depth to see if I can finally make up my mind over the issue.