Open up some scientific papers, and you’ll hear electroconvulsive therapy described as the most effective treatment for depression (especially very severe depression). But open up others, and you’ll see it described as completely useless—and a sad indictment on a medical establishment who’ve completely failed to provide proper evidence on it. Not only that, but they’ve exposed patients to serious side effects, like memory loss, for no good reason.
Who’s right? In this episode, we look into the most controversial psychiatric treatment since lobotomy.
NEXT WEEK: we’ll follow this with an episode on another controversial psychiatric treament: antidepressants.
On this week’s episode we discussed the article “The Perks of Being a Mole Rat”, from our sponsor, Works in Progress magazine. As ever, we’re very grateful for their support. You can find many more excellent articles at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
1937 article by Egas Moniz, lobotomy Nobel Prize-winner
Weird 1998 article defending him on the Nobel Prize website
Megan McArdle on Walter Freeman
The ECT scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
2024 article discussing the possible mechanisms of ECT’s effect
2010 review about sham ECT studies
2019 review of each individual sham ECT study and the meta-analyses that include them
2022 response to the review
Contemporary news article about the controversy
2021 article in defense of ECT
The parachute RCT
2010 meta-analysis on cognitive effects
2025 meta-analysis on autobiographical memory loss
Credits
The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
