Ian Reid, a psychiatrist at the Royal Cornhill Hospital in the Scottish city of Aberdeen, has treated people with severe depression for 25 years. “It’s a very nasty illness, depression,” he says. “I have worked with people who have cancer and depression, and more than one of them has said, ‘If I had to choose one of those two diseases, I’d go for the cancer.’ ”
When patients come to Royal Cornhill with major depression, they’re first treated with psychotherapy and antidepressants. Only about 40 percent respond to their first medication. Sometimes a different one will do the trick, but in Reid’s experience, about 10 to 20 percent of depressed people respond to no drug at all. In those cases, Reid regularly shifts to a third option. It’s officially called electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT—better known by its unofficial name, shock therapy.
Reid is an expert on ECT, and over the years he has received plenty of grief for it. “There are people on the Internet who describe me as a Nazi, as a barbarian,” he says. “And there’s one person who suggested I should get ECT so I know what I’m doing.”
