Talk:Electroconvulsive therapy

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Electroconvulsive therapy article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find medical sources: Source guidelines · PubMed · Cochrane · DOAJ · Gale · OpenMD · ScienceDirect · Springer · Trip · Wiley · TWL

Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6: 1 year

The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute. When updating the article, be bold, but not reckless. Feel free to try to improve the article, but don't take it personally if your changes are reversed; instead, come here to the talk page to discuss them. Content must be written from a neutral point of view. Include citations when adding content and consider tagging or removing unsourced information.

Fictional and semi-fictional depictions of ECT was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 16 April 2010 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Electroconvulsive therapy. The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here.

Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about Electroconvulsive therapy.

PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles)
The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine.
Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

Medicine: Neurology / Psychiatry B‑class Mid‑importance

	Medicine portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Medicine, which recommends that medicine-related articles follow the Manual of Style for medicine-related articles and that biomedical information in any article use high-quality medical sources. Please visit the project page for details or ask questions at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine.MedicineWikipedia:WikiProject MedicineTemplate:WikiProject Medicinemedicine articles
B	This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by the Neurology task force (assessed as Low-importance).
	Psychiatry portal This article is supported by the Psychiatry task force (assessed as High-importance).

Psychology B‑class Mid‑importance

	Psychology portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Psychology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Psychology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PsychologyWikipedia:WikiProject PsychologyTemplate:WikiProject Psychologypsychology articles
B	This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Epilepsy B‑class Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Epilepsy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of epilepsy and epileptic seizures on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EpilepsyWikipedia:WikiProject EpilepsyTemplate:WikiProject EpilepsyEpilepsy articles
B	This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Why are we mentioning voltage and current, but not impedance?[edit]

Please, to make the information more correct, mention the follow information. It's crucially important.

"However, only about 1% of the electrical current crosses the bony skull into the brain because skull impedance is about 100 times higher than skin impedance (Weaver et al., 1976)." https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/83887/excerpt/9780521883887_excerpt.pdf

Article has systematically biased and manipulative language that makes ECT appear more effective and safe than it is[edit]

The article contains a surprising amount of editorialized and biased language, including but not limited to:

      - Attempting to rationalize retrograde amnesia as a "positive" side effect.
      - Minimizing and writing only short sentences about negative effects like cardiac events, memory loss, cognitive impairment, and death.
      - Claiming that ECT was known to be "safe and effective" in the time of its invention
      - Claiming that ECT is known to be "safe and effective" at this time
      - Over-emphasis on individual case studies
      - A basic lack of scientific rigor including referring to an uncontrolled remission rate as an ECT response rate, claiming that this uncontrolled remission rate means that "most severely depressed patients respond to ECT" - which is frankly embarrassing to this community.

It is clear that efforts need to be made to remove editorialized language and a focus on direct quotes from subjective reports, opinions, or speculations made in publications rather than identifying objective result information from studies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:4040:9ECC:2500:D48F:C137:6D47:45CA (talk) 15:52, 12 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Unscientific and unsourced comments. Biased and unacceptable language. --Saidmann (talk) 20:07, 12 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

This is an overt projection. The claim that ECT response rate is equal to uncontrolled remission rate is objectively unscientific and invalid. When any medical treatment's response rate is measured, it is measured in comparison to control for this reason.

Please stop vandalizing the page by using a child-like "no, you" attitude, and either provide detailed justifications and sources of this information. 2600:4040:9ECC:2500:D48F:C137:6D47:45CA (talk) 20:14, 12 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Please be specific, refer to specific examples, and provide specific justifications. Otherwise, please do not vandalize this page. 2600:4040:9ECC:2500:D48F:C137:6D47:45CA (talk) 20:17, 12 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

There is no such "claim" in the article. --Saidmann (talk) 20:19, 12 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The article made the claim multiple times, and this is logged in edits. You do not appear to want to put the effort into this, so please leave until which time you are. 2600:4040:9ECC:2500:D48F:C137:6D47:45CA (talk) 20:31, 12 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

In fact, if you even just read this Talk section, I refer to one of these claims "most severely depressed patients respond to ECT" and detail in the edit why it was removed. Please cease vandalizing this page. 2600:4040:9ECC:2500:D48F:C137:6D47:45CA (talk) 20:41, 12 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Incomprehensible and chaotic language that cannot be replied to. --Saidmann (talk) 21:50, 12 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

You stated "There is no such "claim" in the article" - I provided evidence for you - and now cannot admit you were incorrect. This is another bad-faith response. If you cannot provide specifics and act in good faith, you provide no value to the page. 2600:4040:9ECC:2500:EC53:C80C:70ED:B058 (talk) 22:32, 12 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Two examples of confused and disruptive editing[edit]

First you knocked out a valid secondary source: PMID: 22420590 on 05:27, 12 February 2023.

Then you knocked out text that was referenced by two secondary sources - with the argument "unsupported by evidence" on 22:21, 12 February 2023.

These edits are typical for all your others in this article. They are not only disruptive, they could also be called fraudulent. There is no option but to undo such disruption. --Saidmann (talk) 15:58, 13 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I suspect that 2600:4040 is responding to the overall feeling, rather than to whether individual, discrete facts are supported by a particular source. That is, the article presents ECT as a valid medical treatment that could provide net benefit to most severely depressed people, and 2600:4040 may be feeling a little more like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest about it. My impression is that this discrepancy between the current views of experts and the popular imagination (or the views of people who experienced more side effects than benefits – we see that pattern in other subjects, such as chemotherapy, too) is not exactly unusual.

The challenge for this article is to present the expert view, even though the expert view is not the popular view. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:42, 13 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]