No place for shock therapy in treatment of patients

Published: 24 March, 2011

• IT is frightening to hear that doctors from the Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust are still using electro-convulsive therapy over 100 times in a year (Lost souls beyond a plush entrance, March 17).  

This so-called “treatment” of passing electric current through the brain would be considered torture in any other setting.

The more we discover about the kind of treatments the trust uses the more worried should we be. If it isn’t electric currents through the brain then it is heavy drugging with anti-psychotics which have severe side effects.  

The cuts that the trust wants to apply to its service seems likely to mean that more patients will be subjected to these high-power treatments so that they don’t occupy its beds. The cuts in the mental health services, particularly closures of places like the Highgate Day Centre, seem to mean that there will still be treatment but there will be a decreasing level of care.  

And it is this care that people in emotional distress need the most.

This will be unsatisfactory to staff and patients alike, The only people pleased will be the managers who will be able to show that they have better figures and thus justify their own existence.

SHEILA LAWS 
Lawn Road, NW3