Shocking

The word “controversy” almost always accompanies any reference to ECT or electroconvulsive therapy. It has a dark history and remains a deeply contentious practice.

For many, ECT is seen as outdated, forever linked with frightening images of medical abuse, cruelty and even punishment. But when Professor Sally Marlow met Dr Tania Gergel at King’s College London, she was forced to acknowledge and then reassess everything she thought she knew about ECT. Her friend Tania told Sally that ECT had saved her life on numerous occasions and that ECT is, in fact, the only treatment that can bring her back to health after episodes of severe depression, psychosis and mania.

Tania is Director of Research at Bipolar UK. She’s a philosopher and an internationally respected medical ethicist. She also lives with a serious mental illness; an unusual mixed type of bipolar disorder, and during her last period of illness a year ago, Tania kept an audio diary.

In this programme, Sally wants to test her own preconceptions about ECT and to find out about the group of people who describe ECT as having "given them back their lives". She delves into her own family history and talks to her mum, Kath, about the secrecy and shame around the mental illness of her Auntie Joyce, who received ECT in the 1960s. And she joins Tania in the ECT suite at Northwick Park Hospital with nurses Anjali and Kathy to understand how modern ECT is given, with anaesthetic, muscle relaxants and, as Tania says, much kindness.

Retired social worker, Sue, tells Sally about the dramatic impact on her acute illness of ECT and clinician and researcher Professor of Psychiatry George Kirov, ECT lead for the Cardiff area, describes the group of patients for whom this treatment works. And Sally talks to the grandfather of American ECT, Professor Max Fink, now 100 years old, about the origins of electroconvulsive therapy. Throughout, Tania shares extracts of her audio diary in order to break down stigma around both mental illness and ECT.

Producer: Fiona Hill