A Treatment for Mental Illness.

In the 1940s there were few treatments available for mental illnesses. One regimen, called shock therapy, involved the use of drugs or electricity to treat severe mental disorders by inducing coma or convulsions. Early shock treatments used such chemicals as insulin, camphor, or metrazol. Injections of increasing levels of insulin deoxygenated the blood and induced a deep coma. Metrazol was used to produce convulsions. The therapeutic benefit of the drug shock therapies seemed to be greatest with schizophrenics. In 1938 Ugo Cerletti of Italy first developed an electricshock therapy technique. It proved to be less dangerous, more controlled, and less expensive than the drug treatments. It rapidly became the primary medical treatment for the mentally ill, since there was little else available. At a meeting of the New York Academy of Medicine in February 1944, physicians concluded that the benefits of...