Brief shock therapy—An adjuvant to psychotherapy

Summary and Conclusions

• 1. Electric shock therapy on an out-patient basis offers some important psychotherapeutic advantages. It permits the patient to stay on his job, at his normal social routine, and in contact with his family. It spares him the psychologic trauma of confinement in a mental hospital. It offers opportunities for influencing his environment and changing the environmental attitudes. It opens possibilities for intensive individual psychotherapy on a scale not usually realized within a hospital.

• 2. The full advantage of out-patient electric shock therapy is obtained when organic mental complications are kept to a minimum by making the course of electric shock as short as possible.

• 3. Brief shock therapy necessitates careful selection of cases. When it is to be integrated with intensive psychotherapy it should be used primarily when psychotherapy on an out-patient basis has become impossible as a result of the severity of depression.

• 4. The doctor-patient relationship in psychotherapy, as it is affected by electric shock treatment, is discussed.