Name: 【TED】Sherwin Nuland: How electroshock therapy changed me (Sherwin Nuland: How electroshock therapy changed me)
Uploaded: 2013-08-09T10:56:30.000Z
Duration: 22 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

I'd like to do pretty much what I did the first time,

which is to choose a light-hearted theme.

Last time, I talked about death and dying.

This time, I'm going to talk about mental illness.

so I'll talk about electroshock therapy. (Laughter)

that some of his other people, his colleagues,

could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed

or what we now recognize as schizophrenia,

had to come from evil spirits getting into the body.

in early times was to, in some way or other,

exorcise those evil spirits, and this is still going on, as you know.

When medicine became somewhat scientific, in about 450 BC,

that would literally shake the bad spirits out.

So, they found certain plants that could cause convulsions.

And the herbals, the botanical books of up to the late Middle Ages,

the Renaissance are filled with prescriptions

for causing convulsions to shake the evil spirits out.

a physician whose name was Theophrastus Bombastus Aureolus von Hohenheim,

called Paracelsus, a name probably familiar to some people here --

found that he could predict the degree of convulsion

by using a measured amount of camphor to produce the convulsion.

Can you imagine going to your closet, pulling out a mothball, and

chewing on it if you're feeling depressed?

It's better than Prozac, but I wouldn't recommend it.

So what we see in the seventeenth, eighteenth century

is the continued search for medications other than camphor that'll do the trick.

with a bolt of electricity off the end of his kite.

And so people begin thinking in terms of electricity to produce convulsions.

when three Italian psychiatrists, who were largely treating depression,

began to notice among their patients, who were also epileptics,

that if they had an epileptic -- a series of epileptic fits,

a lot of them in a row -- the depression would very frequently lift.

Not only would it lift, but it might never return.

So they got very interested in producing convulsions,

And they thought, "Well, we've got electricity, we'll plug somebody into the wall.

That always makes hair stand up and people shake a lot."

So, they tried it on a few pigs, and none of the pigs were killed.

So, they went to the police and they said,

"We know that at the Rome railroad station,

there are all these lost souls wandering around,

muttering gibberish. Can you bring one of them to us?"

Someone who is, as the Italians say, "cagoots."

a 39-year-old man who was really hopelessly schizophrenic,

who was known, had been known for months,

So these three psychiatrists, after about two or three weeks of observation,

connected his temples to a very small source of current.

They thought, "Well, we'll try 55 volts, two-tenths of a second.

That's not going to do anything terrible to him."

Well, I have the following from a firsthand observer,

He said, "This fellow" -- remember, he wasn't even put to sleep --

sat right up, looked at these three fellas and said,

'What the fuck are you assholes trying to do?' "

Well, they were happy as could be, because he

hadn't said a rational word in the weeks of observation.

and this time they used 110 volts for half a second.

And to their amazement, after it was over,

he began speaking like he was perfectly well.

He relapsed a little bit, they gave him a series of treatments,

and everybody in the Western world began using electricity

to convulse people who were either schizophrenic or severely depressed.

It didn't work very well on the schizophrenics,

but it was pretty clear in the '30s and by the middle of the '40s

that electroconvulsive therapy was very, very effective

And of course, in those days, there were no antidepressant drugs,

convulse them, but the real difficulty was

that there was no way to paralyze muscles.

So people would have a real grand mal seizure.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Sherwin Nuland: How electroshock therapy changed me (Sherwin Nuland: How electroshock therapy changed me)

essentially

mental

depression

therapy