Madam, - I was less than three years old when my mother, a paranoid schizophrenic, took her own life by burning herself to death. For many years prior to this she had been given an annual course of ECT. She did not like it, but it prevented the wilder excesses of her symptoms. She stayed alive and was the mother to two adoring boys.
In the last year of her life, however, she was treated by a new breed of Laingian psychiatrists, who argued that she was not "ill", and who were vehemently against ECT. It took only a few months of this new style of care before she doused herself in petrol and struck a match.
I do not doubt the idealism of those who argue against ECT. But perhaps they should appreciate that the choice is often this: either occasionally administer a treatment which is unpleasant, or allow extremely vulnerable people to kill themselves (or others).
Medicine is riven with difficult choices in which a view must be taken on the lesser of two evils. Nobody wants to have their leg cut off, yet a doctor would not hesitate to amputate a gangrenous limb if it threatened a patient's life. Someone suffering an infectious disease might not choose to isolate themselves, yet that is what must be done to try to safeguard the community.
I would not have wanted to inflict the obvious suffering involved in ECT on my mother; yet knowing what I do, I would have kept her on an annual involuntary course of it for her whole life if it spared her a death of almost unimaginable agony - and allowed us to be a family. - Yours, etc,
S. HAMILTON,
Longboat Quay,
Dublin 2.