December 2, 2010
Neural Renovation
Two dabs of conductant. A mouthguard, for your protection. Sturdy straps to secure you safely. A split second dose of electricity. And finally, a convulsive seizure lasting 15 seconds or more to trim the connections in your brain and erase the pain from your mind.
If you didn’t see us administering electroconvulsive therapy in the Secret Cinema’s rendition of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest this past November, you can see it in this short film. You may find it disturbing – many of our guests did.
Anyone who hasn’t seen One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest probably knows just one thing about it: the main character is subjected to shock therapy as punishment for his subversive behaviour. The image of Jack Nicholson chomping on a mouthguard, eyes clenched in pain and veins throbbing, is iconic.
No vision of electroconvulsive therapy is so famous. Nothing in popular culture has so profoundly influenced the way we perceive ECT, described in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel as a dehumanising ordeal forced upon patients in a “filthy brain-murdering room that they call the ‘Shock Shop’”.
Before the pharmaceutical revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, ECT was practiced widely: it was one of very few therapies that could produce genuine, lasting changes in the mentally ill. It was lauded as a miracle cure: the Italian neurologists Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini were nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on the treatment in the 1930s.
It is interesting to note: ECT failed where the lobotomy succeeded. Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize in 1949 for the transcranial lobotomy, a procedure that is now almost never performed.
Yet more than a million people a year undergo ECT today – though the experience now is very different from what it was half a century ago.
With advice and expertise from psychiatrist Dr Mark Salter, who coached our ‘patients’ Lime and Ramey, we staged ECT treatments (along with lobotomies) circa 1950 for two weeks straight.
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