Also read comments at the bottom.




Mark Goulston, M.D., Posted: July 9, 2009 02:17 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-g..._b_228811.html

Devastating illnesses can bring patients to the brink of a seemingly agreeable suicide. The role of the psychiatrist can be to look coldly through the pain and determine if there is a way to save the patient's life and make it worth enduring. Then the clinician must be prepared to enact what he perceives.

In 1986, my mentor and suicidologist, Dr. Edwin Shneidman, asked me to see a patient that he had consulted on. Before I did, he told me the following:

The patient was a 64 year old man, housebound from end stage Parkinson's Disease. He had requested to be put out of his misery. He not only desired to be allowed to die, but had asked for help to accomplish the deed. He was unable to get out of bed to retrieve his stockpile of pills or his handgun.

This man previously had been a successful professional athlete. He had also been an example of fortitude and persistence to his wife of 30 years and to his four sons. He had continued as a coach, hiding the early signs of Parkinsonism from his players and children, saying he did not want to be pitied. For six years; he functioned-fairly well. But during the last two, he had deteriorated drastically.

I wrote one of the comments on Dr. Goulston's article. Since then I've been doing some research on PD and ECT.

As far as I can tell, it's mainly a few people in the psychiatric community who have been talking about ECT. Have the movement disorders people (and the drug companies) not noticed?

I find it astounding that hardly anyone has bothered to look into ECT, a noninvasive, widely used procedure that has been greatly refined since its inception in the 1930s and whose side effects for the majority of recipients are few and transient.

Here are some links:

1989

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/...ct/146/11/1451

http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Psycho...eart-rate.html


1991--part of a letter
http://journals.lww.com/ectjournal/C...isease.10.aspx


1995
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9620060


2003
http://jap.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/1/9

a letter and a response to the letter:
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/168/11/1391-b

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/168/11/1392


2005 There is a link to a downloadable PDF of the article.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.go/arti...?artid=1739437

Here's a quote from pp. 5-6 of the PDF:
"Although we show that the effects of ECT are significant and, indeed, had a larger effect size when compared to TMS [transcranial magnetic stimulation], the small number of trials limits our ability to draw any definite conclusion about this technique in PD patients."

Thank Kat for the posting the additional research information.

Thanks for the thank you!

Kathleen