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Electroconvulsive therpapy and cinema. From “the snake pit” to “requiem for a dream”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2020
Abstract
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Introduction
Electroconvulsive therapy is nowadays one of the most useful treatments for severe mental disorders. A lot of patients refer an improvement or even a remission of their psychopathology after this treatment.
Objectives
To demonstrate how cinema has favoured the creation of a social stigma against mental health professionals, against the treatments we use and, most of all, against the people we treat.We based this project on the portrait cinema has meade of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
Methods
ECT appears in more than thirty films. We take into account the most representative ones shot from 1948 to 2008.
Results
ECT makes its debut in cinema in 1948, ten years after its first use as a psychiatric treatment. During 60 years, ECT comes on stage in more than 30 films. The main indication in cinema to use ECT is to control and punish antisocial behaviors. Medical consent is not asked in most of the films. The ECT modified procedure doesn’t appear.
Conclusions
Cinema has contributed to stigmatize mental illness, psychiatrists and treatments we use, specially electroconvulsive therapy.
- Type
- P02-563
- Information
- European Psychiatry , Volume 26 , Issue S2: Abstracts of the 19th European Congress of Psychiatry , March 2011 , pp. 1159
- Copyright
- Copyright © European Psychiatric Association 2011
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