Re: ECT good for fibromyalgia


"fran" <fmc116@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1137949482.128306.146410@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Just as an addendum, this treatment is not
> recommended lightly, and in most hospitals there is a required second
> opinion.--fran
>
Fran, your post helps put my mind to rest a bit more. And now that I think
about it, the few people I've personally known who have had ECT already had
some degree of "strangeness" before and their ECT could not be the entire
reason.

I also have to admit that, as part of my nursing training, we had to spend
an entire summer at our state's mental institution. This would have been in
1971, where families frequently put "odd" family members who needed mental
health treatment. Even Down Syndrome patients were there just because they
had Downs.

We had a curfew and were locked up at night in a separate building on the
campus. We couldn't walk anywhere alone, and were allowed to go into the
nearest town only on weekends. The buildings were old even then -- big,
stone, dungeon-looking warehouses of sad, sad, forgotten humanity. I'll
never forget this experience. I was one of few nurses who actually liked
working there. Most of the students just gritted their teeth, marked each
day off on the calendar, and yearned to go home. If my home had been
closer to the institution, I would have worked there.

If you're thinking of "Cukoo's Nest," you'd be right on. When they filmed
that movie, they needed shots of buildings and grounds of an old mental
institution. They did the filming there. They also did some filming in one
of the buildings that housed the permanent residents -- and even let some of
them wander in and out of camera view range. They lent an air of true
desolation and despair that was so often true of "crazy houses" back in the
60's, before "Home Health" rules changed everything. Sure, they tried to
return patients back to their home communities, with a great degree of
dismal failure. Families had left or even died out; no one was waiting for
the patient to come home and be "integrated" into their former hometowns. I
hate to think of all the crazy, homeless, transients who, at one time were
fed, housed, and received free medical care and free medications, and are
now sleeping under bridges and in cold, empty boxcars, with no medical care,
no food, no bed to call their own, and most of all, no one who cares about
them.

If funding had been more wisely appropriated and administered back then by
our federal and state governments, mental hospitals could have been a safe,
nurturing shelter. Public Health has been sorely unequipped for the
outpatient population who were essentially kicked out and told to "go home."

Oh, boy! I'll get off my soap box, now. Sorry! Time to shut the Poota off
and go to bed.

Take care, Carol!!!

René


.

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