This thread seems to have started as a statement of interest and query by the OP In 2009 about whether people had a fetish for mental hospitals including ElectroConvulsive Therapy or ECT. Additional unrelated topics immediately entered the thread as people referred to things like E-stim, TENS units and non-ECT psychiatric hospital or ward admissions. The OP was very brief without anything but 2 questions about interest. To me, it appeared he/she was asking about fetish interest in ECT use in psychiatric wards or hospitals.
Later posts began to discuss fetish interest in ECT but also more general discussion about the nature and appropriateness of ECT use in real medical practice. I’m a retired US MD who has both given patients anesthesia for ECT hundreds of times as well as later on received ECT myself many years ago in 2 different admissions for severe depression. My own ECT was not the slightest bit unpleasant, and very helpful for my depression.
In brief, I would agree with member @GregB below who recently very briefly posted:
I think twice about getting ECT unless you absolutely have tried everything else for major depression. It can help in terms of relief from depression but it can also relieve you of your memory and cause other changes you may not like.
In my informed opinion, this is a reasonable, intelligent informed brief statement about considering current ECT use, but also is a far cry from blanket statements that it is barbaric and should never be used. Although everyone is entitled to their opinion, you aren’t entitled to your own facts. If, after factually knowing as much about ECT as I have learned from my study and experience, one can still certainly hold the view that they don’t approve of it or desire it to be used for themselves. I obviously believe otherwise when it’s appropriate and likely beneficial. I gave anesthesia for ECT in the mid 1990’s and received my own ECT treatments in 1998-2004. Readng about it or hearing accounts of ECT during a psych hospital admission by someone else is very different from being in an emotional and mental state leading to such an admission and ECT. As others have said here, even though my ECT was very likely beneficial to me, I did not enjoy being in the psych hospital in the slightest and never want to repeat it. Since I knew from giving other pts anesthesia what ECT was like in reality, it was not frightening or unpleasant to me at all, just like going to skeep and awakening after a very short operation but with no post op pain. My only side effect was some brief confusion which quickly disappeared.
On the other hand fetishes, kinks and desires for experiences are not always predictable based on the real nature of the activity being fetishized. I and others here have no desire to either fetishize or repeat in reality a psych hospital stay with or without ECT, though to me the ECT was not scary or unpleasant. Now I do have some fetishes for enjoying bondage and acting submissive with a Domme, but those feelings are completely different than the very unpleasant feelings of confinement and submission encountered in a real psych admission. I would find having a fetish for psych admission and/or ECT completely incomprehensible, but others may have a very different understanding of what that real situation feels like and entails.
Eric, MD
P.S. Come to think of it, in the last few years a completely new class of antidepressant with a radically different mechanism has emerged which is one of the few I have not tried. It could quite possibly have kept me from needing or choosing the ECT if it had been available for depression at the time.