Sorry seventyeight below is from wikipedia. In a book I'm reading on BP they've noted that it's better for the treatment in depression rather than mania for person's with BP, but it has been used to treat both.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), previously known as electroshock, is a well-established, albeit controversial, psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. Today, ECT is most often used as a treatment for severe major depression which has not responded to other treatment, and is also used in the treatment of mania (often in bipolar disorder), and catatonia.[1] It was first introduced in the 1930s[2] and gained widespread use as a form of treatment in the 1940s and 1950s; today, an estimated 1 million people worldwide receive ECT every year,[3] usually in a course of 6–12 treatments administered 2 or 3 times a week.