> I have seen quite a few of my patients at the hospital respond beautifully to ECT.

In what way?

Let me indicate to you why I am so involved with this question. Maybe this is a mistake. I really should not prejudice your answer.

I was "offered" ECT at least twice. I turned it down. But I did not believe at those times that it was really my choice. In my life, with my mother, I perceived that it was worth my life to disagree with her, to go against any wishes that she had, even if she "invited" me to make a choice. Any choice I made that wasn't what she wanted would likely result in severe punishment -- at times so frightening that I think I believed she would kill me if I made the wrong choice. She told me (and my brothers) she would "break" us.

This resulted, I think, in dissociation so severe, an internal "going away" in order to not experience the level of fear that I was feeling, that I have lost memories of a great deal of my childhood. I suppose you could say I "responded beautifully" to the treatment -- I forgot all about it. Almost. It came back to bite me when called upon to become a full adult. Now I am having to work through it again. Very difficult. But rewarding in a manner wholly different than forgetting.

I am now trying to become a real person, not the completely compliant one that my mother seemed to desire. I react to the thought of shock treatment as another attempt to make me into a robot, one who never disagrees, one who doesn't even think disagreement. Maybe others with a different history would not react the same way. The ones who offered me shock treatment never bothered to inquire into what was really going on with me to see how I might react to it.