The Positives and Negatives of Shock Therapy In the sometimes bitter battles over electroconvulsive therapy, also called ECT or shock therapy, 41-year-old Lynn Swan, of Cleveland, is a noncombatant. Neither a staunch advocate nor a foe, Swan -- who has bipolardepression -- says the treatment can work, depending on the illness and the individual patient.

After more than 50 treatments, in which electrodes were attached to her skull to electrically induce a seizure, Swan has earned her right to an opinion.

"Even in the minds of good psychiatrists, it's still controversial," she admits. "But I know it works for some people."

But Swan herself reports only mixed success. Over a four-year period, she received ECT treatments at hospitals in Florida and Ohio, typically two or three times a week, followed by termination of therapy for as long as several months. Invariably, she would relapse and need the treatments again.

Today, she no longer receives ECT but instead takes a combination of five and six drugs at a time, including lithium. She continues to experience debilitating amnesia -- a potential side effect of ECT -- and although she says the procedure worked to relieve her bipolar symptoms in the short term, she believes it did not have a lasting effect.

Her experience would appear to crystallize the promise and pitfalls of ECT: rapid, sometimes startling recovery, followed by relapse.

A 2001 study in The Journal of the American Medical Association confirms that when ECT is abruptly halted without follow-up therapy, relapse is only too predictable. Conversely, the study shows, when ECT is followed by aggressive antidepressant drug therapy, patients are much more likely to stay well.

And experts say that for all the controversy the procedure engenders, it is time for ECT to come "out of the shadows."

"Stigma against ECT is a problem," says Richard Glass, MD, deputy editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association. "It's understandable because it does seem like a strange way to treat an illness -- by causing a seizure. But the most important thing is that it works, and it works in patients who don't respond to anything else."