Adelaide's Parkside hospital the first in Australia to use electro-convulsive shocks to treat mental illness
An 1980s version (at right) of the electro-convulsive shock treatment (ECT) device, still with a telephone dial, developed by Adelaide's Parkside Hospital (later Glenside), above left, and the Adelaide University physics department. Bottom right: A ward for for the criminally insane at Parkside's Z Ward.
ECT image courtesy Glenside Hospital Historical Society
Adelaide's Parkside (later Glenside) in 1941 was the first mental health hospital in Australia to use electro-convulsive shock treatment.
Electro-convulsive shock treatment (ECT) came after other methods were tried on patients in the first half of the 20th Century as overcrowding increased in Parkside’s wards.
In 1929, malaria treatment had been introduced, infecting patients with a controlled form of the disease. Arsenic treatment was tried in 1930 to curb syphilis-derived dementia. Insulin shock treatment, placing the patient in a diabetic coma, was in use by 1938. Cardiazol injections were also administered, with high doses causing convulsions.
Electro-convulsive shock treatment came in the early stages of World War II when the style of timing devices needed for ECT machines was reserved for bombing mechanisms. Psychiatrists at Parkside teamed up with the Adelaide University physics department to build a machine out of available materials. The university scientists hit on the idea of substituting timers with the dial mechanism from a rotary telephone. They discovered that dialing 9 produced the best outcomes.
The ECT machines were tested on rabbits before being used on patients with schizophrenia or manic depression. It was initially applied without anaesthetic and muscle relaxants, with patients held down to control the epileptic seizure.
Modern electroconvulsive therapy, passing an electrical current through the brain of a patient under a general anaesthetic, continued to be performed on hundreds of South Australians each year into the 21st Century. A large body of evidence suggested modern ECT was an effective treatment of last resort for major depression and other serious mental illness. But ECT posed risks to the brain, at worst taking large parts of a person's long-term memory and hampering short-term memory.
The South Australia Mental Health Act said consent to ECT treatment “is not required” if a psychiatrist considered that there was an urgent need for it. A doctor or psychiatrist could apply to the Guardianship Board to perform a course of up to 12 episodes of ECT, over a maximum of three months, without patient consent.
Some consumer advocates believed ECT should never be done without the informed consent of the patient. Since the Advance Care Directives Act 2013, South Australians were able to apply for a directive to prohibit certain treatments, including ECT, from being performed on them.
