Shock therapy improves woman's colour blindness

摘要

A SHOCK of electricity to the temples can be a powerful, last-resort treatment for some people who have mental health conditions that don't respond to other treatments. But it can have surprising side effects -it seems to have improved the colour vision of a woman with colour blindness in the hours after each treatment. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can be recommended for people with severe depression, schizophrenia or mania. The procedure typically involves giving someone anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant before applying a pulse of electric current to one or both sides of the head. The pulse lasts for between 6 and 8 seconds, during which it triggers brain seizures, says Kristian H. Reveles Jensen at the Psychiatric Centre Copenhagen in Denmark. Jensen and his colleagues offered the treatment to a 30-year-old woman who had been experiencing severe symptoms of post-natal depression since giving birth six months earlier. therapy, speech therapy and antidepressants didn't improve them, and the woman went into hospital when she started having suicidal urges. Even then, she continued to deteriorate, says Jensen. "She was experiencing sleep disturbance, low mood, shame, feelings of inadequacy -the classic symptoms of depression," he says.