The adverse effects of electroconvulsive therapy beyond memory loss: an international survey of recipients and relatives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research into the safety of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) usually focuses on memory loss. Studies asking patients directly reveal a broader range of adverse effects. This paper reports the responses of 747 ECT recipients and 201 relatives/friends, from 37 countries, to a question about 25 possible adverse effects, in an online survey. Seventeen of the 25 were reported by more than half of both the ECT recipients and the relatives/friends. Eight were reported by more than 67% of both groups: Losing train of thought, Difficulty concentrating, Fatigue, Emotional blunting, Relationship problems, Loss of independence, Difficulty navigating and Loss of vocabulary. The first four of these were described as ‘severe’ by at least 30% of both groups. Several individual adverse effects were positively related to recipients receiving more courses of ECT and more total individual ECTs, to being female, and having bilateral electrode placements. More recent ECT was not, as often claimed, associated with fewer adverse effects. Researchers and mental health staff should pay attention to a broader range of potential adverse effects than memory loss, so as to facilitate fully informed consent, the minimization or those effects where possible, and, where not possible, referral to rehabilitation programmes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".