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Educating patients and relatives about electroconvulsive therapy: the use of an information leaflet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Alison Jenaway
Alison Jenaway*
Affiliation:
Registrar in Psychiatry, Fulbourn Hospital Cambridge CB1 5EF
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Several studies in the United Kingdom have highlighted the lack of knowledge that patients show about electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), both before treatment starts (Malcolm, 1989) and after it is completed (Freeman & Kendell, 1980; Hughes et al, 1981), with only 10 to 15% of patients having a full understanding of the treatment. In an American study (Baxter et al, 1986) patients seemed slightly better informed; this might be because they were given written information. However, subjects who watched a videotape of someone having the treatment did not score higher on a knowledge questionnaire than a control group and the authors postulated a ‘ceiling effect’. Bird (1979) demonstrated that access to media coverage about ECT improved patients' knowledge without increasing anxiety about the treatment.

Type
Original articles
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 1993 , pp. 10 - 12
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 1993

References

Baxter, L. R., Roy-Byrne, P., Liston, E. H. & Fairbanks, L. (1986) Informing patients about electroconvulsive therapy: effects of a videotape presentation. Convulsive Therapy, 2, 25–29.Google Scholar
Bird, J. M. (1979) Effects of the media on attitudes to electric convulsion therapy. British Medical Journal, 3, 526–527.Google Scholar
Freeman, C. P. L. & Kendell, R. E. (1980) ECT:I. Patients' experiences and attitudes. British Journal of Psychiatry, 137, 8–16.Google Scholar
Hughes, J., Barraclough, B. M. & Reeve, W. (1981) Are patients shocked by ECT? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 74, 283–285.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Malcolm, K. (1989) Patients' perceptions and knowledge of electroconvulsive therapy. Psychiatric Bulletin, 13, 161–165.Google Scholar
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