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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   25622 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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abuses of electroshock therapy

Uh, correct me if I’m wrong- @self_made_human feel free to chime in here- but I thought that electroshock therapy was actually an effectual and not-painful technique that was abandoned for complicated reasons including safetyism?

Well, it's not painful anymore, and it does work for at least a while.

The problem is, 1) it causes temporary cognitive deficits (that aren't so temporary if you're doing it repeatedly), 2) it is one of the few things to cause permanent retrograde amnesia (i.e. it wipes a bit of your memories every time, and they're never coming back). Permanent and scary side effects are bad, because a certain percentage of people kill themselves out of revulsion (Ernest Hemingway, for instance, killed himself after a course of electroshock therapy). Once you take that term into account, you wind up with a cost-benefit profile that's not so pleasant.

You are correct, though these days it's evolved into Electroconvulsive Therapy/ECT. Same principle, we just knock people out first and give them muscle relaxants so they don't end up aching all over.

I've considered it for myself, but I'm not sure my depression is quite that bad yet, and it has an annoying effect of minor memory loss, and buddy I rely on my memories for a living. But it's the final backstop for treatment resistant depression, though we've got new things like ketamine therapy and so on.

So it's not gone or abandoned, we've just become more civil about it. It works well when all else has failed.

Why not just try the insomnia cure ? Apparently Italians are keeping severely depressed people up for like 3-4 days straight and it resets their brain to factory setting or something.

Or the botox cure?

So many fairly low-risk therapies out there.

Is sleep deprivation low-risk? There are major negative long-term mental and physical consequences of chronic sleep deprivation, and there are wild (like, 3-4 days in is when the hallucinations usually begin) consequences of acute sleep deprivation, so while I don't know if there are any studies showing long-term consequences of acute sleep deprivation it's definitely something I'd look into before trying out a multi-day stretch.

This is not chronic, they do it once or maybe several times a year.

But I mean go read up on it, there's probably some papers out there on sci-hub on what the Italians are really doing.

have you tried taking vitamin D in the morning? I would really love a bigger sample size than just me suggesting that vitamin D has positive mood effects.

Supplements (including vitamin supplements) are near criminally under researched in the context of regular consumption by humans.

I think I've had like 5 tablets in my life. I was deficient the last time I checked ages ago, but so is everyone in India, as paradoxical as that is.

Can't say I particularly miss the sun too much really.

I started taking 2000-10,000k IU at the start of the pandemic, and my lifelong subclinical depression has lifted. It’s the only consistent thing I can credit.

n+=1, Vitamin D has positive mood effects.

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