Реферат: Abnormal Psychology Mental Disorders Essay Research Paper

taught to deal with all the impulses that the other personalities would deal

with such as anger, sexuality, and depression. The final stage is fusing all

the personalities back into one. The patient must then practice dealing with

all kinds of emotions to prevent a renewed dissociation.

Electroconvulsive Therapy http://www.i1.net:80/~juli/ect/brain/brain.html

Electroconvulsive therapy is the process of passing an electrical

current through the brain causing unconsciousness and convulsions. In this

procedure electrodes are placed on both temples, or just one temple in

unilateral treatment, and electricity is passed between them. This proceeder is

usually used for patients suffering from severe depression after all other

treatments have failed. The treatment is very controversial because many

believe that there are side effects from passing electricity through the brain.

Five major areas are looked at to see if there are side effects: the brains of

epileptics, animal brains, psychological test findings with history of many ECTs,

spontaneous seizures, and human brain reports.

In study brains of epileptics it was concluded that ECT cause lasting

effects, much in the same way that grand mal seizures did. When studying animal

brain both reversible and irreversible damage was found to brain cells after

multiple ECTs. The results from studying psychological test were inconclusive

because of the experimenters inability to set up a controlled experiment. There

were always too many variables that could not be accounted for. Patients who

have received ECTs have been known to have post-ECT spontaneous seizures.

Though some had them prior to the numerous had not who afterwards did. It is

unsure if the seizures last forever because often the patient i s put on

medication to prevent them. However the studies have concluded that in at least

some cases after people received ECT they started to have seizures. In studying

human autopsies it was found that some patients of ECT had irreversible damage

done to their brain while others damage was reversible. The explanation for the

different was that if the patient was in good health prior to the ECTs they had