Patients' Opinions About Electroconvulsive Therapy: What Do Adolescents with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders Think?

The purpose of this study was to assess, in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) who received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) prior to the age of 18, their experience, knowledge, and attitudes toward ECT, and to compare the findings with those obtained in adolescents treated only with antipsychotics.

Patients diagnosed with SSD (n = 19) and treated with ECT before the age of 18 years (ECT group; n = 19) were compared with a randomly selected group of patients with SSD treated only with antipsychotics (non-ECT group, n = 21). A self-administered questionnaire was used to assess their experience, knowledge, and attitudes.

Most adolescents in the ECT group thought that the intervention had been helpful (78.9%) and believed that their illness had been worse than ECT or medication (68.4%). Similarly, almost three quarters of these patients did not believe the treatment to be cruel (73.7%) or outdated (73.7%), or that it should be illegal (68.4%). Patients in the non-ECT group often chose "don't know" as their response to the survey questions, and significant differences between the groups were observed. Most patients in both the ECT group (84.2%) and the non-ECT group (80%) said that they would accept the treatment in the future if necessary, there being no differences between the groups in this respect (p = 0.2).

Most adolescents in the ECT group had positive views about ECT. By contrast, most adolescents in the non-ECT group either did not know or did not have a clear opinion regarding ECT treatment, although they did not have negative views about it.