Erin Allman‑Updyke

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983 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 2d ago

Erin Allman‑Updyke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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This Podcast Will Kill You · Ep 221 Electroconvulsive Therapy Part 2: A current conversation · 8 Sep 2026 podcast

So just a few things on the agenda.

At the very top of last week's episode, Erin, you defined ECT for us.

Electroconvulsive therapy is basically delivering electricity to our brain.

With the goal of provoking a seizure, to treat a variety, a really kind of wider variety than you might think, of what we call affective disorders.

So those are things like treatment-resistant depression, which might mean either unipolar depression.

So that's things like major depressive disorder, or bipolar depression.

We also use it for psychotic disorders, including psychotic depression, schizoaffective disorder, and schizophrenia.

And catatonia and related disorders, which we're going to talk about in a lot more detail, and can present in both more neurologic and more kind of psychiatric conditions.

But what does it actually look like?

So if you or I were going to go get ECT, if we had a need for this procedure, this is kind of the steps that we would go through.

First, there would be a very lengthy discussion of the risks and the benefits of this procedure.

The person who's performing it would be talking with us.

They would be talking with our family or our friends and other like surrogate decision makers if needed.

There is a really robust informed consent process that has to be gone through.

Usually there's also a general physical exam that has to be done, either by a primary care or hospitalist physician or sometimes by a cardiologist to make sure that our heart and our body is overall healthy enough to withstand this procedure, especially the anesthesia.

We would then have to not eat anything for an entire night, and then the next morning we'd arrive to a room either in a hospital or an outpatient clinic, depending on the situation.

We would be wearing a hospital gown, like we always do for any of these kinds of procedures, and we'd probably be greeted by either a nurse or a technician and an anesthetist.

We'd get an IV put in our arm, we'd have a blood pressure cuff, they'd take our vitals.

Actually they'd put two blood pressure cuffs on, one on our arm and one on our right leg.

We'll talk about why in a second.

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