Treatment dates from 1930s and was used as gay ‘cure’

ECT was invented in Italy in the 1930s by Ugo Cerletti, a professor of neuropsychiatry who had been using it in animal experiments.

Initially seen as a safer option to inducing seizures chemically – which was fairly common at the time – it quickly became widely used in mental hospitals.

In the 1950s, ECT was also used as a “treatment” for homosexuality, then considered by some psychiatrists to be an illness.

By the 1960s and ’70s critics had labelled it as barbaric. Ken Kesey’s 1962 book One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – and the 1975 film starring Jack Nicholson – depicted scenes of unruly patients forced to have ECT.

This, along with protests from the anti-psychiatry movement, led to a sharp decrease in the treatment.

Between 1979 and 1989, ECT use in England dropped by a third. In 1980 around 50,000 UK patients received ECT. This fell to 12,000 in 2002 and latest figures show it at just over 5,000.

It is still used in nearly all psychiatric hospitals, with a 2002 survey showing 71 per cent of patients were women and 46 per cent were over 65.

HANDFUL Patient has ECT in 1956