The Ethics of Electric Shock Therapy in "Regeneration"

"Pat Barker's Regeneration: Is Electric Shock Therapy Moral?"

Psychiatry is a very abstract study. That is why they call it a "soft science." It's earliest roots are only decades, not centuries. In the novel Regeneration, by Pat Barker, their are two different types of therapy used in psychiatry at the time, electric shock therapy and communication therapy. Electric shock therapy is immoral. It is painful to the patient and does not have a a high rate of patient satisfactory. It is done against a patient's will. It usually doesn't work. Communication therapy is so much better than electric shock therapy.

Doctor Rivers, the protagonist in the novel, has been in a psychiatric ward for a number of years now. He is much older than his patients, who are mostly young men brought to him from the war. Craiglockhart, located in England, is a place where soldiers victimized by World War One were sent when they couldn't function as soldiers anymore. Whether it be from shell- shock, or something else. Rivers talks to his patients. This is a very new technic used at this time. Rivers is unsure of his therapy and if it works. He deals with this inner conflict throughout the whole story. Rivers helps his patients deal with their in dilemmas, in hopes that they will understand why they feel the way they do, and how to control their emotions, and how to cope with their problems and experiences.

Doctor Rivers is a character of mercy. He is taking a standby trying to make this new therapy work. When he sees what Doctor Yealland does to his patients in order to "cure" them, Rivers is outraged and disturbed.

Doctor Yealland participates in something which is very accepted at the time, electric shock therapy. He even says to Rivers that he shouldn't feel sympathetic to the patients. I feel Yealland is a brute. How could you know feel remorse for inducing large amounts a agonizing pain on another human being? Yealland is doing something that I would never be able to do, he tortures his patients into being cure. I can't imagine that it worked that well, especially since he was using this therapy on men with shell shock. Yealland's form of therapy is also very impersonal. He even says to one of his patients, "You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say. I cannot imagine the hopelessness his patients must feel, knowing that they were fighting in war, and then brought to be tortured in a psychiatric facility.