Why don't you try to convince one of the psychiatrists who works at a mental hospital to have their brain shocked? Good luck with that.
Try getting an oncologist to undergo chemotherapy he doesn't need. Won't have much luck there either. Doesn't mean chemotherapy doesn't work.
Or, why don't you try to find a scientific study that proves how electric shock actually benefits people?
The brain is extremely complex, and we don't really know how it works. So we don't know exactly how ECT works either. But as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and the proof of the treatment is in the results. People with serious depression that doesn't respond to counseling or medication often improve after ECT. That's a fact that's well supported by decades of evidence.
Here's a paper I found relatively easily that's free for everyone, there's lots more if you are at a university and know how to use PubMed. Does it cure the root cause of depression? No. Is it without side effects? No. Does it keep severely depressed people from relapsing and possibly committing suicide? Yes. That's what's important.
Now, that doesn't mean we don't have good ideas on how it works. It definitely has something to do with the NMDA type glutamate receptor, which is intimately involved in synaptic plasticity. ECT also definitely affects serotonin receptors, which of course are involved in depression (see SSRIs). But this isn't the place for a neurobiology lecture, and I'm not up on the literature anymore anyway. To the OP, sorry to derail your thread.
