GRE Reading Comprehension Practice Test 03

    The article “Shock therapy for mental patients will be reviewed”
    continues the ignorant tradition of demonizing electroconvulsive
    therapy (ECT) in the media (the very use of the anachronistic
    and misleading phrase “shock therapy” is unwarranted) without
5   presenting the compelling reasons for its continued use. Most
    of the facts and quotations in the article, including the
    gratuitous final paragraph about pigs in an abattoir, are
    simply taken from an article by Davar in “Issues in Medical
    Ethics”, without questioning whether Davar’s presentation of
10  the issue is an unbiased and scientifically accurate one. What
    Ms. Davar, and by extension Ms. Jain, has done is simply cite
    authorities who agree with her point of view, quote statistics
    without context, use an abundance of negative adjectives, and
    ignore outright the empirically proven benefits (often
15  life-saving) of ECT in many categories of mentally-ill
    patients. This is shabby and irresponsible medical journalism.

    While this is not the place to dispute, point-by-point, Ms.
    Davar’s presentation of her position and Ms. Jain’s repetition
    of it, I would like to quote, to counter their negative
20  emphasis, from Andrew Solomon’s widely read, intensively
    researched, highly respected book, The Noonday Demon: An
    Anatomy of Depression. Solomon writes: “Antidepressants
    are effective [against major depression] about 50 percent of
    the time, perhaps a bit more; ECT seems to have some
25  significant impact between 75 and 90 percent of the time...
    Many patients feel substantially better within a few days
    of having an ECT treatment – a boon particularly striking
    in contrast to the long, slow process of medication response.
    ECT is particularly appropriate for the severely suicidal –
30  for patients who repeatedly injure themselves and whose
    situation is therefore mortally urgent – because of its
    rapid action and high response rate, and it is used in
    pregnant women, the sick, and the elderly, because it does
    not have the systemic side effects or drug-interaction
35  problems of most medications.”

    There are, indeed, problems with the administration of ECT,
    especially in a country like India with its poor health
    infrastructure. It would be foolish to deny that the
    practice is subject to abuse (as Solomon and numerous
40  Indian writers report). The continued use of “direct” ECT
    (without the use of an anesthetic) is certainly a matter
    of concern – and a concerted effort to implement national
    guidelines making “modified” ECT (using an anesthetic)
    mandatory is as necessary as it is laudatory. But we can
45  all do without more pieces of journalism which perpetuate
    the myth that ECT is a medically unjustified, indeed barbaric
    practice, tantamount to torture. This ignorant view, equally
    prevalent in the West as it is in India, has more to do with
    movies like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest than
50  with scientific fact.

    It is exceedingly difficult to make people realize that an evil
    is an evil. For instance, we seize a man and deliberately do
    him a malicious injury: say, imprison him for years. One would
    not suppose that it needed any exceptional clearness of wit to
5   recognize in this an act of diabolical cruelty. But in England
    such a recognition provokes a stare of surprise, followed by an
    explanation that the outrage is punishment or justice or
    something else that is all right, or perhaps by a heated attempt
    to argue that we should all be robbed and murdered in our beds
10  if such senseless villainies as sentences of imprisonment were
    not committed daily. It is useless to argue that even if this
    were true, which it is not, the alternative to adding crimes
    of our own to the crimes from which we suffer is not helpless
    submission. Chickenpox is an evil; but if I were to declare
15  that we must either submit to it or else repress it by seizing
    everyone who suffers from it and punishing them by inoculation
    with smallpox, I should be laughed at; for though nobody could
    deny that the result would be to prevent chickenpox to some
    extent by making people avoid it much more carefully, and to
20  effect a further apparent prevention by making them conceal
    it very anxiously, yet people would have sense enough to see
    that the deliberate propagation of smallpox was a creation of
    evil, and must therefore be ruled out in favor of purely humane
    and hygienic measures. Yet in the precisely parallel case of a
25  man breaking into my house and stealing my diamonds I am
    expected as a matter of course to steal ten years of his life.
    If he tries to defeat that monstrous retaliation by shooting
    me, my survivors hang him. The net result suggested by the
    police statistics is that we inflict atrocious injuries on the
30  burglars we catch in order to make the rest take effectual
    precautions against detection; so that instead of saving our
    diamonds from burglary we only greatly decrease our chances
    of ever getting them back, and increase our chances of being
    shot by the robber.

35  But the thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter
    sentences of imprisonment is as nothing compared to the
    stupid levity with which we tolerate poverty as if it were
    either a wholesome tonic for lazy people or else a virtue to
    be embraced as St. Francis embraced it. If a man is indolent,
40  let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor. If he is
    not a gentleman, let him be poor. If he is addicted to the
    fine arts or to pure science instead of to trade and finance,
    let him be poor. If he chooses to spend his wages on his beer
    and his family instead of saving it up for his old age, let
45  him be poor. Let nothing be done for "the undeserving": let
    him be poor. Serve him right! Also -- somewhat inconsistently
    -- blessed are the poor!