If you search for ECT, what you find will probably frighten you. Researchers set out to measure exactly that, analysing tweets in English and Spanish that mentioned ECT over a 22-month period.
Two findings stand out. First, more than half of all the posts were jokes or trivialising content — and those were liked and shared more than anything else. Second, among posts expressing a genuine personal opinion, around 75% were negative.
There was also an imbalance in who was talking. Healthcare providers produced about a quarter of the posts and most of the medical content. People with lived experience of ECT, and their families, made up only around 10% combined.
So the loudest voices online are largely not the people who have actually had the treatment.
This matters because that impression is doing real work. ECT is one of the most stigmatised treatments in medicine, and fear shaped by jokes rather than evidence can stop someone considering something that might genuinely help them.
None of this means you should ignore concerns about ECT — there are real trade-offs worth discussing. It means the discussion is better had with a psychiatrist than with a search engine.