Publications by authors named "Shauni Verspecht"
Introduction: Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) related anxiety (ERA) is a common phenomenon with high individual variability. The way patients cognitively cope with the prospects of receiving ECT could be a mechanism explaining individual differences in ERA. Cognitive coping like monitoring (information seeking, paying attention to consequences) and blunting (seeking distraction and reassurance) has been linked to anxiety in various medical settings, with monitoring leading to more and blunting to less anxiety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The recent network perspective of depression conceptualizes depression as a dynamic network of causally related symptoms, that contrasts with the traditional view of depression as a discrete latent entity that causes all symptoms. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is an effective treatment for severe depression, but little is known about the temporal trajectories of symptom improvement during a course of ECT.
Objective: To gain insight into the dynamics of depressive symptoms in individuals treated with ECT.
Article Synopsis
- The study aimed to evaluate the knowledge and attitudes of medical students regarding electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and how various information sources influenced these perspectives.
- A survey involving 295 first-year and 149 final-year students from KU Leuven showed that while final-year students had better knowledge and attitudes towards ECT, both groups scored below 50% in their overall knowledge.
- The findings suggest that limited instruction on ECT in medical education contributes to ongoing misinformation, and reliance on media as a source of information can lead to negative attitudes that should be addressed in the curriculum.
Article Synopsis
- The study looked at how anxiety related to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) changes during treatment, especially in the maintenance phase (M-ECT).
- While anxiety decreased during the initial ECT treatment, it stayed pretty much the same during the M-ECT phase.
- Patients with different types of depression had different experiences with anxiety during the acute treatment, but afterward, both their depression and anxiety levels remained stable during maintenance ECT sessions.