Letters to the Editor How Relevant is Seizure Duration in Assessing the Effectiveness of

(ECT) is a highly effective treatment for major depression and other psychiatric disor-ders. The question of how to define a thera-peutically adequate ECT treatment has been discussed from the early days of ECT (1) to the present (2). Although convention has required a minimum individual seizure duration of 15 to 25 seconds (3,4) or a total seizure duration of more than 200 seconds (5), the complex electrophysiological events involved in developing a generalized seizure make it problematic to link the therapeutic efficacy of ECT to seizure duration only. We describe the case of a patient with severe depression who completely recovered des