Despite concerns about efficacy and side effects, courts are slow to act on behalf of patients who don't want the treatment.

Gina Teixeira, an attorney with the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, got the call last May. A court was going to force a man to undergo shock therapy, and he wanted her help fighting the order.

He wasn't alone. Teixeira regularly receives inquiries from Connecticut patients facing involuntary shock treatment court orders, including one client who she says has been unwillingly subjected to the shocks 500 times.

"I think it happens a lot more than people realize," Teixeira says.

Shock therapy, also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), was developed in the late 1930s as a psychiatric treatment for severe psychosis and catatonia. Patients undergoing the procedure receive jolts of electricity from electrodes placed on their temples, triggering a brain seizure and convulsions that last up to a minute. After the two Italian psychiatrists who invented the treatment reported positive results, a 1938 news headline declared "Madness Cured with Electricity."