has electroshock therapy actually everhelped anyone with anything?
Debatably.
Electroconvulsive therapy was introduced in the 1930's. There are two important things you need to know about medicine (and particularly psychotherapy) in the 1930's: first, this was before the advent of the double-blind controlled trial, meaning that physicians were basically just guessing about how well their treatments worked; and second, there were no effective treatments for most mental disorders.
At the time, there were five available treatment options for any mental illness: Let your rich family take care of you, get locked up in an asylum, get a lobotomy, get ECT, or disappear in prison. Most people don't have rich families, so they almost invariably received one (or more!) of the last four options. Doctors* usually chose ECT as a first-line treatment because it was the only option that didn't involve ruining the patient's life.
*The doctors chose the treatment, not the patients. This was before "informed consent."
ECT (along with the frontal lobotomy) was phased out almost as soon as pharmacological treatments became available. However, it is still used under certain very rare circumstances, mostly for patients with severe depression that has persistently resisted other treatments (it actually is somewhat effective). The modern procedure isn't as barbaric as the old one - for starters, they use muscle relaxants now, which prevents the injured muscles, broken bones, and slipped vertebrae that made the old procedure so exciting.
I have no idea why Tao Ran is using ECT to treat addiction.
(EDIT: It's not ECT. I think it's some kind of aversion training.) I suspect this means he's a quack in the style of America's own Dr. George A. Ricaurte.
