Cuckoo’s Nest-type ECT Still Used across the World

     Electroshock therapy proponents repeat their mantra that “ECT is not like that anymore” when Jack Nicholson’s brutal portrayal of an ECT victim in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is brought up. “Today ECT patients are anesthetized and given muscle relaxers beforehand so they don’t feel any pain at all,” they say.

     Maybe…but the force of 460 volts running through one’s head gives a brutal physical jolt to the brain and the body, regardless if the patient is awake to feel it. Knocking out the patient with drugs first is now called “Modified ECT” and this camouflaged brutality is what is now practiced in the United States, the UK, and Australia, for instance.

     But “Unmodified ECT” – the ECT we see in Cuckoo’s Nest – is still practiced in many countries around the world. Just a straight 460 volts to the head and brain. No Valium, no anesthesia, no muscle relaxers, no oxygen.

     One 2022 Human Watch Report revealed the frequency of these abuses in Indonesia, where Unmodified ECT is not only used as a psychiatric tool, but also a form of punishment. Often it is administered without the patients’ consent. These researchers visited six hospitals in Indonesia and in half of them unmodified ECT was being administered. Grogol Mental Hospital used it on children.

     A 2014 Human Rights Watch report revealed the use of ECT on disabled Indian women being used as a form of coercion. Nurses told researchers of threatening uncooperative patients with ECT simply to induce their compliance. One of the nursing staff said, “We say, ‘If you don’t take your medicine, we will take you to the ECT room’ and immediately they say, ‘Please don’t take me to that room. I won’t do that again.’”

     In Chile, it was not until 2000 that the Ministry of Health issued a ban on the use of unmodified ECT, but in 2022 a report was submitted by the Minister of Health to the National Public Prosecutor that showed that unmodified ECT was still being administered at the Hospital Del Salvador, a public psychiatric hospital in the port city of Valparaiso.

     While the United Nations and the World Health Organization has condemned involuntary modified ECT as well as any unmodified ECT practices, the use of ECT as an efficient punishment tool is still too tempting to be avoided. Those sadistic practitioners who use it that way at least see ECT for what it actually is: a brutal tool to control unwanted human behavior.

     Unmodified or modified.