So, How Many People in U.S. Get ECT Every Year?

      100,000 people get electroshocked in the U.S. every year. At least, that’s the conventional estimate made by the media, academic medical centers, government mental health agencies, and, of course, psychiatrists. That figure, however, is based on two estimates from surveys done way back in the 1980s and 1990s.

     Because only four states are legally required to report ECT sessions – California, Texas, Colorado and Massachusetts – actual data on ECT is almost nonexistent today. Colorado shows that ECT recipients more than doubled from 2008 to 2018, and some other states also report rises in ECT delivery, Rhode Island and Illinois, for instance. Connecticut has reported a dramatic rise in court orders for involuntary ECT sessions since the FDA downgrade ECT device danger from Class III to Class II in 2018.

     Consequently, one has to poke around a bit into the few ECT statistics that are available to come up with a more accurate estimate of annual ECT sessions delivered. 

     There are currently 15,421 mental health facilities in the U.S. In 2022 46 percent of “mental health facilities” had designated ECT delivery resources, but many of those facilities are out-patient delivery centers. If we look at how many facilities are strictly in-patient, we find 1288 in-patient hospitals with mental health departments, 820 strictly psychiatric hospitals, and 2460 residential mental health facilities. That’s just over 4500 mental health facilities likely to deliver ECT. 46 percent of them equals 2101 facilities.

     If each of them delivered ECT to only one patient per week, that would equate to just over 109,000 patients per year…on par with the reported estimate of 100,000. However, that figure leaves any of the private mental health clinics today that deliver ECT as well as the remainder of the 15,421 mental health facilities that may also deliver ECT to out-patients.

      That also omits the known fact that some facilities deliver far more than one ECT session per week per  individual. MacLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, for instance, reports that it delivers 7,000 ECT sessions per year. The hospital is one of the largest ECT facilities in the country and they report they administer ECT “services” to 50 patients per day.

     Yes, that may be the leading ECT hospital n the country, but it does not take many others delivering ECT at that rate to bump up that 109,000 ECT patients per year to a much higher number.

     200,000? 300,000? 

     No wonder psychiatrists have influenced the FDA not to require any national reporting of how many Americans are being given permanent memory loss, cognitive impairment, and dangerous cardiac conditions from the brutal ECT voltage running through their delicate brain cells.

     That’s a lot of carnage for psychiatrists to own up to.