Mini-ECT Devices Said to Correct “Chemical Imbalance”

     Where there’s money to be made, psychiatry is sure to follow. ECT sessions bring in at least 2 ½ billion dollars a year in America alone — ten times that globally — while its delivery is obscured by secrecy. Almost no information is reported officially about the frequency of delivery or about the adverse short and long term effects measured by clinical trials.

     It’s a dark psychiatric industry with almost no public exposure, but it is profitable. Now a shadow mini-ECT industry of transcranial magnetic  devices is growing which uses external neuromodulation to “reset” neural impulses within the brain to release the “natural chemicals” that control emotion. These devices are being marketed as triggering the serotonin levels in the brain and are therefore based on the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental health which has been totally discredited.

     How safe are these devices? We don’t really know. How effective are they? We don’t know that either.

     There is almost as much lack of clarity and information from the FDA about these new devices as there is about ECT itself. The FDA says it doesn’t have to rule on ECT because it constitutes the practice of medicine, and that is out of their purview. Protecting the health and safety of the American public should be under their purview, though, shouldn’t it?

     That’s the same effectiveness and safety criteria they use to rule on every drug they assess. And we know the FDA has never judged the effectiveness of improving mental health by correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain. They couldn’t, could they, as there is no such thing?

     The FDA has not ruled on the effectiveness or safety of these new mini-ECT devices either. Instead they issue their De Novo grant that only authorizes a device to be marketed because the minimal trial “evidence” they have shows no risk of danger. That grant implies nothing about its effectiveness, and in fact the trials that the FDA has looked at involve as few as three hundred participants.

     The non-scientific “evidence” of anecdotal reports and lived experience – the two terms used by psychiatry to discredit valid personal experiences – suggest that there are dangers to the use of these mini-ECT devices. The least severe effects are minor headaches during or after use, twitching or spasms in the face, and dizziness or lightheadedness. The more severe, but more rare, effects reported are reduced hearing or tinnitus and mania. As well as seizures – kind of like a lower harmonic of the grand mal seizures that full ECT is designed to trigger.

     So, just how dangerous are these devices? Again, we do not know, and we won’t know until the FDA starts doing its job of fully protecting the public from these questionable – but profitable — new “therapies.”