Psychiatric Savagery with ECT in India

    As recently as 2024 the Central Institute of Psychiatry, a 643 bed psychiatric hospital in Ranchi, India, was still delivering unmodified electroshock sessions. That’s the version we see in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest when Jack Nicholson’s body and face savagely contort from the high voltage shock given him without a muscle relaxant or anesthesia.

     Unmodified ECT and other horrific psychiatric “treatments” were commonplace in India until 2017. The Mental Health Care Act was then passed to decriminalize attempted suicide, prohibit sterilization of men and women to treat mental illness, ban the seclusion and chaining of patients, and make it illegal to administer ECT without muscle relaxants and anesthesia…all considered the norm before that of good psychiatric care.

     As late as February, 2024, however, the Times of India wrote that resident doctors who had worked at the Central Institute of Psychiatry were reporting that the hospital was still delivering unmodified ECT frequently in the seventy electroshock sessions done daily at the hospital. A psychiatric consultant noted that only two anesthesiologists had been hired by the hospital, not nearly enough to accommodate delivering “modified” ECT in their seventy daily ECT sessions.

     “There is a slight risk of fractures due to the seizures induced by direct ECTs,” the consultant said, in a gross minimization of the danger. “Moreover, the experience of direct ECT could be very traumatic to the patient, too, as the person is conscious until the seizure starts.”

     It certainly “could be.” Watch Jack Nicholson’s face portray the horror he had observed watching unmodified ECT delivered to patients at the Oregon State Hospital so he could play his part realistically.

     “There is also the negative public image of direct ECTs,” the psychiatric consultant added. 

     Ya think?

     The Times also reported that some psychiatrists argued that unmodified ECT should be allowed in “resource poor settings” because it is “just as safe and cheaper” than ECT with muscle relaxants and anesthesia. No real concern by these shrinks that was also then illegal in India and is classified as savage human torture by the World Health Organization. 

     The office of the Central Institute of Psychiatry did not respond to the Times’ queries about their continuing practice of unmodified ECT.

     Psychiatrists, of course know best. They think their being “the” authority on mental health supersedes any concern for their patients’ “slight risk” of fractures or “possible” trauma they might receive from this barbaric electronic torture.