More Involuntary ECT Petitions Might Just Mean More ECT

     Inside Investigator published a news article by Marc E. Fitch this March which showed that in 2024 Connecticut probate court judges approved twice as many petitions to deliver enforced ECT than they had ten years ago. That court ordered ECT was done on patients who were deemed incompetent to voluntarily assent to ECT and who had simply refused ECT treatment.

     There were only 81 petitions for forced ECT in 2015. In 2024 there were 193 such petitions, mostly from Connecticut’s high population centers where the state-run psychiatric hospitals exist or from New Haven, where Yale’s psychiatric hospital is located. The vast majority of these petitions to deliver involuntary ECT were approved.

     The reasons for this doubling of ECT court petitions are “varied and subject to debate, according to several experts and advocates,” the article reports.

     Of course, it could be that more patients are now refusing ECT, given its proven risks and dangers. It could also be that there are more patients who have reached the “last resort” threshold of being treatment resistant after vast cocktails of psychotropic medication has still failed to correct their mental disorders.

     Or…it could just be that there is that much more ECT being delivered now than ten years ago. The percentage of petitions has not increased. The number of attempted ECT sessions has doubled. It is hard to know for sure, but…

     Only four states are legally obligated to report any statistics at all on ECT delivery. The accepted figure of 100,000 ECT sessions delivered every year in America is based on old, unreliable information from the 1980s. Consequently, ECT delivery remains cloaked in secrecy today.

     There are little hints of increased delivery across the board, though. MacLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, for instance, reports that it delivers 10,000 ECT sessions per year.

     They have administered ECT there since it started as a tentative “new” treatment sixty years ago. Today they give ECT to 50 patients per day.

     That 10,000 annual ECT sessions figure would make Maclean responsible all by itself for ten percent of the speculative 100,000 ECT session per year statistic for America. That’s highly unlikely. It’s far more likely that ECT delivery has increased exponentially over the last half century and that the 100,000 figure is now grossly minimized.

     These recent probate court statistics from Connecticut tend to confirm that.

     Of course, in an industry almost completely shielded from public or governmental scrutiny, it would not be hard to hide that kind of astronomical increase.

     And no psychiatrist wants to reveal that there is now that much psychiatric torture being performed on American patients, voluntarily or – horrifyingly enough — involuntarily.