Ernest Hemingway: ECT Treatment Successful, But “We Lost the Patient…”

     Renowned American author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide the day after his thirty-sixth ECT session in 1961.

     In the late 1950s he had become depressed and had announced that FBI agents were tailing him and tapping his phone. For a “cure,” he was prescribed the first of three dozen ECT treatments in 1960 at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. 

     At first he objected to a proposed stay at the Menninger Clinic. “They’ll say I’m losing
my marbles,” he said. 

     Finally he underwent his first battery of electroshocks and was returned home, but after a few weeks his “symptoms” returned and he was sent back for more electroshock. After some of these sessions, he could not remember his name.

     “Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business?” Hemingway said. “It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient….”

     Hemingway’s weight dropped from a robust 220 pounds to a frail 160 pounds during the course of these treatments, and per James Nagle, his biographer and President of the International Hemingway Society, Hemingway “would get on his knees and cry and beg his wife not to send him back for more shock treatments.”

     After his thirty-sixth electroshock treatment at the Mayo clinic, Hemingway returned home, got out his favorite Scott 12 gauge shotgun, propped it against the linoleum kitchen floor, placed the two barrels in his mouth and pulled both triggers.

     Some time after the Freedom of Information Act had been passed in 1966, it was discovered that J. Edgar Hoover had, in fact, assigned an agent in Cuba to watch Hemingway in the 1950’s and that Hemingway’s phone had in fact been tapped and that FBI agent reports had continuously been filed on him all during his stay at St. Mary’s hospital.

(This article is an excerpt from our free downloadable broadsheet Shock Therapy).