American Psychiatric Association Finally Admits Some of the Risks of Electroshock Therapy

  July 9, 2025 – Robert Carter

     

     The American Psychiatric  Association has recently offered new cautions on the use of ECT after citing the risks of long-term memory loss and other health concerns due to the procedure. They recommend against the use of ECT in children. They also now stress the need to ensure that patients are receiving a full informed consent overview when ECT is  recommended.

     It’s about time.

     There is no study that shows electroshock therapy to be effective in treating mental disorders. One study of seventy thousand American veterans with comparable mental problems showed that there was no difference in outcome from those who received ECT and those who didn’t. Only four of the eleven placebo-based ECT studies ever done – all before 1985, by the way – showed ECT to beat the placebo for effectiveness, and the protocol for those four studies has itself been found to be scientifically questionable.

     There are now studies that show that patients who receive ECT are forty-five times more likely to successfully commit suicide than the general public. Other studies show that a third of all ECT recipients have persistent memory loss that can last for years. Life threatening cardiac conditions have also been confirmed in ECT recipients, including those with no prior heart condition.

     The fact that ECT is delivered at all is based on a bogus psychiatric premise from the 1940s that said that because schizophrenics did not suffer with epilepsy, and epileptics did not suffer with schizophrenia, inducing an epileptic seizure should “cure” schizophrenia.

     What?

     Even the psychiatric term “schizophrenia” is of questionable validity. Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the term in 1908, but he claimed the “disease” had a genetic, biological base. Because of his early “chemical imbalance” theory, he suggested schizophrenics be forcibly controlled, not rehabilitated.

     His solution was the enforced castration and sterilization of the schizophrenics incarcerated in his clinic in Zurich. His theories, of course, became popular with the Nazi regime when they began eliminating any impurities within their “pure” race.

     The American Psychiatric Association, with its new “guidance” for the administration of ECT, has at least stuck a couple of its toes into the 21 st century. They’re still far behind the World Health Organization’s stance, however, that says that involuntary ECT is “torture.”

     And they’re even further behind in facing the unending studies that now show the truly harmful effects of zapping a human being’s brain with 460 volts of electricity in order to eradicate a bogus mental disorder.