Does Electroconvulsive Therapy’s Brutal Voltage Merely Snap Someone Violently -- but Temporarily -- into Present Time?

     As if one blow to the brain from 460 volts of electricity wasn’t enough, Penn State researchers have recently  discovered there’s a second, high amplitude wave that passes through a person’s brain immediately after the seizure from electroconvulsive therapy.

     Using newly created optical imaging technology, the Penn State team discovered this second blow to the brain which they call a “hard reset” to every neuron in its path. In ECT’s eighty-four year history this is the first time the second shockwave has been noticed in the study’s neuro-imaging of mouse and human brains.

     The Penn Medicine news announcement also cites a 2022 New England Journal of Medicine article for validation of ECT procedure efficacy, although that article adds that the  actual “mechanism is not known, but a seizure is required for efficacy.” The new neuro-imaging information does not suggest any new theory about this unknown mechanism, but it does  reveal the magnitude of a second blow to the brain.

     There’s an old, slightly cruel joke about a farmer who cannot get his mule to plow a field. He asks a neighboring farmer for help, and that fellow –  probably a part-time psychiatrist – picks up a two-by-four and smacks the mule as hard as he can with it across the head. The mule immediately allows itself to be hitched up and starts  plowing the farmer’s field.

     “First thing you have to do is get the mule’s attention,” the neighboring farmer says.

     Those two blows from ECT’s voltage certainly get a patient’s attention, we suspect. 

     In fact, the immediate surge in non-psychotic thoughts and emotions reported by some ECT recipients after ECT might be attributed to their  sudden violent arrival in present time. Their “attention” has indeed been  gotten. That would also explain their rather quick return to a prior  uncomfortable emotional and mental state as their short term enforced, violent attention on present time recedes.

     Of course, no studies have shown anything but negative long term effects from ECT: moderate to severe memory losses, increases in cardiac difficulties, higher suicide rates.

     ECT is just the most recent attempt by psychiatry to use brutal force to “cure” someone of his or her  abnormalities. Lobotomies, trans-orbital leukotomies, insulin shock coma, and forced sterilization are all “therapies” created by psychiatry over the last hundred years to “help” their fellow man. Even nullifying  undesirable aspects of the personality through mind-numbing antidepressants and psychotropic prescriptions is a vicious use of  chemicals to control behavior through attacking the body with some form of force.

     Apparently there is still a deep confusion between “help” and  “punishment” in the brutal world of psychiatry.