Max Fink, Crazed Pro-ECT Shrink

     Even Dr. Charles Nemeroff, Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin, called pro-ECT psychiatrist Max Fink “an irascible, dominant figure” and “a zealot, no question about it. He thought ECT was a panacea.”

     In 1985 Fink had founded the journal Convulsive Therapy, now a website, and served on the American Psychiatric Association’s task forces on ECT in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties. He was the most active voice within psychiatry for the use of electroshock therapy until his death this year, but he had not always been a fan of ECT.

     After watching an ECT treatment in 1952, he said “As the currents were applied, the neck and back arched, the body became rigid, followed by rhythmic muscle movements and breath holding. The patient became cyanotic with blue lips, movements stopped, the muscles relaxed, deep breathing followed, cyanosis waned, and color returned to the lips as the patient was moved to a recovery room.”

     He claimed he was “jarred” by the sight because he had been trained that all convulsions were to be avoided as they could cause fractures and lethal injuries.

     Somehow, over the following yeas, his view of ECT changed considerably.

     He soon decided that ECT had a biochemical healing basis and he  eventually concluded that the memory loss that was induced by ECT was actually “a hysterical symptom,” parallel to the public’s highly emotional reaction to the Camelford, England, sulphuric acid water pollution  catastrophe in 1988. That catastrophe proved to have severe short term and long term effects on many of the local residents of Cornwall. That hysteria was not unwarranted.

     As he gained prominence in the psychiatric world, Fink was awarded U.S. government funding for a large study that compared the ECT to psychiatric medication for severely depressed patients. Unbelievably, Fink claimed that his study found that of 87 percent of his patients went into remission from depression after ECT.

     No study before or since ever claimed anything even close to that efficacy rate, and most studies done in the last twenty years show very little remission immediately, and almost no long term remission of symptoms after ECT treatments. Fink’s “results” also do not measure the long term dangers to ECT patients from short and long term memory loss, increased cardiac difficulties, and increased suicide rates.

     A 2002 Times of India article on Fink reported that when asked “How safe is ECT?” Fink’s cavalier reply was “If there are some deaths, that has only to do with the fact that they didn’t do it right.”

     Over his long life Fink advanced the idea within psychiatry that  electroconvulsive therapy was a valuable treatment and it shouldn’t be considered just as a last resort, which the FDA has dictated is its only  application. In 2019, as he received a lifetime achievement award from the Institute of Living , a prominent ECT delivery center in Hartford, Conn, he did acknowledge, though, that “We had a problem getting this accepted by the public.”

     Given the number of lives that have been affected by the brutal effects of ECT, that’s hardly surprising, Max.

     Unfortunately, though, the  psychiatric profession has not had that much problem being convinced of Fink’s false claims for ECT.  Psychiatrists deliver more than a million ECT sessions globally each year.