Dr. David Healy: An ECT Wolf in Anti-Big Pharma Clothing

     Psychiatrist David Healy has been a long term critic of psychiatric drugs, citing the contribution of antidepressants to suicide and the financial gains of academic institutions from money from Big Pharma. His book Let Them Eat Prozac, published in 2004, has become a bible for anti-psychiatry, anti-psychotropic medication proponents.

     Then, in 2007 he published Shock Therapy, an unapologetic recommendation of electroconvulsive therapy.

     How could that be?

     Well, Max Fink is apparently a co-author. Psychiatrist Fink was America’s leading proponent of the benefits of electroshock therapy for the last half century, founded the journal Convulsive Therapy (now The Journal of ECT) and started the Scion Natural Science Association. Fink made promotional videos for the Somatics company, leading manufacturer of ECT delivery devices, and published books and article after article denying ECT had any noteworthy negative effects.

     Fink’s Scion Natural Science Association is a non-profit now run by his family with an annual average charitable disbursement of less than $20 thousand. However, it did fund the authors of Shock Therapy with $34,000 – twice their annual charitable donations — to write the book.

     Shock Therapy is as unapologetically pro-ECT as anything Fink himself wrote during his lifetime and it denies any “downside” to ECT and advocates its use over pharmaceutical medication for those who are mentally ill.

     The book opens with the statement “So clear are the benefits from ECT for patients who might otherwise commit suicide, or otherwise languish for years in the blackness of depression, that there should be little controversy over whether it is safe or effective.”

     Brain damage from ECT is an “urban myth,” the authors claim, and reports of memory loss are not significant enough to be considered.

     Those claims, of course, run counter to the decades of valid research that show ECT does cause memory loss, both temporary and permanent, raises the risk of dangerous cardiac conditions, and has a higher incidence of suicide in its recipients.

     Since 1997 psychiatrist Healy has been paid around $40,000 annually as an expert witness in anti-psychotropic drug trials such as the $8 million dollar settlement against GlaxoSmithKline trial in 2001 over Paxil. In 2002 Healy sued the University of Toronto for $6 million for violation of his academic freedom and defamation as a physician because of his voiced opinions. The out of court settlement of the lawsuit included his appointment as a visiting professor at a University of Toronto affiliate center.

     In other words, he has been able to capitalize on his anti-psychotropic, pro ECT opinions.

     A shill is defined as an accomplice of a swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others. Healy may be an expert witness, but he has also done well as the perfect shill for the electroshock industry.