Author name: Robert Carter

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed A Modest Proposal for ECT May 20, 2026 – Robert Carter      Today electroshock is only given to a million or so people internationally every year. These are the psychiatric patients who for the most part have been labeled “treatment resistant.” In other words, no amount of psychotropic drugs has done enough to curb their aberrant behavior.      Just as a child who picks his nose, passes gas at the dinner table, or calls his little sister a nerd will not stop that behavior after a couple spankings with a willow branch and needs a more severe lashing with dad’s leather belt, so too do these “resistant” patients need more force applied to them so they can mend their socially unique behavior.      That’s why, in the crowning glory of our justice system, we execute death row prisoners when no earlier incarcerations have curbed their dangerous behavior. Severe corporal punishment breeds social decorum.       ECT patients get 460 volts of electricity run through their brains in order to induce a grand mal epileptic seizure. In many civilized countries, the patient is given anesthesia and a muscle relaxant so no bones break and no teeth are crushed from the force of the voltage.      Those two medications, though, are mostly for the benefit of the psychiatrists administering the ECT so they don’t have to face the violence of the treatment. After all, those doctors are the sane, well-behaved ones.      Psychiatry has had a long history of eugenic cleansing – like our own capital punishment – which they applied throughout the twentieth century with their insulin comas, ECT, and lobotomies in the dark corridors of the world’s insane asylums as their own brand of culling the world of the “insane” so as to make a better, more “normal” world.      Why not now bring that ideology out into the open and crank up the jolt of ECT electricity to a point where it will actually do some good for the greater world and eliminate these mentally aberrant souls incapable of responding to psychotropic drug treatment?      Tweaking a psychiatrist’s Thymatronic and Sigma device to put out the voltage and amperage of electrocution to swiftly and permanently end “treatment resistance” cannot be too hard a task in our high tech world, can it? Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed The New “Safe and Improved” ECT. Yeah, right. May 8, 2026 – Robert Carter For the last decade psychiatrists have been touting their new, improved, safe and effective electroshock therapy. The anesthesia and muscle relaxants used today, they say, make ECT an entirely different experience than what we saw on Jack Nicholson’s face in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It is true that now anesthesia is used to knock someone out for the procedure. However, the real reason anesthesia is used is because the muscle relaxant they use today – the same paralyzing drug given to death row inmates before their electrocution – is so painful to the body that a person would not be able stand the pain from it unless they were unconscious. Of course, the pain from the 460 volts sent into a person’s brain to initiate a grand mal seizure is also now masked by the anesthesia and the muscle paralyzer. The truly crippling effects from ECT are those that have been found after the procedure to last for years or for life. While there have been no scientific trials for ECT in the last forty years – and the ones conducted before that are unreliable – today there is an increasingly voluminous library of lived experience reported by ECT victims. Dr. John Read’s study of 1144 victims and their families published last fall is but one of thousands of collected tales of the long term horrors from ECT. Anna Webb, Founder of Life after ECT and Sarah Price Hancock, Founder of Ionic Injury Foundation, are two survivors of ECT who today are also leaders in the exposure of ECT’s harm. Anecdotal as well as confirmed evidence of short and long term memory loss, cognitive impairment, and cardiac difficulties are now well documented, and as Anna Webb has recently pointed out on her website, lifeafterect.org, there is now evidence of an increased risk of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) after one has received ECT. Recent studies like Mezei’s 2022 research have shown that those who have received ten or more ECT sessions have doubled their risk for getting ALS, the neurodegenerative disorder that destroys the body’s motor controls and for which there is no cure. There is speculation that the physical trauma from that large a shock of electricity might cause destruction of the body’s motor neurons…regardless if it is masked by anesthesia and paralytics. Even the FDA has issued an oblique warning for these issues by requiring the manufacturers of the ECT devices, Thymatron and MECTA, to have a Black Box warning on their machines noting that ECT use may be associated with disorientation and confusion, and that its benefits may be temporary and that both acute and persistent memory impairment may occur from it. That warning is something that doctors are not required to reveal to their patients in an informed consent briefing, however. Only the manufacturers are required by the FDA to reveal it to the doctors. There is no one charged with regulating the use of ECT on the general public. That’s why there is almost no data reported on how often it is being used, how potent is the voltage, how much long term mental and physical damage is being done to the recipients. There are no trials being conducted, but there is more than enough evidence of ECT’s harm from lived experience reports. Thankfully there are a growing number of ECT whistleblowers who are striving to make public the harm caused by this still barbaric procedure. Otherwise, we’d have to rely on psychiatry’s opinion about ECT. “Safe and effective”? Right. FDA lack box warnings on devices Thyamatron and MECTA, but nothing on procedure itself. There’s no one to regulate it (?) Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed ECT: Fifty Years of Criticism Suppressed May 1, 2026 – Robert Carter In 1976 the American Psychiatric Association began a two year task force to look into what they called the “crisis” surrounding ECT at the time. Following the 1975 release of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a public outcry arose which demanded a stop to the obviously brutal treatment. The APA Task Force mission was to evaluate ECT research in regard to its use and its risks so as to recommend treatment techniques that could reduce any adverse effects from ECT such as memory loss. As Linda Andre has written, the task force was far more a propaganda tool to help guarantee the continuation of ECT use rather than an objective inquiry into any of its adverse effects. Even task force member psychiatrist Max Fink, the notoriously obsessive electroshock proponent, had agreed with her, but as he twisted it, the “crisis” was merely a public relations issue. It was not an issue with any harm from the ECT procedure itself. The task force did make a show of bringing in such reputable critics of ECT as neurologist Dr. Robert Grimm. He presented evidence that suggested ECT might cause brain damage and that many of the ECT studies were too poorly done to have any valid conclusions drawn from them. Dr. Grimm had long been an advocate for sane mental health treatment and he had almost singlehandedly been the driving force behind Oregon’s law in the1960s which had finally made performing a lobotomy illegal. Grimm also pointed out to the Task Force that too many psychiatrists were then refusing to accept their patients’ reports of their memory loss. In 1978 the APA Task Force released its final report that endorsed the use of ECT for treating depression, even for the elderly and for pregnant women. They did, however, recommend that “unmodified” ECT (ECT without anesthetics or muscle relaxants) not be used as a “routine” treatment. They also recommended a stricter informed consent protocol for ECT. The World Health Organization has been a little more condemnatory of ECT than the APA. It says that “unmodified” ECT can be considered “torture,” as can ECT done without a person’s free and voluntary consent. In 2010 psychiatrist Dr. Harold Sackheim, another notorious electroshock “expert” and proponent, offered to publicly substantiate the view he published in more than three hundred articles that ECT is safe and effective. He made a public invitation to anyone who felt that they had been harmed by ECT to contact him and he would do an evaluation of their case. At least 175 ECT victims responded to him and listed their personal tales of memory loss, negative personality change, and functional impairment. Sackheim later testified that he had thrown away all the communication he had received and had never even conducted one evaluation. Dr. Grimm had been right in his task force testimony, but it too had been ignored by the APA. So much for the long term integrity of the psychiatric party line on ECT. Today more than a million people receive ECT every year both as WHO torture and as a procedure now proven by more recent studies such as John Read’s to produce memory loss, cardiac problems, and severe deterioration of quality of life. That’s at least half a century of suppressed human cruelty. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Involuntary ECT: a “Proper” Torture in the UK? April 24, 2026 – Robert Carter Far fewer residents in the UK receive electroshock therapy per capita than in America, but the percentage there of those who are forcibly given the procedure is far higher than in the New World. Of the 2500 people who receive ECT annually in the UK, almost 40 percent are given it involuntarily. In America “only” 8.5 percent of ECT recipients are administered ECT involuntarily. UK’s National Health Service has a severe staffing shortage. More than 100,000 vacancies are reported today, mostly for doctors and nurses. Consequently, about one third of British doctors are now foreign born and educated and are used to more easily fill these vacancies. However, almost half of the psychiatrists in the UK are foreign educated, mostly in India or Greece. In America only 23 percent of doctors are international medical graduates, but 30 percent of US psychiatrists are, and most of them were educated in India or Pakistan. Some foreign psychiatric programs allow entry directly from high school and place more emphasis on initial exam scores than on academic background. Many foreign psychiatric certification programs can be completed in six years rather than the standard eight — four pre-med college and four medical school – of American and British schools. Does the high percentage of UK forced ECT deliveries equate to the high rate of NHS psychiatrists trained elsewhere? It is at least a coincidence worth investigating, both in the UK and in America. The legal requirements for involuntary ECT are similar in both countries, so there’s another variable than that behind the much higher rate of UK’s forced ECT sessions. Both the US and the UK have medical exams that need to be passed in order to practice in each country, but the current US USMLE test is more rigorous by far than the older UK PLAB exam and is also more thorough than the recently upgraded UK medical exam, the UKMLA. There may also be cultural influences on foreign trained psychiatrists that prompt them to more quickly force ECT on someone. For instance, it is only recently that India has banned the use of “unmodified” ECT in the country…that is, administering the 460 volts without any anesthetic. The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) without the free and informed consent of the patient constitutes a violation of human rights and can be considered torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Along with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the WHO calls for the prohibition of any involuntary ECT. Isn’t it about time to add that to the curriculum of all psychiatric medical schools anywhere? Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Why Psychiatrists Must Lie about ECT April 17, 2026 – Robert Carter      Federal law requires that every doctor fully deliver all the steps of Informed Consent protocol to every patient. However, just as the federal government passed the HIPAA laws to protect patients’ privacy rights, but did not establish any agency of “HIPAA Police” to enforce those laws, the enforcement of doctors applying the legal obligations of informed consent is also seldom done.      Due to that laxity of enforcement, a number of states have passed local legislation that more strictly designates the legal liability any doctor has for not doing a full and documented informed consent interview with each patient. If you’re lucky enough to live in California, Washington or Texas, for instance, you’re much better protected by these local state laws.      In fact, the only successful lawsuit against ECT that was decided by a jury in court involved the omission of informed consent application by an ECT device manufacturer to a prescribing doctor.      Step one of any legal informed consent protocol is to inform the patient of the reason for the particular diagnosis and the reason for the treatment that is being recommended to address that diagnosis.      Psychiatrists are out of luck right off the bat if they want to tell the truth here.      What passes as a diagnosis from any other medical practice – for tuberculosis, a hernia, diabetes – is based on the clinical tests that have been run to provide physical evidence for that diagnosis. There is no test that can be run to show the diagnostic validity of any mental disorder a psychiatrist drags out of the DSM. Every one of the three hundred or so diagnostic categories in the DSM is based on the collective opinion of a group of psychiatrists sitting around a conference table describing the “disorder.”      Whereas every valid medical disorder can be traced to an actual physical cause, the DSM diagnoses are merely descriptions of conditions. No provable cause is listed, and no test is named which can substantiate any DSM “disorder.”      Not even the most severe Treatment-resistant Depression Disorder of a Major Depressive Disorder, which is required to justify the prescription and delivery of ECT to a patient, has any objective criterion behind it. It’s merely the opinion of the psychiatrist on the case. In fact, studies show there’s only about a forty percent agreement on the diagnosing of this  “disorder” for any patient or on the necessity of ECT to address it.      That’s why it takes so many court ordered involuntary commitment orders to deliver ECT to so many reluctant patients. The insanity of the diagnosis and treatment has to be implemented by the force of the law as no rational mind can wrap itself around the label or the administration of 460 volts of electricity to induce a grand mal seizure as a “cure” for it.      Only a psychiatrist’s lies to a judge can make ECT seem necessary. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed The Secret World of American ECT April 10, 2026 – Robert Carter Nobody knows much about ECT delivery in America, or if they know, they aren’t saying. The FDA refuses to rule on ECT, saying it is the “practice of medicine,” over which they claim to have no authority. Nonetheless, they did manage to approve the use of the ECT devices themselves through some administrative sleight of hand back in 1976 by grandfathering their use in to earlier devices that had not been tested for safety or efficiency. Only nine states have legislation requiring any reports on ECT delivery, and only four of those collect much useful or complete data at all. Only some make the data they do collect a matter of public record, so that information remains secret. Consequently, only little tidbits of collected information have filtered through. Texas notes that ECT delivery increased by 67 percent from 2001-2013. Massachusetts reports that Mclean Hospital in Boston alone delivers more than 10,000 ECT sessions a year. Back in 200 they were only delivering about 2500 sessions per year. The Zucker Hospital in New York delivers now 7000 ECT session per year. Vermont has one of the highest per capita delivery rates for ECT in the nation. The estimate of total patients who receive ECT in America annually has been speculated to be 100,000, but that number remains an opinion, not an actual fact. The truth is, no one really knows. But why not? European countries have a strictly mandated requirement for ECT reporting, and delivery rates there are quite transparent. Maybe it’s so secret here because ECT is a far bigger, far more lucrative business in America. Delivery statistics like those from Mclean and Zucker suggest that far more than 100,000 people receive ECT every year in America, but even if that number is correct, ECT is unbelievably profitable. Each session is billed at an average of $2000. The normal number of sessions required is between 6 and 12, but more than half of all ECT patients keep returning for continuing or “maintenance” sessions. Calculating from only the 100, 000 ECT patients per year in America and counting only those who undergo the initial average of, let’s say, eight sessions, that equals one and a half billion dollars in revenue every year. The delivery device itself costs only a few thousand dollars. The procedure takes only twenty minutes or so. There’s usually only one psychiatrist, one anesthesiologist, and at least one nurse to pay. It’s a pretty low overhead business. That kind of profit is a pretty good reason to keep this all hush-hush. Today there is new data from more and more studies that show the temporary and permanent memory loss, cognitive decline, and increased cardiac risks that come from ECT. So it’s far better to keep the outrageous profit psychiatrists receive from damaging people with 400 volts of electricity a secret…a very well kept secret. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed So Few Steps to ECT Electrodes Today April 3, 2026 – Robert Carter We’ve all heard or read horrible personal tales from people who have ended up getting ECT after being deemed “treatment resistant” because psychiatric medication – unsurprisingly — had failed to help them. Often these poor souls have been seeing a psychiatrist for years. This week, however, we heard from a middle aged woman who last February went in to an emergency care clinic to be treated for a strictly physical ailment, mononucleosis. She’d had Epstein-Barr for years and every so often it triggered a case of mono. She’d go to a clinic, be prescribed some kind of antibiotic for it, and it would shortly be gone. This time it was suggested she take Zoloft too because she seemed “agitated” by the fact the mono had recurred again. Innocently enough, she agreed. She had never taken any medication of that kind in her life. After a few weeks, she began having an adverse reaction to the Zoloft, but she had already been on it long enough that she developed severe withdrawal symptoms when she stopped taking it cold turkey. Those symptoms were mistaken for more agitation and anxiety. She was then put on Klonopin. She went through several months of misery being put on one medication after another and having adverse reactions to each and then having increasingly severe withdrawal symptoms when each med was ceased abruptly. Her physical condition continued to worsen, too, unlike earlier episodes in her life when she had been successfully and quickly treated for an Epstein-Barr flare-up. After three months a psychiatrist was put on her case who labeled her with “general anxiety due to her medical condition.” She was prescribed Zyprexa, but she had a bad reaction to that psychotropic drug, as well. She was assigned to a second psychiatrist and he prescribed her Ativan and the antipsychotic Risperdal because by now she had become increasingly manic. She was then placed into a psych ward where she was given six electroshock sessions because she had been adjudicated “treatment resistant.” She had said she did not want the ECT, but the psychiatrist took her to probate court and the judge ordered her to receive the shock treatments. A horrifying story, but all the more so because it shows the seamless connection today in some hospitals between a strictly medical approach and a psychiatric influence. This woman went to a clinic just to get her Epstein-Barr flare-up handled and nine months later she was having two electrodes wrapped around her temples to jolt the 400 volts of electricity through her brain which was needed to give her a grand mal seizure because she was “crazy.” We’re not telling you this story just to scare the bejeezus out of you the next time you go in for a simple antibiotic to handle some pesky sinus infection. We’re telling you this story so the next time you go in to some emergency clinic for a strictly physical problem, you know enough to avoid those next few steps that some medical person might take to lead you down such a dangerously camouflaged psychiatric path. You don’t want to end up prone and unconscious on a paper covered table with two electrodes wrapped around your temples just because your nose wouldn’t stop running and itching. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed 50 ECT Sessions a Day Not Enough for McLean March 27, 2026– Robert Carter McLean Hospital, just outside Boston, Massachusetts, performs 10,000 electroshock sessions on people per year. The affluent, mansion filled, bedroom community for Boston where the psychiatric hospital is located is as halcyon an environment as you could ask for to camouflage this modern day chamber of horrors. The hospital was founded as the Asylum for the Insane in 1811 by a group of prominent Bostonians concerned about the fate of the homeless and the mentally ill in their city. Like many of the country’s asylums that opened in the early 1800s, Mclean was run on a “moral treatment” philosophy for the mentally ill with a compassionate, holistic approach that focused on recreational activities, moderate physical labor, and an enjoyment of nature to promote recovery. Not so today. Mclean is one of the largest ECT delivery centers in the United States. They perform fifty electroshock sessions per day and most patients receive a total of eight to fifteen brain jarring shocks over a three to four week period. The number of electroshock treatments delivered there today is four times as many as they delivered back in the 1990s. Sylvia Plath and James Taylor are two of their better known residents. Still, 10,000 electroshock treatments a year is not nearly enough for them. Their website page says “ECT Isn’t a Last Resort. ECT doesn’t have to be the last line of defense.” The FDA, of course, does not agree with that. They have approved it only for treating severe psychiatric conditions, such as adults with treatment-resistant, severe major depressive episodes, bipolar disorder, catatonia, or schizophrenia. ECT is only a last resort treatment, per the FDA, used when all else has failed. But not per Mclean. With today’s technical advances in ECT, they claim that what was once already “an effective and safe treatment is now a more effective, more comfortable, and safer treatment.” “This is good news,” their website claims. Now they can use ECT “to treat a broader population of patients — and not just as a last resort.” Good news, huh? Easy for them to say. Billed at up to $2500.00 per twenty minute treatment, that’s $25,000,000 a year in Mclean’s coffers for those ten thousand sessions. That’s a lot of money for permanently impairing a person’s long and short term memory and cognitive ability, not to mention increasing the probability of having cardiac problems. Sorry. Not “a person.” It’s fifty people per day, at Mclean. And counting. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Psychiatry and ECT: Control by Force March 14, 2026– Robert Carter An ECT session runs up to 460 volts of electricity through a person’s brain in order to induce a grand mal seizure. So as not to fracture any vertebrae or teeth from the violence of the electricity or the seizure, a patient is first injected with the same body paralysis drug injected into a death row inmate just before being electrocuted to make their demise more “humane.” The drug-induced paralysis itself is so painful, though, that an anesthetic must first be given to an ECT patient so he or she does not feel the pain from that medication. The patient goes unconscious, the electric shock is administered, and then the patient undergoes the grand mal seizure. Tripled force to the patient’s brain. Any seizure, just by itself, can cause loss of consciousness, convulsions, stiffening of the body, and rhythmic jerking. Why would any doctor even want to cause a seizure in a patient, let alone drugging him half to death beforehand? Every other doctor on the planet is trying to prevent patients from having seizures. Around 1930 Hungarian psychiatrist Ladislas Meduna decided that because schizophrenics had less than one type of brain cells than epileptics, inducing an epileptic seizure in schizophrenics might cause them to grow those missing cells and be cured of their schizophrenia. Of course, that’s an illogical, crackpot idea to start off with, but it took hold with the psychiatric community in those days. Soon psychiatrist Manfred Sakel was using insulin coma therapy to induce seizures as “therapy.” Unfortunately there was a 5 percent mortality rate with his patients. Then psychiatrist Cerletti saw slaughterhouse pigs being stunned with electricity, but not killed by it, and he started shocking schizophrenics with electricity to induce the “cure” of a seizure. In the 1950s psychiatrist Donald Cameron, President of the American, then the Canadian, and then the World Psychiatric Associations, honed the use of ECT for his own experiments with it for the Central Intelligence Agency MKUltra mind control program as an instrument of medical and psychological torture. These sessions proved to be the ultimate coupling of ECT and force on these “patients,” often without their consent and debilitating most of them for life. Since then ECT has become the psychiatric gold standard for their treatment of last resort. More than 100,000 ECT sessions are given in America annually, more than 1,000,000 worldwide. Yes, it’s a multi-billion dollar psychiatric business. It is based on using as much force as necessary to render a patient more controllable and less likely to complain about their condition, the two criteria most psychiatrists now use to judge the “success” of this brutal procedure. Actual studies of ECT contradict the notion of any success at all from the procedure. In 2025 Mathiassen’s study conclusively showed the high levels of cognitive impairment and permanent memory loss from ECT. Read’s recent study of 1144 recipients of ECT and their families showed that 56 percent of those ECT recipients found their memory loss was much worse after ECT and 81 percent said that their memory loss lasted more than three years. Both Li and Chen’s ECT studies showed that two thirds of all ECT recipients had significant memory impairment. Most doctors do all they can to return their patients to a healthy life. Psychiatrists are the neighborhood bully of the medical field. How do they treat their patients to make them “normal”? By beating them to a pulp. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil