Author name: Robert Carter

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

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed The Brutal Treatment of a British Doc by Psychiatrists March 3, 2026– Robert Carter British Emergency Physician Cathy Wield had more than one hundred ECT sessions forced on her between 1995 and 2001 and she was then given another dozen or so ECT maintenance “treatments” in 2006. She tells her horrifying story in an article she published on the Mad in America website this week. She exposes the brutal nature of ECT itself, and she also exposes the brutality of the mindset  psychiatrists have in administering their version of mental health and mental “help.” The harrowing details of her story may be unique to her, but the pattern of force and authority used by psychiatrists to “treat” patients occurs far too often across the globe. Dr. Wield’s initial step down this dark rabbit hole occurred when she began having suicidal thoughts after being prescribed Prozac for her emotional strife. Then, within twenty-four hours of her first admission to a psychiatric ward, she was told she needed ECT and that it would make her better, faster than psychiatric drugs alone. A doctor herself, she accepted the authority of her highly “trained” psychiatrist. Afterward she was told that ECT had “saved her life” and that her memory loss was “a good thing.” Today she cannot remember many of the details of her ECT sessions. Her memories of them just “do not exist,” she says. Her psychiatrists told her that there were times during her illness “that were best forgotten.” But those moments were hardly the only thing she has forgotten. She has lost memories of certain people and certain friends. She has had to write notes to herself just so she could find things she used everyday, like her nail clippers. The times when she was sent home, she was assigned a caretaker because she could not remember how to do basic personal care tasks. When she failed to “recover” after the ECT, larger and larger cocktails of psychiatric drugs were prescribed her, and when those did not seem to help, more ET was delivered. She became permanently hospitalized. A test of her cognitive functions revealed she was only functioning in the bottom ten percent of her age group, despite the fact that she had been bright enough to get herself through medical school and had been a practicing physician. An MRI since then has revealed evidence of the “white matter changes” in her brain that are associated with repeated physical trauma. Dr. Wield has chronicled her remarkable recovery in her memoir Unshackled Brain. In it she tells of the events that led up to her revelation that it was the ECT and the psychiatric drugs that had been forced on her and not her “mental illness” that were causing her so much torment in her life. She also tells how she had been given the drugs and the ECT without any proper informed consent. Both were forced on her by a brutal authority her psychiatrists operated on to prove that they knew far better than she did how to “cure’ her. It is the same brutal authority that psychiatrists claim in their first moment of a patient’s diagnosis, and that is the first step down that dark rabbit hole that has ruined so many patients’ lives. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Is the FDA Deaf or Just Deceitful about ECT Safety? February 20, 2026– Robert Carter In December, 2018, the FDA reclassified ECT devices from Class III to Class II, but only for treating catatonia, major depressive disorder, or bipolar disorder in treatment resistant patients thirteen or older. If the devices had remained Class III, they would have required premarket approval for their use. However, these now Class II devices that had been in commercial distribution before May, 1976, were not required to be tested for safety or efficiency. The FDA considered their long term use satisfactory “evidence” that they posed no danger. This ruling was based mostly on the recommendations of an FDA device classification panel, an advisory committee that reviewed existing clinical trial data, 3400 personal accounts from ECT recipients, reviews of ECT literature, and notes from earlier ECT advisory panels. They concluded there was “valid scientific evidence” for approval of the electrical as a Class II device. That FDA ruling was controversial. Many of those earlier ECT trials were, at best, questionable in their scientific rigor as well as lacking in any long term follow-up of memory loss and cognitive decline from ECT. Additionally, more than 1500 letters, joint forms, and individual comments had been submitted to the FDA around 1990 detailing the extreme damage done to ECT recipients. Severe memory loss, cognitive decline, heart problems resulting in loss of jobs, family dissolution, and personal incapacitation were all chronicled in horrifying detail. Many of these letters are available to be read on “1990 FDA Dockets” at lifeafterect.org. The final one, from a Dr. Karen Rian, is especially horrifying, but it is also exemplary. Karen says that ECT did get rid of her depression…for three weeks. However, the confusion she experienced immediately after and into the months that followed included “not even knowing what I was, let alone who or where I was…”  She could not even recognize what her vacuum cleaner was. She did not know who people were she should have recognized, she could not drive her car, and she lost the basic skills she had had for performing her work. “No one, under any circumstances, should ever be subjected to ECT without his/her fully informed consent,” she wrote. “And if I were faced with the choice today, I would unhesitatingly prefer death to ECT.” When she was later told she needed more ECT, she did commit suicide instead. Although her choice for suicide rather than receiving more ECT may have been extreme, the impairments she suffered from ECT were echoed by the majority of the others who communicated their horrific experiences to the FDA. Any one of these testaments to the damage caused by ECT could be considered personal or anecdotal by itself, but the sheer number of similar documentation from does qualify as evidence of significant ECT damage. That was more than thirty years ago. The FDA ignored those victims then, and the FDA continues today to ignore the stories of ECT victims…even those from such comprehensive studies as John Read’s last year which chronicled equally severe damage to the lives of hundreds and hundreds of ECT recipients today. Why? Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil