Author name: Robert Carter

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Why You Can’t Successfully Sue the Electroshock Folks September 12, 2025 – Robert Carter Because the electroshock industry is so unregulated and is such a rogue psychiatric procedure in this country, there are virtually no standards for how it should be delivered. Without any official criteria as to how — or if — it can be safely delivered, juries have no standard to measure when it is being done incorrectly. Consequently a patient who has suffered a debilitating memory loss, a suicide attempt, a post ECT cardiac problem, or any other horrible consequence from receiving electroshock treatments has no chance of winning a lawsuit against ECT. There is therefore no legal compensation to be obtained for any ECT damages to a patient’s life. Billions of dollars have been paid out in the last decade to victims of the horrible effects of psychotropic drugs, such as Risperdal and Paxil, but ECT victims do not have the same legal recourse to compensate them for their injuries. In the nearly invisible, underreported world of electroshock treatments, there is no data that is required to be reported on the number of patients administered ECT or on the effects of those treatments. The FDA requires substantial reporting about the safety and effectiveness of psychiatric medications – both before and after they are released to the public – but there are no requirements in place to report on the safe or effective administration of ECT. We therefore don’t know what a safe and effective voltage is — or even if there is such a thing — because no official studies of ECT have been done. We don’t know how many seconds or minutes its voltage should be administered for or even what a “safe” voltage is. We don’t have any legitimate criteria for the diagnosis that leads to ECT. We don’t know what training should be required for those technicians and medical personnel who deliver the ECT sessions. The world of ECT is a dark one. Electroshock therapy is being delivered to almost three hundred people per day in this country – per conservative guesses – as an underground, unregulated, and unreported industry that we know almost nothing about. Even the device that administers the voltage is a machine of unknown safety or effectiveness. While the Medical Device Amendments of 1976 gave the FDA the authority to regulate their manufacture of ECT machines, those devices that were already on the market and being used were excluded from testing and were instead merely grandfathered into an approved status. The only record the FDA had for the safety of these high voltage devices was from a study done on two Dalmation dogs that were each administered several electric shocks in a two day period. When Dr. Schwartz, inventor of the Thymatron ECT device and CEO of its manufacturer, Somatics LLC, originally submitted his device to the FDA for approval, he submitted only that study of two Dalmations. There have never been any tests of the device on humans. So, when psychiatrists say there is no evidence of permanent memory loss or actual brain damage from ECT, they’re right…because there has never been any testing for that. And because there is no “official” evidence, and because there are no regulations that govern the safe administration of 460 volts to a human brain, any court case — like the failed 2022 lawsuit of Thelen versus Somatics — is going to be dismissed by jurors. From 2014 to 2016 Jeffrey Thelen received over 90 ECT sessions at a CHI Health hospital in Omaha, Nebraska, using a Thymatron IV ECT device. In his lawsuit Thelen alleged that Somatic failed to warn him of the risks of ECT despite being aware of them, and that the ECT treatments he received caused him permanent neurological injury, including permanent memory loss and brain damage. The jury dismissed Thelen’s claims due to a lack of “evidence.” There are no standards available for them to measure what “correct” ECT is. Meanwhile, after his ECT treatments Jeffrey Thelen would get lost while driving to his childhood home, he forgot that his cat had died, and he failed to recognize his own brother and sister. In a dark world, dark acts do occur. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Whitewashing the Pain Out of ECT September 3, 2025 – Robert Carter Since the 1975 Milos Forman film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, psychiatry has had a problem dressing up electroshock therapy to make it presentable. Not that they haven’t tried. The image of Jack Nicholson writhing and spasming after receiving ECT on a fifty by twenty foot movie screen is a pretty graphic representation of the horrors of ECT. A consummate method actor, Nicholson watched patients in a psychiatric ward undergo electroshock therapy as part of his research to  prepare for the role. What audiences see on Nicholson’s face is exactly what he had seen on the faces of the actual victims of ECT. Psychiatry has needed to whitewash that horror. Here’s how Susan Benbow, spokeswoman for The Royal College of Psychiatrists, does it. Her take on ECT is representative of psychiatry’s attempt at re-scripting the film’s  narrative. “Films such as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest did for ECT what Jaws did for sharks,” she says. “The depiction of the treatment in that film is completely over the top, with the patient being held down, writhing in pain, as he is electrocuted. This is not what happens. For a start, during ECT the patient is anesthetized and given a muscle  relaxant – which has been the case since the Fifties – to ensure they feel no pain at all.” Well, yes, they may “feel no pain at all,” but those 460 volts of electricity are still penetrating the delicate nerves of the brain and coursing through the rest of a patient’s body. They may not feel the pain today, but the excessive force of the voltage is still there. Why is it, by the way, that they give today’s patients both a muscle relaxant and an anesthetic? Because the muscle “relaxant” is actually the same body-paralyzing drug given death row criminals before they are electrocuted so that their vertebrae don’t snap and their teeth aren’t crushed from the jolt of electricity, as happened with early ECT patients. The anesthetic is given today’s ECT patients because the pain someone experiences from that paralyzing drug is so great that it cannot be endured without knocking the patient out. Of course, psychiatry’s PR pros are right by saying that watching the  administration of electroshock today doesn’t look anything like Jack Nicholson’s horrific ordeal in the film, but that’s because today’s ECT patient has already been numbed to three degrees away from body death by drugs just so that they can withstand that horrific voltage. In other words, we’re being told that the pain we see on Nicholson’s face is not being felt by today’s “new, safe ECT” recipients. Maybe. But the physical damage to the brain and the body is still being done. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Dr. David Healy: An ECT Wolf in Anti-Big Pharma Clothing August 26, 2025 – Robert Carter      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. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Max Fink, Crazed Pro-ECT Shrink August 16, 2025 – Robert Carter      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. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Post-concussion Euphoria:Why a Few Feel that ECT “Works”? July 8, 2025 – Robert Carter The opponents of electroconvulsive therapy cite the numerous studies that have been done which show that victims of psychiatry’s ECT treatments have a higher incidence of suicide, greater risk of cardiac problems, and consistent memory losses. Because there have been no placebo-based, scientific trials for ECT in the last forty years – and the earlier ones are scientifically questionable – proponents of ECT tend to cite personal, anecdotal reports from those who feel ECT has helped them. There are a number of those – including from such public figures like Kitty Dukakis and Carrie Fisher – but they are personal, subjective opinions and not necessarily scientifically factual. Dukakis and Fisher both reported feeling immediate benefits from ECT – despite acknowledging their significant memory loss — and they each underwent ECT treatment after ECT treatment during their lives to “maintain” those benefits. The “gains” apparently soon wore off…without further electroshock sessions. As with any well known public figures, their personal stories about the “value” of ECT have influenced many people in its favor. Given the large amount of scientifically valid data about the dangers of ECT, it’s hard for anyone to square these positive accounts about ECT with its proven dangers. No one suspects these people of dishonesty, but one wonders how they can feel so positive about ECT after experiencing its 460 volt electroshock. “Post-concussion euphoria” might provide the answer. Medical studies now show that after a traumatic brain injury, a feeling of particularly intense well-being, happiness, or excitement can occur for a time period. In fact, a person doesn’t just feel content or happy. They feel a highly exaggerated, if quite inappropriate sense of well-being. They are overly cheerful, unexpectedly excited, and they often experience a heightened and unrealistic sense of self-esteem. Being zapped by 460 volts of electricity ought to be enough to cause the kind of traumatic brain injury that causes that kind of euphoria. And that euphoria – temporary as it might be – ought also to be enough to prompt those glowing reports about ECT from those who make them. It’s also enough to keep them going back for more electric jolts during their lifetime to re-experience that unrealistic self- esteem…not unlike an addict having to keep shooting up to re-experience that high. On the other hand, Ernest Hemingway said about his own early ECT sessions, “It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient.” He committed suicide hours after undergoing his thirty-sixth ECT session, against his will. After repeated ECT sessions, Judy Garland said, “I couldn’t learn  anything. I couldn’t retain anything. I was just up there (on the set of Annie Get Your Gun) making strange noises.” Her life was filled with one suicide attempt after another. Apparently, no euphoria from electroshock for those two. Probably not much euphoria, either, from the other hundred thousand Americans who undergo ECT every year and experience the severe memory loss, increased suicide rates, and dangerous heart conditions that more usually follow that brutal ECT jolt. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil