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Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Tennessee Legislature at Vanguard of Sanity with new ECT Restrictions Passed October 23, 2025 – Robert Carter The Tennessee state legislature has long been at the forefront of sane legislation for restricting the use of electroconvulsive therapy. Only Tennessee, Texas, Colorado and California have passed laws that curtail the use of ECT on children and minors. This year they have further diminished the potential for an unrestricted use of ECT by passing two new laws. The first is the Tennessee Medical Ethics Defense Act. It allows state healthcare providers the option of refusing to participate in any procedure that violates their conscience. Practitioners may now legally refuse to use any medical treatment because of their own moral, ethical or religious objections. While the act does not specifically mention electroconvulsive therapy, ECT is one practice more than ripe for its application. The second, related legislation that Tennessee has passed this year does explicitly apply to the practice of ECT. The new law further limits the use of ECT on minors and it strengthens the existing Tennessee law by requiring a more standard and more specific application of informed consent procedures regarding giving ECT to anyone, regardless of age. This new legislation now requires the testimony of an independent psychiatrist who is both trained and certified in adolescent psychiatry before any ECT can be administered to minors. In addition, that psychiatrist must now have examined the child personally and must submit a cogent rationale about why ECT is necessary for that child. Plus, Tennessee’s new informed consent legislation introduces three stronger aspects. First, written informed consent is required from either the patient or the patient’s legal guardian. That consent is also temporary. It can be withdrawn at any time. Second, a patient’s medical records must include proper documentation of the necessity for giving any patient ECT. That documentation must also attest to the fact that other, less intrusive therapies have been considered. Third, ECT must be ordered by a psychiatrist, or if the prospective ECT recipient’s attending physician is not a psychiatrist, a psychiatrist must be consulted. These new laws protect the citizens of Tennessee in two ways. First, they make it far less likely that indiscriminate, unjustified ECT will be given to anyone. Second, they provide a new legal framework that gives citizens more opportunity to sue ECT practitioners who have administered the brutal treatment without fully informing the patient of the consequences or of the alternative forms of help available which do not have the risk of ECT for permanent memory loss, significant cardiac problems, or higher probability for suicide. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy Latest News The Dark Irony of ECT Use during the Nazi Regime  July 17, 2025 – Robert Carter        Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti introduced his “new” electroconvulsive machine to the Royal Medical Academy in Rome in 1938. He hailed it as a “safer” therapy for schizophrenics than insulin shock and the other chemical methods then used to induce the grand mal seizure that was supposed to “cure” schizophrenia.      Psychiatrists at the time were indoctrinated by the false idea that schizophrenia could be treated by an epileptic seizure, and many embraced Cerletti’s new technology and set about implementing it in their practices, especially on the schizophrenic population of their insane asylums.      Nazi psychiatrists, however, were not so enthusiastic about ECT’s  potential. They did not seek a cure to schizophrenia. They were working hard on eliminating schizophrenics from their “pure” Aryan race by enforced castration, sterilization and – even more effective – the gassing of those “unworthy of life” through their Aktion T4 program that began in 1939.      They didn’t want a therapy that might “cure” someone’s behavior if the core problem was in the “chemical  imbalance” of that person’s genes. They just wanted them gone. Between 1939-1941 over 70,000 of the mentally  “deficient” were eliminated in six Nazi killing centers.      When it became publicly exposed in 1941 that the Aktion T4 program was removing patients from hospitals and institutions and gassing them to death in facilities disguised as shower rooms, the killing of those “unworthy of life” was then done covertly through lethal injection and starvation. These Nazi euthanasia programs then killed another 350,000 individuals by the end of the war.      There was therefore no rush by the Nazi regime to use these new ECT devices they thought might rehabilitate those genetically defective schizophrenics.      Dr. Emil Gelny, head of two psychiatric hospitals in Austria, did find a suitable use for these new ECT devices. He had been killing his  “incurable” patients with lethal doses of morphine and barbiturates since 1943, but those drugs were becomingly increasingly difficult to obtain later during the war.      Then he ran across an ECT machine. By adding two more electrodes to it and increasing the voltage, he created a perfect killing machine. It was easily obtainable, cost effective, and patients only thought they were undergoing a standard medical procedure with it, so they didn’t resist. It is estimated that almost five thousand of Gelny’s  “incurable” patients were killed at his two hospitals by the end of the Third Reich.      Meanwhile, at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, another use was found for the ECT device. SS  doctors, including the infamous Josef Mengele, had discovered ECT devices could be used to test just how much voltage a human body could withstand before dying. The new ECT machines became treasured devices in their deadly human experimentation on camps’ prisoners.      Other Nazi concentration camp officials were finding that a few ECT sessions could bring slacking prisoners back into the camps’ work force as “productive” labor, and ECT shocks began being regularly used on prisoners to increase their usefulness by brutally snapping them out of their supposed lethargy with the harsh voltage. Those who did not respond to the electroshocks, however, were just “eliminated” altogether.      The Nazi regime recognized the potential of these new electroshock devices for what they really were: instruments of torture. Although psychiatrists at that time could only justify as a “therapeutic cure” the brutal shocking of a person with high voltage to induce a grand mal seizure, the death camp psychiatrists used no such therapeutic excuse for their vicious employment of what they saw were obviously only lethal machines. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy Latest News American Psychiatric Association Finally Admits Some of the Risks of Electroshock Therapy   July 9, 2025 – Robert Carter            The American Psychiatric  Association has recently offered new cautions on the use of ECT after citing the risks of long-term memory loss and other health concerns due to the procedure. They recommend against the use of ECT in children. They also now stress the need to ensure that patients are receiving a full informed consent overview when ECT is  recommended.      It’s about time.      There is no study that shows electroshock therapy to be effective in treating mental disorders. One study of seventy thousand American veterans with comparable mental problems showed that there was no difference in outcome from those who received ECT and those who didn’t. Only four of the eleven placebo-based ECT studies ever done – all before 1985, by the way – showed ECT to beat the placebo for effectiveness, and the protocol for those four studies has itself been found to be scientifically questionable.      There are now studies that show that patients who receive ECT are forty-five times more likely to successfully commit suicide than the general public. Other studies show that a third of all ECT recipients have persistent memory loss that can last for years. Life threatening cardiac conditions have also been confirmed in ECT recipients, including those with no prior heart condition.      The fact that ECT is delivered at all is based on a bogus psychiatric premise from the 1940s that said that because schizophrenics did not suffer with epilepsy, and epileptics did not suffer with schizophrenia, inducing an epileptic seizure should “cure” schizophrenia.      What?      Even the psychiatric term “schizophrenia” is of questionable validity. Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the term in 1908, but he claimed the “disease” had a genetic, biological base. Because of his early “chemical imbalance” theory, he suggested schizophrenics be forcibly controlled, not rehabilitated.      His solution was the enforced castration and sterilization of the schizophrenics incarcerated in his clinic in Zurich. His theories, of course, became popular with the Nazi regime when they began eliminating any impurities within their “pure” race.      The American Psychiatric Association, with its new “guidance” for the administration of ECT, has at least stuck a couple of its toes into the 21 st century. They’re still far behind the World Health Organization’s stance, however, that says that involuntary ECT is “torture.”      And they’re even further behind in facing the unending studies that now show the truly harmful effects of zapping a human being’s brain with 460 volts of electricity in order to eradicate a bogus mental disorder. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy Latest News Suicide and Death Rates Skyrocket for ECT Victims      Less than one percent of the general population commits suicide. Fourteen percent of all ECT patients commit suicide.      The institutions and psychiatrists who perform ECT do not keep much in the way of records, or if they do, they are for the most part not published. No one wants to expose their own sins.      Instead, they call ECT “help.”      One 2011 British study tracked suicides among psychiatric patients and found that nearly half of those treated with ECT died by suicide within three months of their discharge.     A 2007 Danish study of all inpatient deaths at a psychiatric hospital over a twenty-five year period found that ECT patents had a twenty percent higher risk of death by suicide.      The mortality rate of those who have received ECT is also much higher than the general population. One study shows one death for every ninety-one ECT treatments…and that’s when the patient dies during the procedure itself, not afterward, because of suicide or complications.      Your risk of dying from an ECT procedure is greater if you are elderly. A Kroessler and Fogel study spanning twelve years of ECT research from 1974-1986 showed that one of every four elderly patients died from an ECT treatment. Another 2010 survey showed that ECT deaths were actually ten to a hundred times more common than what the American Psychiatric Association had been reporting.      Not only were psychiatrists not exposing their sins, they were lying about them.      (This article is an excerpt from our free downloadable broadsheet Shock Therapy). Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy Latest News Ernest Hemingway: ECT Treatment Successful, But “We Lost the Patient…”      Renowned American author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide the day after his thirty-sixth ECT session in 1961.      In the late 1950s he had become depressed and had announced that FBI agents were tailing him and tapping his phone. For a “cure,” he was prescribed the first of three dozen ECT treatments in 1960 at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.         At first he objected to a proposed stay at the Menninger Clinic. “They’ll say I’m losingmy marbles,” he said.       Finally he underwent his first battery of electroshocks and was returned home, but after a few weeks his “symptoms” returned and he was sent back for more electroshock. After some of these sessions, he could not remember his name.      “Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business?” Hemingway said. “It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient….”      Hemingway’s weight dropped from a robust 220 pounds to a frail 160 pounds during the course of these treatments, and per James Nagle, his biographer and President of the International Hemingway Society, Hemingway “would get on his knees and cry and beg his wife not to send him back for more shock treatments.”        After his thirty-sixth electroshock treatment at the Mayo clinic, Hemingway returned home, got out his favorite Scott 12 gauge shotgun, propped it against the linoleum kitchen floor, placed the two barrels in his mouth and pulled both triggers.      Some time after the Freedom of Information Act had been passed in 1966, it was discovered that J. Edgar Hoover had, in fact, assigned an agent in Cuba to watch Hemingway in the 1950’s and that Hemingway’s phone had in fact been tapped and that FBI agent reports had continuously been filed on him all during his stay at St. Mary’s hospital.   (This article is an excerpt from our free downloadable broadsheet Shock Therapy). Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy Latest News The First Electroshock “Therapy”      In 1938 psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti was still trying to perfect his idea of inducing seizures in his patients to cure their schizophrenia…a dubious idea at best. He had gotten it into his mind that a strong jolt of electricity would be a great way to induce  “therapeutic” convulsions in schizophrenics to reduce their “tension and hostility.”        Of course, most other physicians on the planet were trying their best to safeguard their patients from having seizures. Cerletti started off by electrocuting dogs with 120 volts of electricity run though electrodes placed on the head and anus. Yes, he was able to provoke a seizure in half of the dogs…but the other half died from the voltage.             Hardly surprising, to a sane person.        Cerletti then heard that pigs were being given an electric shock to render them too compliant to struggle against having their throats slit, the conventional method then of slaughtering the animals. The chief veterinarian at a local slaughterhouse invited Cerletti to use the electric prods to perform his own experiments on the pigs.Cerletti was able to induce epileptic seizures in the animals, and they did not die from the voltage.        Perfect. He could now start experimenting on humans.       The “good doctor” then arranged one night for the police to bring in a poor soul they had found wandering around aimlessly in the streets of Rome. He had no known family or relatives. He could therefore be legitimately “diagnosed” as schizophrenic, Cerletti decided.         Realizing the need for secrecy to carry out the brutal treatment, Cerletti and his colleagues hid themselves in a basement room of the hospital and posted a guard outside to avoid detection. They lay the man on a bed, shaved his head, and stuck a plastic tube in his mouth so he didn’t crush his teeth with the ferocious biting they’d seen in animals as a result of such high voltage running through their bodies.        They attached two electrodes to the sides of the homeless man’s head and flipped a switch.        Eighty volts of electricity shot through his brain for a tenth of a second. His body contracted into a horrid spasm. Then it relaxed. No seizure. Cerletti’s assistant held his stethoscope over the man’s heart. He was still alive. The group breathed a sigh of relief.          “We need to increase the current,” Cerletti announced.              The second shock was 90 volts. The man’s body underwent a longer spasm, he turned pale for a second, and then his body relaxed. He took a deep breath.        But again, no seizure.        Suddenly the man sat up and said to the group around him, “Be careful! The first one was a nuisance. The second one was deadly.”        “This dose still is not sufficient to induce a seizure,” Cerletti said. “Shall we try again?”        A third shock was given at maximum voltage. The patient’s body went into a spasm, but this time it did not relax. Instead, a wave of spasms began and the man stopped breathing. The stethoscope was held to his chest as his heart began beating faster and faster. His face turned purple. His spasms continued for forty-eight seconds until he finally took one enormous breath and then collapsed.        “I can now assume that an electric current can induce a seizure in a man without risk,” Cerletti said.        On April 11, 1938 electroconvulsive therapy began its path of destroying lives. Much later in his life Cerletti realized the horror of the treatment he’d invented.        “When I saw the first patient’s reaction,” he wrote, “I thought to myself, ‘This ought to be abolished.’ Ever since I have looked forward to the time when another treatment would replace electroshock.”        Unfortunately, nothing has.        Since then millions of lives have been ruined by electroconvulsive “therapy” and more than a hundred thousand Americans are still electroshocked every year.        (This article is an excerpt from our free downloadable broadsheet Shock Therapy). Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy Latest News ECT: Easy Prey, Excessive Profit      A typical electroshock program for one inpatient in the United States costs between $50,000 and $75,000. ECT can also be administered to an outpatient in a hospital or in a psychiatrist’s office at $300 to $1,000 per session. Anywhere between half a dozen and a dozen sessions are normally given.        To start with. Many patients are  prescribed a sequence of follow up ECT sessions that continue on and off for years. Electroconvulsive therapy treatments rake in more than $5 billion in the United States every year. The government and private insurance covers most, if not all, of the cost. The mean annual income for all psychiatrists is $150,000 per year, but psychiatrists specializing in electroshock therapy are more likely to earn $300,000 to $500,000 a year.      ECT is a high profit industry for everyone involved.        For instance, the cost of an ECT device is only around $20,000 to a  psychiatrist, even though its parts cost the manufacturer closer to $1,000. The FDA has allowed the continued use of these devices by giving them “clearance” — not approval — through a loophole that grandfathers their use into a pre-1976 provision.         Nineteen states can therefore continue to electroshock children today. Seven states can shock children under the age of five. Children, of course, are the easiest prey because they can be given ECT without their own informed consent…but with great profit.   (This article is an excerpt from our free downloadable broadsheet Shock Therapy). Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil