Blog

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

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed So, How Many People in U.S. Get ECT Every Year? February 7, 2026– Robert Carter 100,000 people get electroshocked in the U.S. every year. At least, that’s the conventional estimate made by the media, academic medical centers, government mental health agencies, and, of course, psychiatrists. That figure, however, is based on two estimates from surveys done way back in the 1980s and 1990s. Because only four states are legally required to report ECT sessions – California, Texas, Colorado and Massachusetts – actual data on ECT is almost nonexistent today. Colorado shows that ECT recipients more than doubled from 2008 to 2018, and some other states also report rises in ECT delivery, Rhode Island and Illinois, for instance. Connecticut has reported a dramatic rise in court orders for involuntary ECT sessions since the FDA downgrade ECT device danger from Class III to Class II in 2018. Consequently, one has to poke around a bit into the few ECT statistics that are available to come up with a more accurate estimate of annual ECT sessions delivered. There are currently 15,421 mental health facilities in the U.S. In 2022 46 percent of “mental health facilities” had designated ECT delivery resources, but many of those facilities are out-patient delivery centers. If we look at how many facilities are strictly in-patient, we find 1288 in-patient hospitals with mental health departments, 820 strictly psychiatric hospitals, and 2460 residential mental health facilities. That’s just over 4500 mental health facilities likely to deliver ECT. 46 percent of them equals 2101 facilities. If each of them delivered ECT to only one patient per week, that would equate to just over 109,000 patients per year…on par with the reported estimate of 100,000. However, that figure leaves any of the private mental health clinics today that deliver ECT as well as the remainder of the 15,421 mental health facilities that may also deliver ECT to out-patients. That also omits the known fact that some facilities deliver far more than one ECT session per week per  individual. MacLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, for instance, reports that it delivers 7,000 ECT sessions per year. The hospital is one of the largest ECT facilities in the country and they report they administer ECT “services” to 50 patients per day. Yes, that may be the leading ECT hospital n the country, but it does not take many others delivering ECT at that rate to bump up that 109,000 ECT patients per year to a much higher number. 200,000? 300,000? No wonder psychiatrists have influenced the FDA not to require any national reporting of how many Americans are being given permanent memory loss, cognitive impairment, and dangerous cardiac conditions from the brutal ECT voltage running through their delicate brain cells. That’s a lot of carnage for psychiatrists to own up to. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed “The Horror, the Horror” January 30, 2026– Robert Carter Marlon Brando’s final words from the movie Apocalypse Now immediately echo in one’s mind when reading a recent article in Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences which tells of Japanese psychiatrist Shimpei Hanaoka using ECT in order to force a patient to agree to take clozapine long term to treat her mental illness. Hanaoka and his team view the case as an unparalleled success. The journal of the Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology which published this case study apparently does not disagree. The female patient had been forcibly hospitalized in her late thirties and administered an antipsychotic, which in Japan can be given without a patient’s consent. Hanaoka saw no improvement in her psychotic symptoms so he prescribed her clozapine, but in Japan taking clozapine must be consented to by a patient because the drug may cause potentially fatal side effects. The woman initially consented to take clozapine, but then she refused. “If I take this, I will die,” she said. Hanaoka announced that her refusal to take it was a symptom of her “reduced insight” and her inability to make a decision that was a survival one for herself. He ordered two ECT treatments a week for her, because in Japan, barbarically enough, a patient need not consent to receiving electroshock therapy. After her third ECT session, the symptoms of her psychosis apparently “subsided” enough that she “voluntarily” consented to take clozapine. However, she still needed to consent to taking a continuous dosage of clozapine, so she was prescribed another twelve session of ECT. Her “insight and decision making capacity gradually returned,” per Hanaoka, and she finally consented to taking clozapine regularly. The authors of this case study highlighted the treatment that this woman received as one of “ethical care.” “The horror, the horror.” Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed FDA’s Electroshock Hypocrisy January 24, 2026– Robert Carter In 2021 the FDA approved the marketing of an ECT Cotton Bite Block made by the MECTA Corporation, one of two manufacturers of electroshock administering devices. The FDA approval was based on the marketing of similar devices before 1976 and therefore needed no new trial evidence for safety or efficiency of the protective device. The FDA’s grandfathered approval of the bite block paralleled their grandfathering of the ECT device itself without any submission of scientific proof for its safety or effectiveness. As part of their approval documentation, they listed their description of the device along with its intended use. The description reads, in part: “During the passage of the electrical stimulus during ECT, despite the fact that the patient has been given a systemic muscle relaxant, the masseter muscles contract forcefully, necessitating the use of a bite block or mouth guard…in order to protect the teeth and tongue during an electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatment.” The cotton pad “allows for any damaged or compromised molars on the opp osite side of the mouth to be free from compression. In addition, incisors avoid the risk of being damaged during compression.” Their description also notes that the mentally ill “commonly” have poor oral hygiene, a suggestion that this is the reason for the necessity for the device, as opposed to the actual threat of 400 volts of electricity passing through the patient’s head. However, in the next section, “Intended Use,” the oral protector is said to be used “during seizures induced by electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).” What happened to the electrical stimulus of the ECT itself in the description being the actual danger? It returns in the following section, “Comparison of Technological Characteristics,” which justifies the FDA’s grandfathered approval. “The ECT Cotton Bite Block is substantially equivalent to its predicate device in that both bite blocks protect the compression of the back molars when the masseter muscles contract during electroconvulsive therapy.” That’s a lot of semantic dancing by the FDA in those three sections to hide the hypocrisy behind their approval of MECTA’s ECT mouth guard. If the electrical voltage from the device requires a mouth guard to protect a patient’s teeth from being crushed, how is the device itself safe? The FDA knows ECT is not safe, but they do nothing to curb its use. That’s a jarring hypocrisy from a government agency with the mission of protecting the public. MECTA itself went bankrupt in 2021 because they could not be approved for product liability insurance due to the number of lawsuits against the company by those claiming brain damage and serious memory loss from their ECT sessions. MECTA CEO Adrian Kettering was quick on her feet, though, and soon started SigmaStim as another manufacturer of electroshock devices. Kettering’s new devices offer similar functions as the previous MECTA machines, but with an “updated technology” platform. Kettering’s first customers? All those MECTA machine owners who would now need to update their equipment to these new standards with the purchase of the “improved” SigmaStim machine. Fits right in with Kettering’s sense of business ethics. In one deposition for a civil case suit against MECTA, she announced, “We are not responsible for individual patients…. that is not our responsibility from the FDA perspective or from our perspective as medical-device manufacturers.” She added, “…no effort is made to acquire adverse information caused by MECTA devices.” Unlike the FDA, she certainly can’t be accused of hypocrisy, can she? Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Cuckoo’s Nest-type ECT Still Used across the World January 5, 2026– Robert Carter      Electroshock therapy proponents repeat their mantra that “ECT is not like that anymore” when Jack Nicholson’s brutal portrayal of an ECT victim in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is brought up. “Today ECT patients are anesthetized and given muscle relaxers beforehand so they don’t feel any pain at all,” they say.      Maybe…but the force of 460 volts running through one’s head gives a brutal physical jolt to the brain and the body, regardless if the patient is awake to feel it. Knocking out the patient with drugs first is now called “Modified ECT” and this camouflaged brutality is what is now practiced in the United States, the UK, and Australia, for instance.      But “Unmodified ECT” – the ECT we see in Cuckoo’s Nest – is still practiced in many countries around the world. Just a straight 460 volts to the head and brain. No Valium, no anesthesia, no muscle relaxers, no oxygen.      One 2022 Human Watch Report revealed the frequency of these abuses in Indonesia, where Unmodified ECT is not only used as a psychiatric tool, but also a form of punishment. Often it is administered without the patients’ consent. These researchers visited six hospitals in Indonesia and in half of them unmodified ECT was being administered. Grogol Mental Hospital used it on children.      A 2014 Human Rights Watch report revealed the use of ECT on disabled Indian women being used as a form of coercion. Nurses told researchers of threatening uncooperative patients with ECT simply to induce their compliance. One of the nursing staff said, “We say, ‘If you don’t take your medicine, we will take you to the ECT room’ and immediately they say, ‘Please don’t take me to that room. I won’t do that again.’”      In Chile, it was not until 2000 that the Ministry of Health issued a ban on the use of unmodified ECT, but in 2022 a report was submitted by the Minister of Health to the National Public Prosecutor that showed that unmodified ECT was still being administered at the Hospital Del Salvador, a public psychiatric hospital in the port city of Valparaiso.      While the United Nations and the World Health Organization has condemned involuntary modified ECT as well as any unmodified ECT practices, the use of ECT as an efficient punishment tool is still too tempting to be avoided. Those sadistic practitioners who use it that way at least see ECT for what it actually is: a brutal tool to control unwanted human behavior.      Unmodified or modified. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed ECT: the Cash Cow for Hospital Psychiatric Units December 18, 2025– Robert Carter      In her recent interview on a Gaslit Truth YouTube podcast, Sarah Hancock, co-author of an extensive international study of the effects of ECT on women, notes that Medicare only requires an initial approval to reimburse a hospital for a patient’s electro shock treatments. Once approved, there is no restriction for a patient to receive as many shocks as “needed.”      The typical course of initial ECT treatment runs around twelve sessions for a patient, sometimes less, sometimes more. However, because any positive effect from the ECT is usually short lived, many patients find themselves prescribed ongoing “maintenance” shock sessions. Sometimes those last for months, sometimes for years.      Some patients have received over a hundred shock treatments to keep their “mental disorders” under control. One man in Connecticut is known to have received more than five hundreds shocks as his ongoing mental health “maintenance.”      Because neither the FDA nor any other governmental agency has issued a legal requirement to report the number of ECT patients or the number of treatments given in America, we can only approximate that there are between 100,000 and 200,000 patients receiving ECT each year. If each of those patients only received the average twelve sessions, that would be between 1 and 2 million sessions delivered. Add in those patients who receive ongoing maintenance ECT sessions, and that number grows even larger.      The average charge to insurance for an individual ECT session in America is $2333.00.      Medicare only has to have that first ECT session approved. After that, as many as deemed “necessary” can be delivered and still be reimbursed by Medicare.      Someone who receives only twelve sessions nets a hospital almost $30,000 dollars…plus any additional charges for the nurses, doctors, and anesthesiologists needed for the delivery.      Given the fact that an ECT session might take thirty minutes, tops, that’s a mighty hefty fee per minute.Those poor souls who have been prescribed one hundred or more maintenance sessions are going to net a hospital about a quarter of a million dollars each, just for the ECT itself. That one fellow in Connecticut earned his hospital’s psychiatric department $1,166,500.      Even if every ECT patient in America only received the average twelve sessions, that makes ECT a $4 billion a year industry.      You can fund a lot of hospital psychiatric units for that. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed New British Study Wants Any ECT Practice Suspended Because of Its Many Severe Adverse Effects December 4, 2025– Robert Carter A new British study of the effects of electroconvulsive therapy was published last month and it calls for the suspension of any ECT treatments for depression until further research is done. The researchers, led by Professor John Read at the University of East London, found such widespread damage done to ECT recipients that Read called for an immediate cessation of its use to treat depression. Besides the short and long term memory loss from ECT, which has been known about for so long, the research found twenty-five other adverse conditions that occur regularly after ECT treatments. 87 percent of the 747 ECT patients studied easily lost their train of thought and 86 percent had difficulty concentrating. More than 75 percent of them experienced “emotional blunting.” More than 50 percent had recurring headaches. 67 percent reported loss of independence, and 55 percent reported the effects ECT associated with their loss of a job. Over 22 percent experienced heart problems such as arrhythmia. 16 percent reported seizures or convulsions that occurred beyond the ECT period. The list of adverse effects goes on and on and includes such conditions as relationship difficulties connected to memory loss, difficulties in being able to navigate, and ongoing loss of vocabulary. Each of the 25 adverse effects met the criterion used by the European Medicines agency to classify these side effects as “very common.” Professor Read noted in his remarks that there have been no studies that even show that ECT is any more effective than a placebo in treating depression. Earlier research, he says, “is so flawed and inconclusive that ECT would have absolutely no chance of obtaining MHRA (the British Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) approval in the UK, or FDA approval in the USA, if it were introduced today.” He says that these startling new findings from this study make it even more urgent that ECT be suspended pending a thorough investigation into both its safety and efficacy. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed New British Study Wants Any ECT Practice Suspended Because of Its Many Severe Adverse Effects December 4, 2025– Robert Carter A new British study of the effects of electroconvulsive therapy was published last month and it calls for the suspension of any ECT treatments for depression until further research is done. The researchers, led by Professor John Read at the University of East London, found such widespread damage done to ECT recipients that Read called for an immediate cessation of its use to treat depression. Besides the short and long term memory loss from ECT, which has been known about for so long, the research found twenty-five other adverse conditions that occur regularly after ECT treatments. 87 percent of the 747 ECT patients studied easily lost their train of thought and 86 percent had difficulty concentrating. More than 75 percent of them experienced “emotional blunting.” More than 50 percent had recurring headaches. 67 percent reported loss of independence, and 55 percent reported the effects ECT associated with their loss of a job. Over 22 percent experienced heart problems such as arrhythmia. 16 percent reported seizures or convulsions that occurred beyond the ECT period. The list of adverse effects goes on and on and includes such conditions as relationship difficulties connected to memory loss, difficulties in being able to navigate, and ongoing loss of vocabulary. Each of the 25 adverse effects met the criterion used by the European Medicines agency to classify these side effects as “very common.” Professor Read noted in his remarks that there have been no studies that even show that ECT is any more effective than a placebo in treating depression. Earlier research, he says, “is so flawed and inconclusive that ECT would have absolutely no chance of obtaining MHRA (the British Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) approval in the UK, or FDA approval in the USA, if it were introduced today.” He says that these startling new findings from this study make it even more urgent that ECT be suspended pending a thorough investigation into both its safety and efficacy. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed It’s That Time of the Month. Give Her ECT: Psychiatric “Hysteria” Still Victimizes Women November 22, 2025 – Robert Carter      There are about as many female as male psychiatrists, close to 50 percent each. Yet, a new study shows that 81 percent of the psychiatrists who give electroconvulsive treatments are male. In America, a male psychiatrist treating a female patient is 25 times more likely to administer ECT than a female psychiatrist is.      “Hysteria” comes from the Greek word for uterus and has described that supposedly unique “female” state since Hippocrates. During the medieval period hysteria began to be associated with witchcraft, as well. Up until the nineteenth century the symptoms – anxiety, fainting, fatigue, and irritability — of this male diagnosed, but peculiarly female disorder continued to be labeled by a predominantly male medical field.      Even the modern bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, listed hysteria as a mental disorder until it was finally removed in 1980, thus ending two millennia of male dominated medical misogyny.      Or did it?      The statistics listed above from the recent international study cited by Lisa Morrison on the Mad in America website this week suggest otherwise. Psychiatry is a male dominated field with an apparently misogynistic agenda, intentional or otherwise.      Other data collected from this study show that ECT is a “treatment” more often enforced on women than on men. 73 percent of the 858 ECT recipients of this study were women, a figure that parallels data from other ECT gender studies, and only 50 percent of those women voluntarily consented to ECT. In contrast, almost two thirds of the men gave their consent voluntarily. Significantly, 37 percent of those women who did voluntarily consent to ECT reported that they did so only “under pressure.” Only 22 percent of the men felt so pressured.      Are all these statistics skewed so heavily against women because females do, in fact, have some native propensity toward “hysteria” which they need to be “cured” of by male psychiatrists?      Or are these statistics so heavily skewed against women because male psychiatrists have their own long term propensity to stigmatize women through a myopic male perspective? Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil