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Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Psychiatric Savagery with ECT in India July 19, 2026 – Robert Carter     As recently as 2024 the Central Institute of Psychiatry, a 643 bed psychiatric hospital in Ranchi, India, was still delivering unmodified electroshock sessions. That’s the version we see in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest when Jack Nicholson’s body and face savagely contort from the high voltage shock given him without a muscle relaxant or anesthesia.      Unmodified ECT and other horrific psychiatric “treatments” were commonplace in India until 2017. The Mental Health Care Act was then passed to decriminalize attempted suicide, prohibit sterilization of men and women to treat mental illness, ban the seclusion and chaining of patients, and make it illegal to administer ECT without muscle relaxants and anesthesia…all considered the norm before that of good psychiatric care.      As late as February, 2024, however, the Times of India wrote that resident doctors who had worked at the Central Institute of Psychiatry were reporting that the hospital was still delivering unmodified ECT frequently in the seventy electroshock sessions done daily at the hospital. A psychiatric consultant noted that only two anesthesiologists had been hired by the hospital, not nearly enough to accommodate delivering “modified” ECT in their seventy daily ECT sessions.      “There is a slight risk of fractures due to the seizures induced by direct ECTs,” the consultant said, in a gross minimization of the danger. “Moreover, the experience of direct ECT could be very traumatic to the patient, too, as the person is conscious until the seizure starts.”      It certainly “could be.” Watch Jack Nicholson’s face portray the horror he had observed watching unmodified ECT delivered to patients at the Oregon State Hospital so he could play his part realistically.      “There is also the negative public image of direct ECTs,” the psychiatric consultant added.       Ya think?      The Times also reported that some psychiatrists argued that unmodified ECT should be allowed in “resource poor settings” because it is “just as safe and cheaper” than ECT with muscle relaxants and anesthesia. No real concern by these shrinks that was also then illegal in India and is classified as savage human torture by the World Health Organization.       The office of the Central Institute of Psychiatry did not respond to the Times’ queries about their continuing practice of unmodified ECT.      Psychiatrists, of course know best. They think their being “the” authority on mental health supersedes any concern for their patients’ “slight risk” of fractures or “possible” trauma they might receive from this barbaric electronic torture. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed ECT: the Perfect Tool for Human Mind Control July 6, 2026 – Robert Carter      Psychiatrist Donald Cameron believed that mental illness was a contagious “disease” and that psychiatrists should be put in control of schools, governments, prisons, and hospitals in order to stamp out the viral infection of healthy people by those dangerous, infectious, mentally ill elements in our population. Cameron experimented with brutal methods to try to “correct” schizophrenia by erasing the existing memories of these contagious social misfits and reprogramming their psyches.      Naturally, he therefore became a desirable asset to the CIA for their MKUltra mind control experiments. U.S. Representative Anna Luna called these MKUltra experiments “crimes against humanity” in her opening statement last week as the chairwoman for the new House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.      From 1957 to 1964 Cameron was paid $69,000 by the CIA to carry out his “Montreal Experiments” at McGill University. He used LSD and paralyzing agents such as curare on unwitting subjects as well as massive, continuous electroshocks to “wipe” clean his subjects’ minds. His “psychic driving” procedures put subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks while he played taped loops to them of insignificant noise or, more often, of simple statements. In other words, he forcefully brainwashed people without their consent or knowledge.      ECT was a major tool in his psychic driving arsenal and he shocked his victims with voltage thirty to forty times the normal electrical current of ECT for periods as long as two to five years. In a 1962 research paper he published, he reported using three barbiturates, Veronal, Seconal, and Nembutal as well as chlorpromazine to keep his subjects asleep for up to three weeks except for being woken up three times daily for meals and to use the toilet. Per the report of his 1961 experiments, his unwitting subjects were given follow-up ECT sessions for 22 months to as long as 68 months.      Cameron knew that ECT was not a therapeutic tool. He recognized it instead as a weapon to be used to eradicate a person’s memories and personal psyche so that they could then be reprogrammed in any direction desired from the blank slate that their minds had become. His work was the perfect tool for the CIA to be able to change a person’s loyalties and implant ideas of justified assassination or violence.      At that time psychiatrist Jolly West, also an MKUltra “researcher,” was running a covert clinic in San Francisco reprogramming subjects with similar mind control mechanisms. Charles Manson was the star graduate from that program.      Cameron may not have been familiar with West’s experiments, but he was inspired by British psychiatrist William Sargant, who was also associated with post WWII intelligence services. Sargant was promoting the use of psychosurgery, insulin shock therapy, deep sleep treatment, and especially electroconvulsive therapy for his mind control experiments.      “All sorts of treatment can be given while the patient is kept sleeping,” Sargant wrote, “including a variety of drugs and ECT [which] together generally induce considerable memory loss for the period under narcosis. We may be seeing here a new exciting beginning in psychiatry.”      Cameron was apparently equally enthusiastic in developing this new era of psychiatry with extensive ECT abuse. His “new” psychiatry became the perfect tool for the CIA’s shameful MKUltra human experimentation from 1953 to 1973. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Study Says We Need More Female, Afro-American Electroshock Sites June 26, 2026 – Robert Carter      A 2023 National Institute of Mental Health and University of Maryland study of ECT delivery came up with an interesting conclusion. We need more electroshock facilities run by women or by Afro-Americans.      Please, let’s not have such racial bias entering into this most brutal of psychiatric practices. We need make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to zap the living bejeezus out of people. Really. Tsk, tsk to our current electroshock community.      That was their conclusion. Right there in paragraph one, first page of the abstract. “Our results…highlight the need to increase the number of female and Black or Afro American ECT providers.”      Yes, they also recommend establishing a nationwide network of ECT practice sites to facilitate ECT surveys so that the delivery of electroshock services can be more fully tabulated. This study only comprised a survey sample for fifteen percent of extant ECT facilities, and they acknowledged their survey response rate was only two percent.      It’s probably a lot easier to maintain gender and racial discrimination in an industry so rife with secrecy.      Let’s find out more about it, they say – not to see the breadth of human harm being done by ECT’s extreme voltage to the brain – but so that we can make sure it’s politically correct in its employment opportunities. Maybe we should make sure it has its own Equal Opportunity Bureau to monitor it.      How blind must these National Institute of Mental Health and University of Maryland researchers be to have no interest in the long term and short term memory loss, the cardiac difficulties, and the lives ruined by ECT to instead focus on the racial bias in the industry? And approve the taxpayer funding that financed this ludicrous study.       Just goes to show the level of poorly prioritized thinking and disregard of human suffering our National Institute of Mental Health is capable of.      Ain’t no mental health in those government corridors. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Shrink Said Lou Reed’s Refrigerator Mother Is Why He Needed ECT June 19, 2026 – Robert Carter      Toby Reed, Lou’s mother, was told by the psychiatrist she and her husband Sidney had innocently sought help from for her son that Lou’s obstinate, counterculture attitude – which the shrink diagnosed as schizophrenia — was caused by her failing to pick up Lou enough as an infant. Instead, she had let him cry himself to sleep in his room. She was to blame.      That accusation became her belief, and per her daughter Merrill was a burden Lou’s mother took to her grave.      Destroying one life was not enough, though. The psychiatrist recommended immediate ECT for the seventeen year old Lou, and in that summer of 1959 he was then given twenty-four high voltage sessions every other day. He was then released to go home.      “I watched my brother as my parents assisted him coming back into our home afterwards, unable to walk, stupor-like,” Merrill has written. “It damaged his short term memory horribly and throughout his life he struggled with memory retention.”      Lou himself later wrote that the shock treatments at the Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens were debilitating and made him feel like he was “a vegetable.” Those moments were not a perfect day for Lou or for his mother.      The brutality of Lou’s ECT was of comparable magnitude to the brutality of the accusation against his mother. That’s how a psychiatrist was trained to operate and trained to think in the nineteen-fifties, when their diagnosis of a cold “refrigerator mother” was all the rage.      Has that really changed at all since then? One million people are still given ECT every year, and who knows how many mothers’ lives are also still being destroyed.      “You’re going to reap just what you sow” could also well have been Lou’s message to the “two-bit psychiatrists” that he excoriated in his song “Kill Your Sons.” Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Mini-ECT Devices Said to Correct “Chemical Imbalance” June 12, 2026 – Robert Carter      Where there’s money to be made, psychiatry is sure to follow. ECT sessions bring in at least 2 ½ billion dollars a year in America alone — ten times that globally — while its delivery is obscured by secrecy. Almost no information is reported officially about the frequency of delivery or about the adverse short and long term effects measured by clinical trials.      It’s a dark psychiatric industry with almost no public exposure, but it is profitable. Now a shadow mini-ECT industry of transcranial magnetic  devices is growing which uses external neuromodulation to “reset” neural impulses within the brain to release the “natural chemicals” that control emotion. These devices are being marketed as triggering the serotonin levels in the brain and are therefore based on the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental health which has been totally discredited.      How safe are these devices? We don’t really know. How effective are they? We don’t know that either.      There is almost as much lack of clarity and information from the FDA about these new devices as there is about ECT itself. The FDA says it doesn’t have to rule on ECT because it constitutes the practice of medicine, and that is out of their purview. Protecting the health and safety of the American public should be under their purview, though, shouldn’t it?      That’s the same effectiveness and safety criteria they use to rule on every drug they assess. And we know the FDA has never judged the effectiveness of improving mental health by correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain. They couldn’t, could they, as there is no such thing?      The FDA has not ruled on the effectiveness or safety of these new mini-ECT devices either. Instead they issue their De Novo grant that only authorizes a device to be marketed because the minimal trial “evidence” they have shows no risk of danger. That grant implies nothing about its effectiveness, and in fact the trials that the FDA has looked at involve as few as three hundred participants.      The non-scientific “evidence” of anecdotal reports and lived experience – the two terms used by psychiatry to discredit valid personal experiences – suggest that there are dangers to the use of these mini-ECT devices. The least severe effects are minor headaches during or after use, twitching or spasms in the face, and dizziness or lightheadedness. The more severe, but more rare, effects reported are reduced hearing or tinnitus and mania. As well as seizures – kind of like a lower harmonic of the grand mal seizures that full ECT is designed to trigger.      So, just how dangerous are these devices? Again, we do not know, and we won’t know until the FDA starts doing its job of fully protecting the public from these questionable – but profitable — new “therapies.” Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Today’s Road to ECT Not Paved with Good Intentions June 6, 2026 – Robert Carter      Writer and psychiatric drug withdrawal advocate Jules Jones tells the horrifying story this week on the Mad in America site of her transfer from innocent cardio patient to recipient of thirty-nine electroshock sessions. It is an increasingly common tale of someone who is incrementally moved from the physical health end of modern medicine to the mental health end because of untrained MDs labeling them incorrectly with a mental disorder they do not actually have.      Thirty years ago Jules had been coping well with the rigors of work and children. She never had one thought that she was “depressed” when she began experiencing heart symptoms that sent her to her MD. He referred her to a cardiologist. Tests were run and Jules was diagnosed with an episodic racing heart that, understandably, might have felt more terrifying than it actually was. She was prescribed a beta blocker to slow the arrhythmia down. It all seemed like simple enough, evidence-based medicine to her.      Then her cardiologist suddenly moved into the murky waters of mental health. She “suggested” Jules might be depressed, might have some psychological cause behind her worry, and should go back and consult with her primary care physician.      Jules did, and there she was told point blank by her general practitioner that she was experiencing depression. It was caused by a chemical imbalance, she was told, and there was a pill that would balance her back out. Jules, innocently enough, accepted the diagnosis.      Twenty years of horrific medical abuse followed: five psychiatric labels, twenty-one psychiatric drugs, thirty-nine rounds of electroshock. A ruined life.      Jules was able to successfully taper off all her psychiatric drugs nine years ago with the help of her wife, who is a naturopath, but there are still periods within those two decades which are not clear in her memory.           What combination of faulty ideas and ill will were these two medical doctors operating on?      What hidden standards did they have in their minds which allowed them to think they knew more about another’s mental health than Jules herself did?      Forty years ago psychiatrists used the lie of “chemical imbalance” to legitimize themselves as “real” doctors who could treat mental “disease” with their Big Pharma promoted drugs.      Since then their bogus theories have so contaminated regular medicine that we now have general practitioners and physical medicine specialists who also presume to know more about their patients’ psyches than their patients themselves.      It’s a circle no one in their right mind would ever have wanted completed. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed One Hollywood Shrink. A Bit of ECT. Two Dead Celebrities May 29, 2026 – Robert Carter Psychiatrist Ralph Greenson came to fame as a shrink to the stars during the popular trend of the 1950s of getting Freudian psychoanalysis, but he branched out into psychotropic drugs, electroshock therapy, and questionable session practices. In 1953 Vivien Leigh suffered from exhaustion and a mental “breakdown” while filming Elephant Walk on location in what is now Sri Lanka. Paramount Pictures was forced to dismiss her, but they did bring in two prominent Hollywood psychiatrists to advise on her treatment. One, Martin Grotjann, recommended complete rest. The other, Ralph Greenson, recommended electroshock therapy for a “quick fix.” Greenson won. She ended up in an institution, packed in ice, fed raw eggs, and given ECT. That was not the end of her ECT, though. Once later, in Warsaw, she had to perform with the ECT burn marks still on her forehead. When her headaches from ECT became too severe, she was put on psychotropic drugs. When she died in 1967, it was discovered she may have been misdiagnosed for years because of her mental symptoms may have come from from her chronic TB. Marilyn Monroe, Greeson’s other famous female client, had barely escaped getting electroshock therapy in 1961. Her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio managed to pull her out of a locked, padded cell at the Payne Whitney psych ward, infamous for its ECT use. She had already been a client of Greeson’s before that, and she continued to see him when she returned to California afterward and up until her suicide the next year. She had as many as five private sessions a week with Greeson and it was Greeson who was called to her house and broke open her bedroom door to find her dead. She had apparently overdosed from the sedatives chloral hydrate and pentobarbital, presumably both prescribed by Greenson. It doesn’t take Agatha Christie to figure out that psychiatrist Greeson is a prime suspect in these two celebrity deaths. Did he pull a trigger? No. Did he push for Vivien Leigh’s electroshock? Yes. Did he write Marilyn Monroe’s prescriptions? Yes. He was, after all, a psychiatrist. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

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

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

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