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Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed From Pigs to People: the Origin of Electroshock Therapy November 14, 2025 – Robert Carter Here’s a little history lesson about how ECT started. In 1938 psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti was still trying to perfect his idea of inducing convulsions in patients to cure their schizophrenia. A dubious idea, at best, but one that psychiatrists had been working with since the turn of the century. Psychiatrists had recently been trying to trigger grand mal seizures to cure schizophrenia by injecting patients with high doses of the stimulant Cardiazol. They claimed that the intense fear the patients felt after the injection was “therapeutically beneficial,” despite the brain injury that might also be occurring. Insulin coma therapy had been used earlier for the same purpose, but psychiatrists had to abandon that because of the frequency of deaths and brain damage from it…although the brain damage was thought to be “therapeutically beneficial,” they said, because of the consequent “loss of tension and hostility” in a patient. Tension and hostility in patients disappeared, of course, because the treatment had reduced them to zombies. Not dismayed by the brutal “side effects” of these other experiments, Ugo Cerletti got it into his mind that electricity would be a great way to induce schizophrenia “curing” convulsions. He started electrocuting dogs. For one year he had the local dog catcher bring him a weekly delivery of dogs to zap with 120 volts of electricity run though electrodes placed on the head and anus. Cerletti and his partner had as many as fifty dogs at a time undergoing his experiments. Yes, they were able to provoke a seizure in half of those dogs, but the other half died from the voltage. Hardly surprising…to a sane person. Then Cerletti heard that pigs were given an electric shock to render them too docile to struggle against having their throats slit, the conventional method in those days of slaughtering them. The chief veterinarian at the local slaughterhouse invited Cerletti to observe and to perform his own experiments on the pigs. These animals were provoked into having epileptic seizures by Cerletti giving them a stronger voltage, but they did not die. Good news for Cerletti. He could now start experimenting on humans. The “good doctor” then arranged one night to have the local police bring in a poor soul they had found wandering around aimlessly on the streets of Rome. He had no known family or relatives. Perfect. And, of course, he could be diagnosed by Cerletti as a “schizophrenic” to justify the harsh experiment he was about to perform on him. Cerletti and his colleagues hid themselves in a room in the basement of the hospital, posted a guard outside to avoid any unanticipated detection, and went to work. They lay the man on a bed, shaved his head, and stuck a gauze covered plastic tube in his mouth so he didn’t crush his own teeth from the fierce biting they knew would occur from the voltage and the seizure. They attached two electrodes to the sides of his head and flipped a switch. Eighty volts of electricity coursed 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 to the man’s chest over his heart. He was still alive. The group breathed a sigh of relief. “We need to increase the current,” Cerletti announced. The second shock was given at 90 volts. The man’s body underwent a slightly longer spasm, he turned pale for a second, and then he relaxed and took a deep breath. Again, no seizure. Suddenly the homeless man sat up and addressed the group around him. “Be careful,” he said. “The first one was a nuisance. The second one was deadly.” “This dose still isn’t sufficient to induce a seizure,” Cerletti said. “Shall we try again?” A third shock was administered at maximum voltage. The patient’s body again went into a spasm, but this time it did not relax afterward. Instead, a wave of spasms started and he stopped breathing. A stethoscope was held to his chest. His heart began beating again, faster and then faster. His face turned purple. His spasms continued for forty-eight seconds and then he took one enormous breath and his body finally did relax. Cerletti spoke. “I can now assume that an electric current can induce a  seizure in a man without risk.” Easy for him to say, eh? Psychiatrists have been giving electroshock therapy ever since. One million a year globally, one hundred thousand a year in America. Now they use a muscle paralyzing agent and an anesthetic so the patient cannot feel — and no one else can see — the brutal effects of up to 460 volts of electricity running through a human brain.  (To download and read the rest of our broadsheet about electroshock  therapy, click on the image on the homepage of this website or on the image of the broadsheet on the Resources page). Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Better Never than Late… If Brown University Psychiatrist Martin B. Keller Had His Way October 28, 2025 – Robert Carter      In 2001 the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry published the results of a study of Paxil, the adult antidepressant, which concluded that Paxil was safe and effective for kids ages 12 to 18.       In 2012 GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturer of Paxil, paid $3 billion to settle civil and criminal charges that included “unlawful promotion” of Paxil for adolescents. The complaint included the allegation that GSK “participated in preparing, publishing and distributing” that misleading medical journal article first prepared by Brown University psychiatrist Martin B. Keller which said Paxil was safe for adolescents.      A second scientific analysis of Paxil in 2015 found that the drug was indeed “ineffective and unsafe” for adolescents.      Only this September, 2025, has the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry issued an “expression of concern” about their original Paxil article. “Further review is underway, and an expression of concern will continue to be associated with the article until an outcome is reached.”Only a quarter of a century later? Wow.      Jon Jureidini, a researcher at the University of Adelaide in South Australia and the coauthor of the 2015 analysis, noted that by that time the article had been cited 451 times, and that number included the researchers who referred to the article in a positive way. Jureidini’s analysis also found that 11 of 275 children and teenagers (4 percent) taking Paxil developed suicidal or self-harming behaviors, while only one in the placebo group did.      Could it be that the new lawsuit against the owner of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the publisher of the article, Elsevier, for continuing to “publish, distribute, and sell a fraudulent scientific article” that endangers adolescents prompted this sudden ethical wakeup?  The journal has been charging readers $41.50 and the publisher $33.39 to buy access to the paper. Over the quarter of a century the article has been available, that’s a sizable income.      Of course, it’s far less than the $11.6 billion GSK made during the period covered in their lawsuit over Paxil…even though $11.6 billion is more than enough to cover their $3 billion settlement for the teens whose lives they endangered, thanks to the publication of psychiatrist Keller’s original article. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed A Realistic Informed Consent Form for ECT October 17, 2025 – Robert Carter      British psychiatrist Bob Johnson says that mental disorders are “a software problem, not a hardware problem.” He’s opposed to psychiatric medication, psychosurgery, and electroconvulsive therapy.      In 2003, to prepare for his being called as an expert witness in a dozen different trials involving claims of damage from electroconvulsive therapy, he did as thorough a study as he could of the existing literature about the effects, positive, neutral, or negative from ECT.      He concluded, among other things, that patients were seldom given a full informed consent briefing before receiving ECT and were therefore unaware of the potential harmful effects of their receiving that treatment. He created a new informed consent form for ECT which covered all of the omissions he had found in the informed consent process of the time.      Many of those “omissions” exist today.      He states that his form “follows the available scientific evidence more faithfully than those currently used.” It is composed of six statements that each must be signed off, in writing, by a prospective ECT patient.     These are the six points:      Point 1: The scientific evidence proving that ECT helps with depression and with suicide has always been either weak or seriously flawed.     Point 2: ECT is still controversial, medical opinion has always been divided – some doctors being strongly in favour, others strongly against, then as now.     Point 3: ECT can be fatal, with one estimate being as high as 1 death in every 2000 patients.     Point 4: ECT always disrupts the memory, sometimes briefly, sometimes permanently.     Point 5: ECT always causes mental confusion, known as ‘cognitive impairment’. This means that normal mental activities such as reading, calculating, planning, learning something new, telling the time, telling whoyou are – any or all of these can become hard or impossible to do, following ECT. Sometimes this impairment is brief, sometimes it is permanent. In its first 20 years, this was commonly used to justify the use of ECT.     Point 6: ECT always damages brain cells, as animal studies amply prove. Again, in the early decades, this was regarded by some as justification for using it (cf lobotomy).     Johnson’s six points are a no-holds-barred exposure of the risks involved with undergoing ECT, but each point is based solely on the results of his painstaking research on the ECT literature of the time. Johnson argues that by not revealing these six risks, true informed consent is not being offered or obtained.      Today’s opponents of continued, unregulated delivery of ECT argue that there are only two reasons psychiatrists would not use a standard informed consent form such as this for their ECT patients.      First, they fear that informing patients so honestly about the risks of ECT would open them up to an onslaught of lawsuits over the harm being done to ECT recipients. This is a rational objection, even if not a particularly ethical one.      Second, they believe these horrific risks are justified by the “value” the patient receives from the treatment. One could argue this is an ethical objection – if they really believe that – but it is hardly a rational one. No ECT studies have ever been done that show that there are more benefits from ECT than there is damage from it.      State legislators have not done well – except in Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, and California – in regulating the use of ECT to protect their citizens. Passing legislation mandating the use of this informed consent form for ECT patients is at least one step they could take to protect their public from harm.  Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed NAACP Called for Bans on ECT October 11, 2025 – Robert Carter The NAACP has said that electroconvulsive therapy constitutes “torture” when given without consent and they called for bans on the use of electroconvulsive therapy for anyone under the age of twenty-one and for any adults prescribed it indiscriminately. Their 2017 proclamation listed ten reasons for their “vehement” opposition to its continued use, and eight of those noted the broad barbarism of ECT, not its discriminatory use against African-Americans. Established in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the oldest civil rights organization in the United States. Its purpose is to protect and advance the civil rights of African-Americans and other minorities and it has over half a million members registered at its 2200 affiliate offices across the United States and overseas. Only the final two of the ten sections of their call for bans on ECT note that African-American men are diagnosed with a serious mental disorder 1500 times more often than white men, that all African-Americans are classified as mentally retarded twice as often as whites, that they are given significantly higher doses of neuroleptic drugs than are whites, and that they are therefore at risk of receiving electroshock when labeled with a serious mental disorder. Those two sections of the proclamation also quote from Herb Kutchins’ 2008 publication Creating Racism: Psychiatry’s Betrayal which says that racists have “consistently attempted to justify oppression by inventing new mental illnesses and by reporting higher rates of abnormality among African Americans or other minorities.” However, by far the greatest thrust of their call for bans – eight out of ten sections — is based on the acual danger and oppressive use of ECT itself, regardless of the ethnicity of those it is given to. These other eight points of their proclamation note that with ECT any person’s brain is shocked with up to 450 volts of electricity which “overwhelms delicate brain circuitry and function.” They also state that the February, 2013 United Nations Special report on Torture describes ECT without consent as “torture” and recommends “an absolute ban on all forced and nonconsensual” use of electroshock. Other sections focus on the negligence of the FDA failing to regulate ECT despite the many reports the FDA has received showing the adverse effects of ECT, such as cardiovascular complications, cognition and memory impairment, death, prolonged or latent seizures, pulmonary complications, skin burns, and a potential worsening of the psychiatric symptoms ECT has been prescribed to treat. The NAACP proclamation also notes that there is no required reporting of how many are given ECT each year or of the ages of those people, and that for more than forty years the FDA has never required the manufacturers of ECT devices to provide clinical evidence that the devices are safe and effective. The NAACP not only calls for bans on the use of ECT, but also “vehemently opposes any attempt by the FDA to reduce the risk classification of the ECT device or to allow its continuance when there are no clinical trials submitted by the ECT device manufacturers to the FDA proving safety and efficacy.” In December, 2018, however, the FDA went ahead and did exactly that, and the ECT devices in use since then are Class II, moderate risk, not the earlier, high risk Class III designation that had prevented such broad use of ECT before then. Today anyone, regardless of race, age, religion, or disagreement can be ordered to undergo ECT treatments and risks any of those adverse effects that the FDA has long known about, but has refused to rule on preventing. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed Do the Seizures from ECT Do Anything Therapeutic at All? October 8, 2025 – Robert Carter How did anybody come up with the idea that causing a person to have grand mal seizure would help cure them of schizophrenia? Sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it? It might be. Hungarian psychiatrist Ladislas Meduna was the first to give it a shot. He had observed from post mortem autopsies that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia had far fewer glia cells in their brains than patients with epilepsy did. Glia cells provide nutrients to neuron cells, but they do not produce electrical impulses, as neuron cells do. Most “normal” people have equal amounts of glia and neuron cells in their brains, about 85 billion of each. Meduna decided that causing seizures in schizophrenic patients might increase the number of glia cells they had in their brains, just because they’d had a seizure. That might help cure their schizophrenia, he thought. Meduna had been led to this hypothesis after studying some of the research of fellow Hungarian psychiatrist Gyula Nyiro, who in 1929 had discovered that epileptic patients who had developed symptoms of schizophrenia had fewer epileptic seizures than non-epileptic schizophrenics. Nyiro, however, had wanted to cure epilepsy with schizophrenia, not the opposite. He started injecting blood from patients with schizophrenia into patients with epilepsy, but he had such poor results, he gave up with that hypothesis. Perhaps Meduna had missed that part of Nyioro’s research. Meduna started experimenting with ways to induce seizures in animals and he settled on high giving doses of camphor for his first human experiments. About two grams of camphor causes a convulsion. Four grams is considered fatal. He found his first schizophrenic subjects in a psychiatric hospital outside of Budapest where no one would question his experiments. Soon he switched from camphor to Metrazol for triggering seizures because it caused the grand mal seizures much more quickly. He did not like using electric shock, which was quicker yet, to prompt a seizure, though, because of the amnesia it caused. He had a fifty/fifty success/failure rate with Metrazol per his published findings. He and some of his fellow physicians began to speculate, though, that the intense fear that patients felt prior to the pain they experienced from the Metrazol could itself have been part of the reason that his treatments were successful on fifty percent of his patients. They had actually only been frightened into their very temporary sanity. When Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti published his work from 1938 on inducing seizures with electric shock to “treat” schizophrenia, ECT became the preferred psychiatric method because of its ease of application. Cerletti was actually nominated for a Nobel Prize for his electroshock therapy and it has been psychiatry’s standard method to cause grand mal seizures ever since. But does it have any permanent, positive effect? A 2013 study showed that that only about 50 percent of ECT patents did not relapse within a year after their first treatment, but that was only if they were being prescribed antidepressants afterward. 37 percent of those actually relapsed within the first six months. For those who did not take any antidepressants after ECT, the number of relapses doubled. A more recent 2022 study showed that when ECT treatments are stopped abruptly, and no  antidepressants are administered, there is an 84 percent relapse rate. Perhaps Meduna and his fellow physicians had been right. The intense fear patients experience prior to a  Metrazol or an electroshock treatment is itself enough to briefly snap a person out of their mental disorder. But, at best, only temporarily. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed When Greed Trumps Integrity: The Story of Richard Abrams and His ECT Machine October 3, 2025 – Robert Carter Psychiatrist Richard Abrams died this July. He was the founder and director of Somatics, LLC, the manufacturer of the Thymatron electroshock device. He also served as a professor of psychiatry at the Chicago Medical School, and he was the author of Electroconvulsive Therapy, published in 2002 and considered to be the “bible” for ECT devices. His legacy will include his shameless promotion of his ECT machines that have harmed thousands through memory loss, neurological damage, and death. At the 2023 jury trial of Jeffrey Thelen, who had sued Thymatron for not providing adequate warning to him of the risks of their machine, Abrams was asked if Somatics had ever conducted studies to determine whether ECT caused brain damage or permanent memory loss. He replied, “No” and said that Somatics had never conducted any studies of any kind for its devices. “That’s not our business. We sell Thymatrons.” In fact, they sell a lot of them. They are the most used ECT devices on the planet. That is due, in part, to Abrams himself authoring Electroconvulsive Therapy, which fully describes the perfect ECT machine and which has become the definitive textbook on ECT operation. The machine he describes matches perfectly his own Thymatronic device, although his machine is never mentioned by name in the book. The Oxford University Press published the book in 2002 without even being told by Abrams that he was the director of Somatics, the manufacturer of his ECT machine. The book itself costs $135.00 per copy, $105.00 per Kindle edition, and it has sold well, but it is only a brazen, 344 page advertisement for Abrams’ own Thymatron device. In the book Abrams writes, for instance, of the importance of having an EEG monitoring device on an ECT machine to measure the brain’s electrical activity. Then he distinguishes between the old-fashioned chart drive, pen-writing method and the modern, real time tone-emitting auditory signal model that immediately alerts a technician to any problem. He does not mention it in his book, but his Thymatron is the machine with the real time auditory tone. His Electroconvulsive Therapy book has set the international standards for electroconvulsive therapy delivery, and his Thymatron device turns out to be the perfect instrument to best achieve those standards. In 1976 Abrams originally got the FDA to approve the use of his Thymatron by showing that its technical specifications were similar to another electrical device already on the market. Thymatron was therefore grandfathered in with the FDA’s Premarket Approval as a “cleared” product that could then be sold and used. He did not have to show the FDA any clinical trial data that demonstrated that the device was either safe or effective, the FDA’s standard criteria for approving medical products or devices. Jeffrey Thelen did lose his lawsuit against Somatics. The jury ruled that while Somatics failed to warn Thelen of the risks of their ET device, that failure was not the cause of his permanent memory loss and brain injuries. The jury had no trials or evidence to refer to which could show the proven dangers of these machines. No trials have ever been done still to this day. If the FDA had required standard safety and effectiveness evidence for Thymatron in the first place, or if Abrams had had enough integrity along his way to becoming a multi-millionaire to find out what the 460 volts his machine was actually doing to people’s brains, Jeffrey Thelen might have gotten the legally approved compensation he was entitled to for his suffering. So too could thousands of others who have suffered similar damage from a Thymatron. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Ban Electroshock Therapy ECT: Brutality Prescribed The Lies from ECT Device Manufacturers and Psychiatry about Electroshock Therapy September 22, 2025 – Robert Carter      Here’s the scariest fact about Douglas Cameron’s 2023 two volume expose about the actual amount of electricity used in ECT which is hidden by the manufacturer and psychiatrists: there are only two Amazon customer reviews of his The Great Electro Convulsive Therapy Hoax Volume I: Manufacturer Fraud and Deception, and there are no reviews of Volume II.      Why is there not more attention given to these two carefully researched volumes? They show that the memory loss and brain damage that occurs from ECT is due to the strength of the electrical current itself that is used in the treatment.      The extensive overview Cameron provides of the current misinformation about the safety of modern ECT devices and the fact that the current amplitude of electricity used in ECT is actually far higher, not lower than with earlier devices is scary enough. The fact that so few people are aware of his research is far scarier, though.      Unfortunately, the most common response today when someone is told there are more than one hundred thousand people in America being given ECT is “I had no idea they were still doing that.”      With no government regulations regarding the delivery of ECT, and with no reporting required of its effects, this barbarous industry can remain invisible to the general public. There is no actual data available about its delivery or about how many people have been harmed by its high voltage.      ECT device manufacturers and the psychiatrists who order ECT remain determined to keep us in the dark so we don’t discover that the Jack Nicholson ECT scene in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not overly dramatic fiction, but is realistic fact.      Cameron shows how today’s ECT devices are designed to emit amounts of electricity far above that required to induce a seizure and that electrical jolt is what destroys neuron connections in the brain. This deliberate destruction, Cameron says, is like a lobotomy. The patient is made more tractable after the initial mild, but temporary euphoric effect as a result of permanent brain damage.      Douglas Cameron, a professor at a Houston, Texas, community college with a Bachelor’s Degree and two Masters Degrees was himself administered ECT against his will, and today he suffers from permanent memory loss and cognitive impairment as a result of the dangerously high electrical shock from his ECT treatments. He thereafter researched the actual effects of that level of voltage on the brain and discovered the device manufacturers have lied to the FDA and to the public about the harmful effects of the level of electricity itself on the human brain.      The memory loss and confusion one experiences after an ECT session is by no means “temporary” and “rare,” as the prescribing psychiatrists and the manufacturers of the device claim.      Cameron has done the research necessary to sort through the different effects on the human brain from electrical volts, ohms, and columbs in order to show exactly how the brain damage occurs from ECT. His nearly thirty years of careful research unveils the truth behind ECT which is otherwise unavailable to the general public, who only have the manufacturers’ lies to go by.      Kudos to Brave New World Publishing for making Cameron’s work available. These two volumes should be required educational tools for health safety advocate agencies, regulatory governmental organizations such as the FDA, ECT researchers, and medical malpractice attorneys. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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