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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 

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