ECT: Fifty Years of Criticism Suppressed

    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.