Shrink Said Lou Reed’s Refrigerator Mother Is Why He Needed ECT

     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.”