The New “Safe and Improved” ECT. Yeah, right.

     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 (?)