When Greed Trumps Integrity: The Story of Richard Abrams and His ECT Machine

     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.