Whitewashing the Pain Out of ECT

     Since the 1975 Milos Forman film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, psychiatry has had a problem dressing up electroshock therapy to make it presentable. Not that they haven’t tried. The image of Jack Nicholson writhing and spasming after receiving ECT on a fifty by twenty foot movie screen is a pretty graphic representation of the horrors of ECT.

     A consummate method actor, Nicholson watched patients in a psychiatric ward undergo electroshock therapy as part of his research to  prepare for the role. What audiences see on Nicholson’s face is exactly what he had seen on the faces of the actual victims of ECT. Psychiatry has needed to whitewash that horror.

     Here’s how Susan Benbow, spokeswoman for The Royal College of Psychiatrists, does it. Her take on ECT is representative of psychiatry’s attempt at re-scripting the film’s  narrative. “Films such as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest did for ECT what Jaws did for sharks,” she says. “The depiction of the treatment in that film is completely over the top, with the patient being held down, writhing in pain, as he is electrocuted.

     
     This is not what happens.

     For a start, during ECT the patient is anesthetized and given a muscle  relaxant – which has been the case since the Fifties – to ensure they feel no pain at all.”

     Well, yes, they may “feel no pain at all,” but those 460 volts of electricity are still penetrating the delicate nerves of the brain and coursing through the rest of a patient’s body. They may not feel the pain today, but the excessive force of the voltage is still there.

     Why is it, by the way, that they give today’s patients both a muscle relaxant and an anesthetic? Because the muscle “relaxant” is actually the same body-paralyzing drug given death row criminals before they are electrocuted so that their vertebrae don’t snap and their teeth aren’t crushed from the jolt of electricity, as happened with early ECT patients. The anesthetic is given today’s ECT patients because the pain someone experiences from that paralyzing drug is so great that it cannot be endured without knocking the patient out.

     Of course, psychiatry’s PR pros are right by saying that watching the  administration of electroshock today doesn’t look anything like Jack Nicholson’s horrific ordeal in the film, but that’s because today’s ECT patient has already been numbed to three degrees away from body death by drugs just so that they can withstand that horrific voltage.

     In other words, we’re being told that the pain we see on Nicholson’s face is not being felt by today’s “new, safe ECT” recipients.

     Maybe. But the physical damage to the brain and the body is still being done.