Why Psychiatrists Must Lie about ECT

     Federal law requires that every doctor fully deliver all the steps of Informed Consent protocol to every patient. However, just as the federal government passed the HIPAA laws to protect patients’ privacy rights, but did not establish any agency of “HIPAA Police” to enforce those laws, the enforcement of doctors applying the legal obligations of informed consent is also seldom done.

     Due to that laxity of enforcement, a number of states have passed local legislation that more strictly designates the legal liability any doctor has for not doing a full and documented informed consent interview with each patient. If you’re lucky enough to live in California, Washington or Texas, for instance, you’re much better protected by these local state laws.

     In fact, the only successful lawsuit against ECT that was decided by a jury in court involved the omission of informed consent application by an ECT device manufacturer to a prescribing doctor.

     Step one of any legal informed consent protocol is to inform the patient of the reason for the particular diagnosis and the reason for the treatment that is being recommended to address that diagnosis.

     Psychiatrists are out of luck right off the bat if they want to tell the truth here.

     What passes as a diagnosis from any other medical practice – for tuberculosis, a hernia, diabetes – is based on the clinical tests that have been run to provide physical evidence for that diagnosis. There is no test that can be run to show the diagnostic validity of any mental disorder a psychiatrist drags out of the DSM. Every one of the three hundred or so diagnostic categories in the DSM is based on the collective opinion of a group of psychiatrists sitting around a conference table describing the “disorder.”

     Whereas every valid medical disorder can be traced to an actual physical cause, the DSM diagnoses are merely descriptions of conditions. No provable cause is listed, and no test is named which can substantiate any DSM “disorder.”

     Not even the most severe Treatment-resistant Depression Disorder of a Major Depressive Disorder, which is required to justify the prescription and delivery of ECT to a patient, has any objective criterion behind it. It’s merely the opinion of the psychiatrist on the case. In fact, studies show there’s only about a forty percent agreement on the diagnosing of this  “disorder” for any patient or on the necessity of ECT to address it.

     That’s why it takes so many court ordered involuntary commitment orders to deliver ECT to so many reluctant patients. The insanity of the diagnosis and treatment has to be implemented by the force of the law as no rational mind can wrap itself around the label or the administration of 460 volts of electricity to induce a grand mal seizure as a “cure” for it.

     Only a psychiatrist’s lies to a judge can make ECT seem necessary.