Why You Can’t Successfully Sue the Electroshock Folks

     Because the electroshock industry is so unregulated and is such a rogue psychiatric procedure in this country, there are virtually no standards for how it should be delivered. Without any official criteria as to how — or if — it can be safely delivered, juries have no standard to measure when it is being done incorrectly.

     Consequently a patient who has suffered a debilitating memory loss, a suicide attempt, a post ECT cardiac problem, or any other horrible consequence from receiving electroshock treatments has no chance of winning a lawsuit against ECT. There is therefore no legal compensation to be obtained for any ECT damages to a patient’s life.

     Billions of dollars have been paid out in the last decade to victims of the horrible effects of psychotropic drugs, such as Risperdal and Paxil, but ECT victims do not have the same legal recourse to compensate them for their injuries.

     In the nearly invisible, underreported world of electroshock treatments, there is no data that is required to be reported on the number of patients administered ECT or on the effects of those treatments. The FDA requires substantial reporting about the safety and effectiveness of psychiatric medications – both before and after they are released to the public – but there are no requirements in place to report on the safe or effective administration of ECT.

     We therefore don’t know what a safe and effective voltage is — or even if there is such a thing — because no official studies of ECT have been done. We don’t know how many seconds or minutes its voltage should be administered for or even what a “safe” voltage is.

     We don’t have any legitimate criteria for the diagnosis that leads to ECT. We don’t know what training should be required for those technicians and medical personnel who deliver the ECT sessions.

    The world of ECT is a dark one. Electroshock therapy is being delivered to almost three hundred people per day in this country – per conservative guesses – as an underground, unregulated, and unreported industry that we know almost nothing about.

     Even the device that administers the voltage is a machine of unknown safety or effectiveness. While the Medical Device Amendments of 1976 gave the FDA the authority to regulate their manufacture of ECT machines, those devices that were already on the market and being used were excluded from testing and were instead merely grandfathered into an approved status.

     The only record the FDA had for the safety of these high voltage devices was from a study done on two Dalmation dogs that were each administered several electric shocks in a two day period. When Dr. Schwartz, inventor of the Thymatron ECT device and CEO of its manufacturer, Somatics LLC, originally submitted his device to the FDA for approval, he submitted only that study of two Dalmations.

      There have never been any tests of the device on humans.

     So, when psychiatrists say there is no evidence of permanent memory loss or actual brain damage from ECT, they’re right…because there has never been any testing for that. And because there is no “official” evidence, and because there are no regulations that govern the safe administration of 460 volts to a human brain, any court case — like the failed 2022 lawsuit of Thelen versus Somatics — is going to be dismissed by jurors.

     From 2014 to 2016 Jeffrey Thelen received over 90 ECT sessions at a CHI Health hospital in Omaha, Nebraska, using a Thymatron IV ECT device. In his lawsuit Thelen alleged that Somatic failed to warn him of the risks of ECT despite being aware of them, and that the ECT treatments he received caused him permanent neurological injury, including permanent memory loss and brain damage.

     The jury dismissed Thelen’s claims due to a lack of “evidence.” There are no standards available for them to measure what “correct” ECT is.

     Meanwhile, after his ECT treatments Jeffrey Thelen would get lost while driving to his childhood home, he forgot that his cat had died, and he failed to recognize his own brother and sister. 

     In a dark world, dark acts do occur.