It never is called shock treatment--at lest by those who profit from the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). The words "electric shock" carry too many threatening connotations. Described by many as inhumane, electroshock "treatment" first was used to render slaughterhouse pigs unconscious to make it easier to slit their throats.
In 1938, Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti decided to try this procedure on humans. The first guinea pig left no doubt as to how he felt about hundreds of volts of electricity sending a current searing through his brain. When he realized Cerletti planned another dose, he screamed, "Not another one! It's deadly."
Today, psychiatrist have reason to thank Cerletti for a financial blessings that has showered them with riches at the press of a button. The entire procedure takes just minutes to administer and reaps about $3,000,000,000 a year for the psychiatric industry.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has estimated tat more than 88,000 people are given electroshock each year in the U.S. However, this is based on statistics that are more than 15 years old. It would seem that psychiatrists have no desire to monitor their systematic social crippling of tens of thousands of people annually. Newspaper articles in 1993, for instance, put the number of Americans undergoing ECT each year as high as 110,000.
How did electroshock, with no history of ever having done anybody any good, become accepted in countries like the U.S. with "authoritative" recognition? How was it that, as ECT continued to be used, the procedure became "standard practice"?
In a 1992 paper, "The Introduction and Spread of Shock Treatment and the Emigration of Psychiatrists," physicians credited Germany with the exportation of shock and its practitioners around the world. One of the psychiatrists cited in this paper is Lothar B. Kalinowsky, an honorary member of the German Society for Psychiatry and Neurology.
A student of Cerletti, Kalinowsky developed his own electroshock machine and introduced his method to France, Holland, and England in 1938, later pioneering it in the U.S. Austrian-born psychiatrist Leo T. Alexander, who trained in Germany before moving to the U.S. in 1934, was an advocate of ECT as well.
By the 1940s, the devastating effects of electroshock were undeniable. At least 20% of ECT patients suffered fractures of the vertebrate from the violent convulsions it caused. During a 1941 meeting of psychiatrists, Roy Grinker said, "I think it can be states unequivocally that [shock] is fraught with extreme danger ... Careful studies by means of a battery of psychological test reveal a definite `organic' change in memory which does not entirely clear up.... Often the so-called normal alpha rhythm increases greatly in voltage, making one suspicious that irreparable damage to the brain has bee produced."
Despite the warning, psychiatrists employed it as a "quick fix" for all manner of conditions. Some simply overlooked the devastating complications. Others called them essential to the "curative process." Take, for example, Abraham Myerson, who said in 1942, "The reduction of intelligence is an important factor in the curative process.... The fact is that some of the very best cures that one gets are in those individuals whom one gets are almost to amentia [feeble-mindedness]...."
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During World War II, German psychiatrists had other uses for electroshock. Between 1939 and 1941, they produced a film called "The Mentally Ill" in which electroshock and gassing procedures were discussed. The picture supposedly proves the "scientific" incurability of the insane by electroshock and justifies gassing them to death as the only other valid option.
Later, Leo Alexander, as a consultant to the Office of the Chief Counsel for War Crimes during the postwar Nuremberg trials, interviewed the Nazi doctors and studied their research. In his 1945 report, "Public Mental Health Practices in Germany: Sterilization and Execution of Patients Suffering from Nervous or Mental Disease," he detailed how children had been killed by gas and electricity in the Grafekek and Hadamar centers. Alexander failed to condemn the atrocities of these procedures and went on to lead the U.S. Electroshock Research Association as its president in 1951 and 1952.
Apparently, Alexander saw nothing wring with inflicting pain and suffering on a fellow human being in the name of "research." Evidence of this is in his description of his own ECT experiments: "I produced painful, though otherwise fortunately harmless, spinal fractures (two of them multiple) in three patients in fairly rapid succession." He theorized that, with a certain amount of force, one could push a person into subterranean levels of the unconscious mind where he or she could be manipulated to exhibit the most base purposes of man.
Electroshock's use as a mean of control and torture was not limited to Germany . An unnamed psychiatrists quoted in a 1951 Central Intelligence Agency document stated that use of the lower setting of the same model shock machine Alexander used could produce "excruciating pain and that the individual would be quite willing to give information if threatened with the use of this machine." In this same document, the psychiatrist informed the CIA that a person "can be reduced to the vegetable level" through the use of ECT.
During the 1950s, the CIA paid Canadian psychiatrists Donald Ewen Cameron (president of both the World Psychiatric Association and APA) $69,000 to conduct his "psychic driving" and "depatterning" experiments as part of its mind control operation code-named MK-ULTRA. A number of Cameron's victims were place into a drug-induced stupor lasting up to 90 days while tape recorded messages were played. In the procedure, also known as "deep sleep treatment" (DST), patients were awakened two to three times every day for multiple electroshock treatments. In October, 1988, the CIA settled with eight individuals who had been experimented upon for $750,000. Joseph Rauh, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said he hoped the case closed the door on this type of experimentation happening again.
It didn't. At a private psychiatric hospital in Australia, thousands of people were subjected to Harry Bailey's deep sleep treatment before it was banned as a violent and lethal practice. DST was similar to Cameron's experiments in that victims were placed in a drug-induced sleep for up to three weeks, during which time electroshock was administered one to two times daily--often without the patients' knowledge or consent. The difference is that Cameron's abuses were committed as part of a mind-control experiment. Bailey was part of no conspiracy. DST simply was his brand of psychiatric "treatment," and 48 people died from it.
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Bailey had studied the method while on a study tour in Canada and the U.S. in the 1950s. Like Kalinowsky, he developed his own ECT machine, which he said prevented that "terrible jerk" with which "we used to break arms ... leg[s] and elbows" during electroshock "in the old days." However, his patients were administered electroshock without an anesthetic, with many of them awakening during the painful and frightening procedure. It prompted a 1990 Royal Commission inquiry into the treatment to find that electroshock used without proper consent is an act of violence and "an assault."
Electroshock was given without anesthetics to black South Africans held in secret, private, for-profit psychiatric institutions in the 1960s and 1970s. South Africa's chief state psychiatrist felt this was appropriate because anesthesia is "simply too expensive, too slow, and too risky" and "because we treat more Africans than whites, we would have to double our staff if we used anesthetics." The private facilities where this brutality was practiced eventually came under investigation by and condemnation of the United Nations and World Health Organization after complaints were filed by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, investigating apartheid crimes, heard evidence of how political "detainees" (suspects of apartheid resistance) had been tortured by police utilizing electroshock. Doctors at Kroonstad prison, for example, used drugs and electroshock on inmates.
Psychiatrists seek to distance themselves from these crimes, admitting only that "there have been occasional abuses of ECT in the past." This understatement often is coupled with the claim that, unlike its barbaric predecessor--electroshock used without anesthetics--"modern ECT is painless, safe, and effective." Psychiatrist Lee Coleman debunked this lie when he said, "Since neither the brain nor electricity has changed since the 1930s, the result is still the same--brain damage."
Physical reactions
"Modern" ECT differs only in that the patient is first given anesthesia and a muscle relaxant. A rubber gag is placed in the patient's mouth to prevent him from breaking his teeth and the patient is put on artificial respiration. Electrodes are placed against the patient's temples, and up to 460 volts of electricity send a current through the brain, resulting in a grand mal seizure, similar to an epileptic fit. The combination of raised blood pressure, hemorrhaging, and ruptures in the blood brain barrier can cause the brain to swell. The switchboard-like function of the brain becomes scrambled and impaired. Memory loss, confusion, and loss of space and time orientation result.
An in-depth review of ECT published in 1992 in Changes, an international journal on psychology, found that, despite modifications, the treatment is, in fact, more dangerous. Muscle relaxants, the authors said, "sedate the brain and it is much more difficult to induce a seizure. Therefore the voltage has to be increased even higher than with unmodified ECT to reach the threshold necessary to produce a convulsion. The result of this improved procedure is a higher degree of damage to the brain."
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The authors added that claims of less damage occurring when electric shock is just placed unilaterally (on one side of the brain instead of both sides) are false. "This procedure assumes that one side of the brain is less valuable than the other ... EEG [electroencephalogram] results one month after unilateral ECT confirm that it is possible to detect which side of the brain is damaged."
Some psychiatrists believe the seizure is "therapeutic." However, as one neurologist commented to a psychiatric student, "Our fields do opposite things. I try to prevent seizures; your field induces them through ECT." [Emphasis added.]
They argue that electroshock can prevent suicides, but a 1986 study involving 1,494 patients found no difference in suicide rates between shocked and non-shocked depressed patients. Published in Convulsive Therapy, it reviewed all past studies on electroshock and suicide. It concluded that the literature does "not support the commonly held belief that ECT exerts long-range protective effects against suicide."
One of the more famous victims of ECT is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway. Despondent about electroshock "ruining my head and erasing my memory," he shot himself two days after leaving the hospital.
In an ECT information sheet, the APA claims that "80% to 90% of depressed people who receive it respond favorably, making it the most effective treatment for severe depression." Both a 1980 and 1984 study on ECT and depression, though, found that, after three to six months, there was no change felt by patients, even if ECT had appeared to give some initial "relief."
As for its safety, Bernard J. Alpers carried out the first post-ECT autopsies in 1942 and found in two cases hemorrhages and tissue destruction that "offers a clear demonstration of the fact that [ECT] is followed at times by structural damage of the brain." I.M. Allen reviewed ECT studies and published a report in 1959 in the New Zealand Medical Journal finding that they "confirmed the appearance of irreversible physical changes in the brain after and as a result of electric shock treatment." Similarly, a 1973 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry concludes, "The ECT patients' inferior [test] performance does suggest that ECT causes permanent brain damage."
The APA maintains that the chances of dying from electroshock are one in 10,000. Psychiatrists have fought efforts to gather accurate statistics on the treatment, but Texas passed a law which required that all deaths occurring within 14 days of ECT being administered be reported to the Texas Department of Mental Health and Retardation. In the first 18 months after the 1993 law took effect, it was found that one in 197 patients died within two weeks of receiving ECT--a death rate 50 times greater than that admitted to by the APA.
One explanation as to why psychiatrists ignore the evidence and administer an estimated 260,000 shock treatments a year is offered by Texas anesthesiologist Michael Chavin, who assisted with more than 2,000 electroshock procedures and then denounced it. "After 50 years of practicing this hoax, psychiatrists are not likely to suddenly agree that it is harmful. As soon as they do, they know there would be a rush of criminal and civil suits from which they would never recover."
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Profit is another factor. Electric shock can increase a psychiatrist's annual income by over $27,000 a year. Whether or not a person receives electroshock seems to depend more on his insurance coverage than his "mental health." This is seen in Texas, where 65-year-olds get 360% more electric shock treatments than 64-year-olds. The difference is that, at age 65, Medicare coverage takes effect.
Two of the most avid promoters of electroshock in the U.S., Max Fink and Richard Abrams, both have a financial stake in the treatment. Abrams is president of a shock machine manufacturing company called Somatics Inc., from which he receives 50% of his income. The company's Thymatron shock machine sells for $10,000. Fink is the editor of the only medical journal on electroshock, Convulsive Therapy. He also stars in Somatics' ECT videos that sell for about $350 each.
The cost of the electricity used for ECT each year comes to a total of less than $22. Meanwhile, the $3,000,000,000 charged for it is enough to power the entire state of Vermont for more than two years or provide emergency heating assistance to almost 27,000,000 homes for an entire month.
There are alternatives to tampering with and destroying the brain and wrecking people's memory. Many studies show that undiagnosed physical problems can manifest as psychiatric symptoms. For example, a 1979 study of 2,090 Canadian psychiatric patients found that 43% suffered from one or more major, previously undetected, physical illnesses. Researcher Erwin Koranyi stated, "No single psychiatric symptom exists that can not at times be caused or aggravated by various physical illnesses," which is why competent medical examinations are needed. Good nutrition, a healthy, safe environment, and productive activity will do far more for a troubled person than repeated drugging, shocks, and other psychiatric abuses.
Chavin's introduction to the 1996 publication, Inflicting Pain: Psychiatry Destroys Minds, rails against the practice he once assisted in: "That psychiatrists' insensitive and uncaring thirst to shock their patients in often assembly line fashion amount[s] to no less than medical barbarism masquerading as medical care. That medical professionals, hospital administrators, health insurance industry personnel, government officials, the general public, in fact anyone who is willing to give any degree of credence to this so-called treatment, [makes them] unwitting pawns in perhaps one of the most tragic medical hoaxes of this century." Chavin now supports the growing demand for electroshock to be banned.
For years, mothers have been telling children not to put their fingers in electrical outlets. Psychiatrists expect you to put your brain in one. Any five-year-old knows better.
Ms. Eastgate is president, Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, Los Angeles, Calif.
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