Leading ECT Critic Explains Dangers of Electroshock Therapy
TRANSCRIPT: Hi, this is Peter Breggin. I'm a psychiatrist, and this is one in my series of "Simple Truths About Psychiatry." Today, I'm going to talk to you about electroshock treatment or shock treatment, abbreviated as ECT in capital letters, and, of course, many of you might ask, if you've gotten this far, "Why do I have to learn anything about shock treatment?" Because, frankly, it's being done to hundreds of thousands of your neighbors. We don't know exactly how many. The common estimate is a hundred thousand people a year. The only reason that's the common estimate, it's the one I made from available data in 1979, and in the first and only medical book critical of shock treatment, so going back to '79, believe me, there's a lot more going on now.
Every city in America has hospitals, usually several, that are doing shock treatment. Not far from me in Syracuse, maybe within a short drive, are several places that do shock treatment. They love to do shock treatment. It's extremely remunerative, and, according to the meager statistics we have because the shock docs hide the data, the vast majority of shock treatment is currently being done to elderly women. Why elderly women? Well, they're vulnerable. They have no one to protect them, and it gets paid for by Medicare. It's not very complicated. Shock machine will keep your average psychiatric unit in the general hospital making money and the doctors making money.
What is shock treatment? Shock treatment was invented back in 1938 during a period of time when psychiatrists were looking for new and better ways to inflict brain damage on people. It's not like today, where they lie and say the treatment's harmless. It was, frankly, part of the whole search for lobotomy and shock, and Cerletti and Bini, in Italy, found out that there were pigs being knocked out with jolts to the head of normal electricity, gave them a seizure, they fell to the ground, and if they weren't slaughtered, they would get up, they'd be wobbly, and they'd walk away, and that gave them the idea this might be a good way to administer shocks to human beings using electricity.
They had been causing convulsions with drugs. They had been causing convulsions, for example, by overdosing patients with insulin coma. They knew it caused brain damage. This is something you've got to understand, folks. My colleagues knew it caused brain damage because they would look at the slides of the brains of people who died during insulin coma, which was not uncommon, and they'd see dead brain cells. The argument, back in those days, was that they were killing bad brain cells. Remember, lobotomy came out of that same period. Clearly, you're killing brain cells if you chop up the front of the brain with a scalpel or if you pour formaldehyde into the brain or if you put, more recently, radium seeds into the brain. I mean, nobody's denying you're killing brain cells.
You see, psychiatry has a history of killing brain cells. The only reason that the modern shock doctors no longer talk about damaging the brain as being the treatment, the only reason they don't do that now is because I publicized it way back in '79 and quoted all of them, and it really made for bad PR, so now shock treatment supposed to correct biochemical imbalances. Well, first, there aren't any imbalances, and, second, the only thing a blow to the brain can do is disrupt all its functions.
Shock treatment involves the application of electrodes, usually bilateral ECT is still what's used, to both sides of the head, causing a major convulsion, far stronger and more harmful and dangerous than an ordinary, spontaneous seizure that people with epilepsy have. In fact, the convulsions are so powerful that things happen to people that don't happen to epileptics. In animals, you get brain damage, cell death, small hemorrhages throughout the brain, and, in fact, they're so physically powerful, more powerful than ordinary seizures, that before they started paralyzing the muscles, people would break their spine. If they were being held, they'd break their limbs from the overwhelming power of these seizures.
Sometimes the electrodes are placed so that only one is over the frontal and temporal lobe. This is where your frontal lobe is and also the tip of your temporal lobe, and they'll put one further back on your head; the idea being that maybe it would be less damaging to do it on one side of the head, particularly the side of the head that wasn't the language center. Well, all that happens from that is it's a little harder for the person to realize what's happened to them. Now the damage is actually more focused in a narrower area, causes at least as much damage as bilateral, but then again, maybe not because, quote, "It doesn't do as much good," and since the damage is the trick, most docs don't use the new kinds of electro placements. They use the old kinds.
Now let's talk about new electroshock. "Oh, Breggin doesn't know what he's talking about. We have new, modified forms." Well, one of the sins of my life is that I gave new, modified forms of shock treatment as a psychiatric resident at Harvard in 1963 and 4. I want to take a breath and tell you that I've spent a lot of time setting up a free website, so that if you hear somebody's about to get shock treatment, you can go on the website. You can print out a color brochure to give them. It's all free.
You can just print out the brochure as a straight essay on paper to show to somebody and look at well over a hundred PDFs of articles about brain damage from shock, about women becoming more submissive to their husbands, about doctors shocking women to make them more submissive to their husbands. It's all there documented about people losing much of their memory for their whole lives, all documented and animal studies, all documented. It's on ectresources.com, ectresources.com. I even have put up there for your use, code words like brain damage, women, abuse, animal studies, that you can just plug in, and get all the studies that I've put up there that relate to that.
When shock treatment is done, certainly, by the second or third one, let alone eight, nine, ten, or twenty, the person wakes up after a period of coma. You go into a coma. How could that not be harmful to the brain? How could a blow to the brain with electricity so severe cause a coma, and you're not harmed by it? In addition, very often if they're doing brainwaves and EEG, the brainwave flatlines. What does that mean? That's brain death. It's a temporary, brief, several seconds long period where your poor brain is so exhausted from the mess of seizure, the electricity, the hypertension, the breakdown of the blood vessels inside the brain that it stops working for a time.
You wake up in a completely disoriented state. Most of the time, you don't know you had shock treatment. You don't know what's happened to you. You can't remember the treatment, and gradually as the treatments increase, you lose more and more of your past memory. I have seen marvelous, professional people, men and women, who could no longer function in their professions, and I'm proud to say I was the medical expert and the very first electroshock malpractice victory a few years ago. You can read about it on breggin.com.
I have to take a breath. It is dismay that this still goes on. Why does it go on? Because when you've been concussed again and again, you stop complaining. In fact, initially, you might get euphoric. I've read hospital record after hospital record when the patient gets the euphoria brain injury, the doctor says, "Mood elevated." I think it's evil to damage somebody's brain, make them silly and giddy and write in their record, "Mood elevated," or "Mood improved." They don't even usually say "elevated," mostly just "improved," but after a few of them, the patient doesn't even know what's happened to them. Were they sexually abused? They can't remember. Is their husband beating them? They can't remember. Was he threatening to leave them? They can't remember. Mostly, these are women. Was their husband having an affair? They can't remember.
They become indifferent and apathetic, which happens from injury to the brain. They don't care. They don't feel, and they don't remember, and the doctors call it a cure, but only unscrupulous family members consider it a cure. Because it's not a cure, it's a horrible injury. I'm not going to say a lot more about this. I mean, how much can people bear to hear about something being done probably to a couple of hundred thousand Americans every year, being done right near you in your local city or maybe out in the country in your private hospital, never being talked about except for an occasional media program lauding the new shock treatment, which is very, very old.
I would put it to you bluntly, you know a friend, the family member on shock? Do everything you can to stop it because they'll never be the same once they've been affected by the treatment. Put a stop to it. There's no harm in stopping shock treatment. It's not like the danger of you stop psychiatric drugs right away, then you might get into some serious physical or mental problem. Stopping shock treatment is just the equivalent of stopping repeated blows on the head.
If you want to read about shock treatment, my book, "Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry," is an up-to-date analysis of shock treatment with tons of references, citations, and discussions, and you can also go to, as I mentioned to you before, to ectresources.org, ectresources.org. I put hundreds of hours into that. It's there for you to take. Please make use of it. Thank you.
