“What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.”
Excerpted from Ernest Hemingway, Nobel prize-winning author’s suicide note following ECT
Electroshock treatment – also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) – is trying to make a come-back in the UK with Mental Health Trusts applying for ‘accreditation’ status for their ECT surgeries.
One could say the use of ECT reached its zenith by the late 1960s following the horrific portrayals of ECT in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the amount of public outcry brought against the procedure by survivors and concerned groups.
However, ECT procedures are still very much in use throughout the Ireland today, but there is a severe lack of reporting on just how much ECT is being administered. A report done by Salford Mental Health Community in 1999, estimated 22,000 people received ECT in 1998. In England, the most recent report done by the Department of Health was in 2002 and reported 2,300 patients received ECT and only for the first three months of that year.
It should be noted that when electroshock is inflicted on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, this is viewed as torture and a human rights violation. When a recent dog owner refused to stop using an electroshock dog collar on his pet, he was prosecuted and fined £2000 plus costs of £1000, but when electroshock is inflicted upon vulnerable children, pregnant women and the elderly, it is called ‘treatment.’
There is nothing therapeutic about inducing Grand Mal seizures with 150 volts of electricity, and often against the person’s wishes. Like Guantanamo Bay and electric dog collars – the procedure is torture and a human rights abuse!
ECT Statistics
According to the royal college of psychiatrists, in 2016/17
- 1682 people received 1821 courses of ECT
- 139 people received more than one course of treatment.
This information was reported by 74% of clinics who are authorised to give ECT to patients.
Since their inception, these procedures have been dogged by conflict between psychiatrists that promote ECT and swear by them, and the large numbers of psychiatrists, victims and victims’ families whose lives have been destroyed. Psychiatrists deceptively cloak these procedures in medical legitimacy: the hospital setting, white-coated assistants, anaesthetics, muscle paralysing drugs and sophisticated-looking equipment.
“As a psychiatrist, I can imagine a situation where we might think about giving a patient ECT without their consent — if the patient was not communicating, not eating, not drinking. Something needs to be done or the patient will die. As a doctor, I have a duty to do something.
“But in 27 years of practice — in Africa, inner-city work in Britain, and now seven years in Ireland — I have never reached this situation with a patient. We have always found something else to do.“
Dr Pat Bracken, Consultant psychiatrist and Clinical Director of Mental Health Services, West Cork
If you want to know more about the effects of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), read this article.
