An Electrifying Tale: The Untold Harms Of Electroconvulsive Therapy
After the book and popular movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, revealed the vicious brutality of mental hospitals, especially electroconvulsive therapy and horrific brain operations like lobotomies, both forms of so-called treatments for the vulnerable mentally ill took a decided downturn. No doubt, many lives were saved. Lobotomies and their many related brain-butchering surgeries virtually disappeared from the medical landscape.
However, after hitting all-time lows in the 1990s, ECT got a cosmetic makeover and quietly began a comeback. For example, in Florida and many other states, ECT is currently authorized for use on patients of all ages including babies, children, and pregnant women.
Let’s be clear. NO valid scientific research supports using ECT for anything. No psychiatrist can explain scientifically what causes most mental illnesses, and they certainly can’t explain how sending electricity through a brain will fix something they don’t even understand. They show interesting diagrams of brains and speculate how it all works, but the fact is they don’t know. Like the brain chemistry imbalance theory that Big Psych and Big Pharma have pushed for decades, which new studies now show to be a house of cards completely unsupported by actual science, they make it up to suit their profits.
If adults really want brain damage, that is their business. But minors and especially babies are another story altogether. Parents rightfully want to protect their children from harm. That’s why the whole transgender hormones and surgery fiasco has sparked such a backlash. No one wants a child butchered because of supposed gender confusion that will likely work itself out given time. After all, children are vulnerable. Ideas that seem all-consuming today will be trivial in a few years. As adults, we already know that. Children don’t have the advantage of life experience and hindsight. A child has a whole life ahead of him to figure things out.
So why would you want potentially harmful electric voltage shot through a child’s brain? A brain that is still growing and developing. How could anyone justify such barbarism? We must stop this practice once and for all.
How ECT ever got started as a treatment is an interesting if not gruesome story. Many centuries ago inducing convulsions was thought to be potentially helpful to distraught people. Originally the convulsions were caused by using dangerous drugs. Sounds strange, but this was back in the late Medieval period when bloodletting was also a standard medical “treatment.” Eventually, both practices were dropped as bad ideas that didn’t work and often killed the patient.
But when it comes to psychiatry, no idea is a bad idea. In the 1930’s an Italian psychiatrist watched pigs at a slaughterhouse being shocked just before they were butchered. He noticed how docile they became. He began shocking dogs on their heads which sent them into violent seizures. But, and this was important, it mostly did not kill them. Being a doctor and all, he had that pesky Hippocratic oath to do no harm. That gave him an idea. Thus, ECT was born.
How violent is ECT? Psychiatry claims modern ECT is safe and effective. Where have you heard that one before? ECT sends 100+ volts of electricity straight through the brain, causing a GRAND MAL seizure. The Grand Mal (it literally means big bad) seizure is most commonly associated with epilepsy. Be thankful if you haven’t seen someone have a full-blown epileptic seizure. It is frightening. Caregivers are told to shove something in the person’s mouth to prevent them from breaking too many teeth.
In the good old days of ECT, patients would shake so violently that their bones would break. Nowadays the patient is knocked out with anesthetics, and given heavy muscle relaxers so nothing breaks and a drug to prevent excessive salivation. Despite all that, ECT can still sometimes cause fractures or dental injury. A urinary catheter is used because patients will wet themselves. That’s what the psychiatrist calls safe and effective.
The brain contains a complex network of nerve cells called neurons. These neurons send and receive tiny electrical signals to and from the body while the body is alive. ECT disrupts the neural pathways in the brain. That is all the experts can say. It disrupts the brain and its activity. The hope is that something gets shaken loose or destroyed, and somehow regrows or becomes realigned better. That’s it. Really. Shake the cup, roll the dice, and hope you don’t get snake eyes. That is the science of ECT.
People are observably quieter after receiving electroconvulsive therapy, but that is not necessarily a good thing at all. A two-by-four to the head will also make someone quiet but no one but a psychiatrist would call that “treatment.” A few ECT patients will claim they are all better now. "Really I am," they will say, but if you listen carefully you’ll hear either desperation or an apathetic nothing at all. The still bright or frightened ones are desperate to avoid more torture, much like prisoners in a gulag, and the others are gone. Nausea, headaches, and drowsiness are routine side effects. Confusion and memory loss are known as standard results with ECT. Psychiatry claims most of that with go away with enough time.
As to permanent memory loss, psychiatry skirts the issue, claiming there is no reliable way to measure that. However, surveys of patients found that between 29% and 55% of respondents believed they experienced long-lasting or permanent memory changes.
Are there health risks with ECT? The rate of major adverse cardiac events with ECT was 1 in 39 patients or about 1 in 200 to 500 procedures. That’s MAJOR events, like permanent heart damage, or flat-lining. Psychiatrists don’t even track minor adverse events because there are too many.
The risk of immediate death with ECT however is low. Only 1 in 100,000 treatments cause immediate death. Psychiatry is proud of the fact that most people can survive the “treatment.” And if death does occur, cardiovascular complications are often to blame, say the doctors, not the voltage shot through the patient’s head.
Children become easy victims of outside forces that do not have their best interests in mind. That’s why minors cannot buy alcohol or tobacco, and why there are laws to protect them from work or sexual abuse. It is why they cannot legally sign contracts, or drive cars. Any of those things could end badly.
Like the horrific tragedy of irreversible transgender surgery done on otherwise healthy minors, electroconvulsive therapy done to minors deserves the same outrage, the same parental voices raised in defense of the most vulnerable among us. Our children are our future. They are in our care because we are the most vested in protecting and nurturing them so they can live full, productive, and happy lives. They deserve our help.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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Hi, so i understand your concerns but i also feel as though you are misinformed. So while a lot of what you said is true, there are serious risks of memory loss, heart damage, etc. the good news is this is only done as a last resort, usually because drugs do not work to treat whatever psychiatric condition they are trying to treat. I see a ton of people dying in Canada by the MAID program and I think it’s a shame they don’t try ECT as a last chance effort. It does have the potential to 100% cure depression. And while we don’t understand how it works we also take wild guesses as to how medications work because we’re unable to see the brain respond to medicine in real time.
"If adults really want brain damage, that is their business."
Really? Are there no laws? No regulations to protect patients? misguided, "mentally ill" or otherwise? Any snake oil con is fair game? Any manner of exploitation is their business?
This is the argument that gives us these "treatments" which are simply the exploitation of vulnerable people whether its electro-shock, lobotomy, or "Trans." Once proven profitable, the market always, ALWAYS, expands to minors and children.