A Pseudoscientific Hoax

Ask a psychiatrist today about how the mind or brain works and you will discover he doesn’t know. Ask him about how ECT “works” and he will also tell you he doesn’t know, that he isn’t an “expert on electricity.” However, he does have endless theories about it. These include (actual quotes):

It “is a destructive process that somehow makes for improvement.”

“Yields a beneficial vegetative effect.”

“Yields the unconscious experience of dying and resurrection.”

“Yields fear, which in turn causes remission (recovery).”

“...[B]rings the personality ‘down to a lower level’ and so facilitates adjustment.”

“Teaches the brain to resist seizures” which “dampens abnormally active brain circuits, stabilizing mood.”

“Depressed people often feel guilty, and ECT satisfies their need for punishment.”

Now imagine that same scenario with a heart surgeon who claims he doesn’t know how the heart works, while he explains that there are dozens of theories about why a coronary bypass operation should be performed, despite there being no scientific facts to support the procedure.

Even worse, what if the doctor were to tell a patient the following was the likely outcome of an upcoming operation: “brain damage, memory loss, disorientation that creates the illusion that problems are gone.” Yet these are the results of shock treat- ment according to the 2003 U.S. Mental Health Foundation ECT Fact Sheet .

This is the outcome psychiatry has long sought as evidenced by a 1942 quote from psychiatrist Abraham Myerson: “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 reduces almost to amentia [feeble-mindedness].”

The theory behind ECT hasn’t advanced beyond that of the ancient Greeks who tried to cure mental problems using convulsive shock created by a drug called hellebore. It may sound crude but it is a fact: the ECT procedure itself is no more scientific or therapeutic than being hit over the head with a bat.

Today, ECT remains in use as a psychiatric treatment, despite legislative bans and laws limiting its use, its lack of science and its high risk of harm, solely because it is highly lucrative.

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