Memory Loss

The loss of memo-ry and the intellectual abilities that require memory to function properly are often devastating to the person treated with ECT. In California in 1990, out of 656 complications reported as the result of ECT, 82% included memory loss. More than 17% of the complications related to apnea (cessation of breathing) and at least three people suffered bone fractures.

In 1995, a British Royal College of Psychiatrists survey conducted on psychiatrists, psychotherapists and general practitioners, confirmed memory loss as an effect of ECT. Of the 1,344 psychiatrists surveyed, 21% referred to “long-term side effects and risks of brain damage, memory loss [and] intellectual impairment.” General practitioners reported that 34% of patients whom they had seen in the months after receiving ECT “were poor or worse.” Fifty psychotherapists were more candid about the effects of ECT, making comments such as: “It can cause personality changes and memory impairment, making therapy more difficult” and “... ECT, however it is dressed up in clinical terms, is inseparable from an assault.”

Margo Bauer recalled her ECT experience as an adolescent in a letter to the Los Angeles Timesin 2003: “I was assaulted and damaged, and have spent my lifetime surviving this draconian treatment. By this I mean having little memory of childhood before the ECT, which was given at ages 11 and 13. I lost the memories [and] lost trust in caretakers who could allow this to happen.”

“ECT Anonymous,” a U.K. watchdog group, summed up the Royal College’s report as “a chilling catalogue of blundering incompetence.” Roy Barker, spokesman for the group, said of ECT: “An appointment with fate, a brief but vital juncture in your life, a few seconds, that can destroy the quality of your entire life.”

In 2000, psychiatrist Harold A. Sackheim, a major proponent of ECT, when addressing the frequency with which patients complain of memory loss, stated, “As a field, we have more readily acknowledged the possibility of death due to ECT than the possibility of profound memory loss, despite the fact that adverse effects on cognition [consciousness] are by far ECT’s most common side effects.”

Nobel prize- winning author Ernest Hemingway committed suicide shortly after being subjected to a series of electric shocks. Before his death he wrote, “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.”

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