Electroshock and Psychosurgery

Despite the general belief that electroshock treatment stopped when the Jack Nicholson character died in  One Flew Over the Cuckoo�s Nest, it is still widely used. More than 100,000 Americans are given ECT each year; two-thirds of these are women.

Electroshock�also known as electroconvulsive therapy, shock treatment and ECT�was pioneered by psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti in the mid-1930s. In a Rome slaughterhouse, Cerletti witnessed butchers incapacitate pigs with electricity before slitting their throats. The attendants would walk through the pig pens with a large pair of electrically wired pincers  with electrodes on each pincer arm. Once electroshocked, the animal would fall to the ground paralyzed, whereupon it could be easily killed. Cerletti decided to develop this technique for use on humans to control their behavior.

Documented studies show that ECT creates irreversible brain damage, often causes permanent loss of memory and may result in death.

A 1994 British paper stated, �contrary to the claims of ECT experts and the ECT industry, a majority, not �a small minority,� of ECT recipients sustain permanent memory dysfunction each year as a result of ECT.�

A 2001 Columbia University study found ECT so ineffective at ridding patients of their depression that nearly all who receive it relapse within six months.

Because of the brain damage associated with ECT, today a new approach, repetitive transcranial (passing through the skull) magnetic stimulation, is being pushed as the latest �solution.� A psychiatrist uses a hand-held wire coil to produce a controlled, rapidly fluctuating magnetic field. Around 1,000 magnetic waves pulse through the brain over a 10- to 15- minute period, supposedly �stimulating� the brain. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved the new procedure, it is nonetheless being inflicted on patients experimentally and costs up to $3,000 for a course of 20 treatments.

Today, the administration of electroshock brings in an estimated $5 billion annually to the psychiatric industry in the U.S. alone. 

In psychosurgery�s heyday in the 1940s and 50s, the psychiatric community successfully convinced state governments that psychosurgery could reduce their mental health budgets. It was a lie.  Unlike medical brain surgery that alleviates actual physical conditions, psychosurgery attempts to brutally alter behavior by destroying perfectly healthy brain tissue. By the late 1940s, the crippling and lethal effects of psychosurgery were well known to psychiatrists and included meningitis (serious infectious disease in the brain), a death and suicide rate of up to 10% and epileptic seizures in 50% of recipients.

Although psychosurgery has largely fallen into disuse today, up to 300 operations are still performed every year in the United States, including the �prefrontal lobotomy.�

In Russia, between 1997 and 1999, 100 psychosurgery operations were conducted on teenage drug addicts in St. Petersburg. �They drilled my head without any anesthetic,� Alexander Lusikian said. �They kept drilling and cauterizing [burning] exposed areas of my brain � blood was everywhere. � During the three or four days after the operation � the pain in my head was so terrible, it was as if it had been beaten by a baseball bat. And when the pain passed a little, I again felt the desire to take drugs.� Within two months,  Alexander reverted to drugs.

In 2002, one new procedure��deep brain stimulation,� where wires are threaded through the skull to a battery pack implanted in the chest, producing a high-frequency current in the brain, cost around $50,000 per operation.

Governments should be aware that psychosurgery and ECT are unscientific, abusive practices that bear no resemblance to therapy, and they provide no individual or community gain. They should be abolished in the interest of protecting the patients, their families and the larger community.

Next

Back to Contents