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The spike may reflect an increase in perceived dangers of ECT, or wider use by hospitals convinced it works.
Steinhauser's problems began with a 1990 motorcycle accident. She was riding on the back as her then-husband steered.
They were going to Montauk Point to gaze at the ocean. A van cut into their path and Steinhauser was thrown off the bike. She broke her back and suffered herniated discs in her neck.
She was in excruciating pain, but says she was never depressed or mentally ill; her husband insisted she was. About a year after the crash, she said he had her admitted to South Oaks, a psychiatric facility in Amityville, and authorized electroshock treatment against her will.
Steinhauser harbors "resentment" toward ECT, saying it has done her more harm than the debilitating accident. Even today, she uses a wheelchair to get around and takes medication to relieve pain from the crash.
"The psychological is more sensitive than the physical," she said. "I felt like I was a vegetable for a while."
Because of her memory losses, photos, friends and relatives fill in the gaps in her life: Christmases, her divorce, how to paint. They tell her, for example, that she thoroughly enjoyed a Diana Ross concert at Jones Beach some time before her accident.
"It bothers me that I couldn't remember the good things I had in my life, like the Diana Ross concert," she said.
Unlike a broken bone, memory loss can't be confirmed or disproved, but doctors such as Samuel H. Bailine, physician in charge of ECT services at Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, are skeptical of such claims.
His facility, located on the Nassau-Queens border, administers 3,600 electroshock treatments each year, a peak reached after a steady rise, he said.
Bailine concedes that ECT causes some memory loss, but he said those losses are not brain damage, are confined to the period during ECT treatments, and that even some memories from that period come back over time.
The memory losses are a lot like what happens when you turn off a computer before saving items on its hard drive, he said. The information may be lost, but the computer is intact.
"There are things we expect to remember and if we can't remember them, we turn to some convenient thing to blame it on," Bailine said.
But critics say it is more like having the saved contents of a computer's hard drive completely erased when it crashes.
Paul Rosenbaum, the dentist, said electroshock did erase memories - but only the bad ones. He vaguely recalls the psychic pain he suffered, and does not recall the period of treatment itself.
He does, however, remember the day when his mood began to lift. It was his 64th birthday, and he was still at New York Hospital in White Plains, having undergone about six treatments.
His wife, Arlene, had come with cake to celebrate.
"From that day on, I began to improve every single day," Rosenbaum said, adding that he learned to speak again with the help of a speech pathologist.
Unable to resume dentistry, he set his sights on becoming a substance abuse counselor. But that dream fizzled last year when the state changed the requirements, and Rosenbaum again sank into depression. He underwent ECT again last April.
The treatment, which he received at Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre, is the only thing that helped, he said.
Now he spends his time planning culturally enriching events for former mental health patients, such as tours of museums.
Rosenbaum speaks highly of ECT and the doctors who he says gave him his life back. "I have no loss of memory of the pleasant things in my life," he said.
Westbury's Scott Demeter says ECT didn't help him in two courses of treatment he had at Winthrop- University Hospital in Mineola in 1987 and at Hillside last year. But it didn't harm him much, either.
For years, Demeter, 43, struggled with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Often, he fixated on unattainable women, such as Hofstra University classmates with boyfriends or husbands.
Anxiety over those women led him into deep depression.
"To me, it was a true physical feeling," he said. "Like a severe compression inside my forehead. I used to think I had a frozen wall of tears in my head, but I couldn't cry and so I just felt so paralyzed by sadness.
"Things seemed dark and cloudy," he said. "It always seemed like night time, even when it was bright outside."
ECT was one of many treatments Demeter tried - psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, Gestalt therapy, exposure response prevention, neuro-linguistic programming and trauma therapy, to name a few - before most recently finding some success with medication.
But he reports some hearing loss that he thinks came from ECT.
That problem was more severe for Lance Shere, 41, of Glen Cove. He said his 60 ECT treatments knocked his hearing out of whack: he now hears things at several times their actual volume.
Testifying at one of Luster's hearings in July, Shere said he suffered permanent memory loss and now must cope with amplified hearing, a condition called hyperacusis. He can hardly function without earplugs.
"I'm sure it's from ECT because I never had a problem with hearing until I had ECT," said Shere, who had three courses of treatment between 1994 and 1996: at New York Hospital in White Plains, Hillside, and Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village, where he was shocked 45 times.
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