The Shocking Truth, Part II

Why the sudden media blitz? And why is it all so lacking?

BY LIZ SPIKOL
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The Pelican Brief is bad, stupid filmmaking. But Sunday night, I sat in my bedroom, transfixed by Julia Roberts as a young law student pursuing The Truth despite the fact that it puts her life in danger and kills her older/drunk/ depressive lover. Denzel Washington plays Woodward and Bernstein all by himself -- taking deep-throated tips on the phone, calling his editor from pastoral scenes that actually bristle with malice. With all that expressionless tenacity and sleeping upright with scribbled notes in lap, the only cliche Washington isn't shoved into is an affair with Roberts, which I assume is because he's black and she's white.

Thing is, the movie does get you all runny about being a journalist. It makes you ask yourself, again, why you do what you do. And when I get really, really mad at another media outlet, I try to think of a producer from, say, 60 Minutes II, watching The Pelican Brief in his pajamas on a Sunday night getting all runny inside, too. Maybe it's at a moment like this that he thinks, "Gee, I really screwed that story up ..."

I'll own up to mistakes myself. In my last column, I said Vermont was the first state to require record-keeping in relation to shock treatments. That's not true. Normally, the column would have been fact-checked, but I told our copy editor, "I fact-checked it myself." (If that isn't a cry for help, I don't know what is.) The other states that require record-keeping are California, Colorado, Texas, Illinois and Massachusetts.

I know 60 Minutes II has to give Charles Grodin his 30 seconds or so to be droll and effete, so I thought I'd issue a clarification on its behalf--when I got a call from Joel Bernstein, the producer of the segment on shock treatments who I'd just, one night before, been envisioning in footies.

Turns out, of course, that Bernstein and I were talking about radically different shows. While I heard him call Dr. Harold Sackheim a "physician," he told me that right before the show he changed that to "doctor," after he was informed that Sackheim was not, in fact, an M.D. We had other disagreements about Sackheim: I think the show made an error in judgement by giving Sackheim a disproportionate amount of air time, making it seem as though he were the primary expert in the field.

Bernstein told me, "The hospital where he works does a lot of it [ECT]. They have a strong research program there." Well, I do a lot of playing with my dog, but that doesn't make me an animal behaviorist. And Sackheim doesn't actually "do" any ECT--because he's not a psychiatrist. Bernstein told me, "I'm sure Sackheim makes a nice salary, but he doesn't make any money from doing the treatments himself." Because he can't--but those research grant applications have been rolling in under his name since 1981, garnering roughly $5 million dollars from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Sackheim has also acted as a (paid and unpaid) consultant to a company that makes ECT machines, MECTA. The show did not disclose Sackheim's ties to MECTA, including the fact that he testified on their behalf in a product liability suit against a shock machine manufacturer in 1989.

"I knew about his ex-ties with MECTA," Bernstein said, but he also said Sackheim denied any current financial connection, which would--he's right--negate conflict of interest. Should the past linkages bother me? They don't bother Bernstein, and he's been doing this a lot longer.

Bernstein and I quibbled on other details, but he believes he presented a balanced view. "We pointed out what everybody ought to know by now--that there is no cure for depression. I never implied that this was a magic bullet." That's true, but Sackheim was allowed to say on-camera, with no opposition, that, "The medical community recognizes universally that ECT is the most effective antidepressant we have."

The "medical community" does no such thing--and who is Sackheim to speak for it?

ECT can be effective for roughly 80 percent of those who undergo it. But as with any medication, if you stop taking it, you stop receiving the benefits. Interestingly, the most recent study on the devastatingly high relapse rate was done by Sackheim himself. The study showed that more than half of those who undergo ECT will relapse in 6-12 months. One wonders if Sackheim's increased media presence isn't the industry's way of putting a spin on those very depressing results.

Sometimes journalists rely on others to tell them who to interview. "Who's the best person to talk to in this field?" I might reasonably ask someone who specializes in hot-metal biomechanics.

In this case, 60 Minutes II didn't do enough backgrounding. I find it discouraging that with so many qualified, uncompromised, knowledgeable and honest psychiatrists who practice ECT, 60 Minutes II chose to highlight Harold Sackheim. Nothing could be worse for the show's credibility.

Producer Joel Bernstein told me at the end of our call, "We did this whole thing in 10 days--it was very fast. In retrospect, I wish I could have taken more time with it." I have a feeling he wouldn't have relied on Harold Sackheim if he did.

I asked Bernstein where he got the idea for the story. "A psych friend told me that shock therapy was making a comeback and then The Atlantic magazine story came out, and that was the shove I needed."

Perhaps that's the real story here. Is all this damage control, orchestrated by Sackheim and friends? Who called The Atlantic Monthly --or Associated Press or Reuters or Fox News--and pitched the story? That, I'm sure as I am a journalist, is the bigger tale to tell. PW