Testimony of Leonard Roy Frank on Electroconvulsive Treatment

Seven Reasons

If electroshock is an atrocity, as I maintain, how can its use on more than 10 million Americans since being introduced more than 60 years ago be explained? Here are seven reasons:

1. ECT is a money-maker. Psychiatrists specializing in ECT earn $300,000-500,000 a year compared with other psychiatrists whose mean annual income is $150,000. An in-hospital ECT series costs anywhere from $50,000-75,000. One-hundred thousand Americans are believed to undergo ECT annually. Based on this figure, I estimate that electroshock is a $5 billion-a-year industry.

2. Biological model. ECT reinforces the psychiatric belief system, the linchpin of which is the biological model of mental illness. This model centers on the brain and reduces most serious personal problems down to genetic, physical, hormonal, and/or biochemical defects which call for biological treatment of one kind or another. The biological approach covers a spectrum of physical treatments, at one end of which are psychiatric drugs, at the other end is psychosurgery (which is still being used, although infrequently), with electroshock falling somewhere between the two. The brain as psychiatry's focus of attention and treatment is not a new idea. What psychiatrist Carl G. Jung wrote in 1916 applies today: "The dogma that 'mental diseases are diseases of the brain' is a hangover from the materialism of the 1870s. It has become a prejudice which hinders all progress, with nothing to justify it." ("General Aspects of Dream Psychology," The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960) Eighty-five years later, there's still nothing in the way of scientific evidence to support the brain-disease notion. The tragic irony is that the psychiatric profession makes unsubstantiated claims that mental illness is caused by a brain disease while hotly denying that electroshock causes brain damage, the evidence for which is overwhelming.

3. The myth of informed consent. While outright force is seldom used, genuine informed consent is never obtained because ECT candidates can be coerced and because electroshock specialists refuse to accurately inform ECT candidates and their families of the procedure's nature and effects. ECT specialists lie not only to the parties vitally concerned, they lie to themselves and to each other. Eventually they come to believe their own lies, and when they do, they become even more persuasive to the naïve and uninformed. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1852, "A man cannot dupe others long who has not duped himself first." Here is an instance of evil so deeply ingrained that it's no longer recognized as such. Instead we see such outrages as ECT specialist Robert E. Peck titling his 1974 book, The Miracle of Shock Treatment and Max Fink, who for many years edited the leading professional journal in the field, now called The Journal of ECT, telling a Washington Post reporter in 1996, "ECT is one of God's gifts to mankind." (Sandra G. Boodman, "Shock Therapy: It's Back," 24 September, Health [section], p.16)

4. Backup for treatment-resistant psychiatric-drug users. Many, if not most, of those being electroshocked today are suffering from the ill effects of a trial run or long-term use of antidepressant, anti-anxiety, neuroleptic, and/or stimulant drugs, or combinations thereof. When such effects become obvious, the patient, the patient's family, or the treating psychiatrist may refuse to continue the drug-treatment program. This helps explain why ECT is so necessary in modern psychiatric practice: it is the treatment of next resort. It is psychiatry's way of burying their mistakes without, except rarely, killing the patient. Growing use and failure of psychiatric-drug treatment has forced psychiatry to rely more and more on ECT as a way of dealing with difficult, complaining patients, who often are hurting more from the drugs than from their original problems. And when the ECT fails to "work," there's always -- following an initial series -- more ECT (prophylactic ECT administered periodically to outpatients), or more drug treatment, or a combination of the two. That drugs and ECT are for practical purposes the only methods psychiatry offers to, or imposes on, those who seek treatment or for whom treatment is sought is further evidence of the profession's clinical and moral bankruptcy.

5. Lack of accountability. Psychiatry has become a Teflon profession: criticism, what little there is of it, doesn't stick. Psychiatrists routinely carry out brutal acts of inhumanity and no one calls them on it -- not the courts, not the government, not the people. Psychiatry has become an out-of-control profession, a rogue profession, a paradigm of authority without responsibility, which is a good working definition of tyranny.

6. Government support. Not only does the federal government stand by passively as psychiatrists continue to electroshock American citizens in direct violation of some of their most fundamental freedoms, including freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from assault, and freedom from "cruel and unusual punishment," the government also actively supports electroshock through the licensing and funding of hospitals where the procedure is used, by covering ECT costs in its insurance programs (including Medicare), and by financing ECT research (including some of the most damaging ECT techniques ever devised). A recently published study provides an example of such research. The ECT experiment, which was conducted at Wake Forest University School of Medicine/North Carolina Baptist Hospital, Winston-Salem, between 1995 and 1998, reports the use of electric current at up to 12 times the individual's convulsive threshold on as many as 36 depressed patients. The destructive element in ECT is the current that causes the convulsion: the more electrical energy, the greater the brain damage. This reckless disregard for the safety of ECT subjects was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health. (W. Vaughn McCall, David M. Begoussin, Richard D. Weiner, and Harold A. Sackeim, "Titrated Moderately Suprathreshold vs. Fixed High-Dose Right Unilateral Electroconvulsive Therapy: Acute Antidepressant and Cognitive Effects," Archives of General Psychiatry, May 2000, pp. 438-444)

7. Electroshock could never have become a major psychiatric procedure without the active collusion and silent acquiescence of tens of thousands of psychiatrists. Many of them know better; all of them should know better. The active and passive cooperation of the media has also played an essential role in expanding the use of electroshock. Amidst a barrage of propaganda from the psychiatric profession, the media passes on the claims of ECT proponents almost without challenge. The occasional critical articles are one-shot affairs, with no follow-up, which the public quickly forgets. With so much controversy surrounding this procedure, one would think that some investigative reporters would key on to the story. But it's happened only rarely up to now. And the silence continues to drown out the voices of those who need to be heard. I'm reminded of Martin Luther King's 1963 "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," in which he wrote "We shall have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling tilence of the good people."