What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment
Shock treatment. You heard somewhere that it’s perfectly
safe. Doctors say it can’t ruin your memory or damage your brain. They say it’s
new and improved.
But who are they and why should you believe them?
But in the 1970s, the shock industry faced what it saw as challenges to its profitable practice: Courts in state after state ruled that mental patients must give their consent to treatment and had the right to say no to shock in some cases. The invention of the CAT-scan meant that it was now possible to investigate the effects of shock in vivo, settling the question of whether it damaged brains once and for all. And finally, in 1976 the Food and Drug Administration was given authority to regulate the machines used to give shock, including a mandate to investigate its safety.
The American Psychiatric Association--- in the form of a small self-selected cartel of doctors who owned or worked for the shock machine manufacturers---put all its resources into lobbying against a safety investigation of ECT. Much like the tobacco companies, the industry substituted a masterful public relations campaign for scientific research.Former patients who had experienced permanent extensive amnesia and cognitive disability from ECT organized to lobby for a scientific safety investigation, even offering their own brains to the FDA for study. This battle between ex-patients and doctors, unparalleled in the history of medicine, went on for over a generation. Previously unpublished documents from the FDA archives tell the dramatic story: ex-patients with nothing but truth on their side, doctors substituting power and prestige for the scientific evidence they refused to produce, taking every opportunity to dismiss their critics as mentally ill.
In the end no safety investigation of ECT’s permanent effects on the brain was done, and has not been done to this day. Instead, the industry continued its public relations campaign. Its spokesmen, while not revealing their financial ties to the shock machine companies, established themselves in key research positions, accepting tens of millions of federal research dollars for themselves and deciding who else would (or would not) get funding; in this way they were able to determine what was published on shock treatment and thus what was “true.” The end result of this is that today, despite laws in all states mandating consent, shock is commonly forced on patients who refuse it, since judges believe the statements of the shock doctors that it is harmless.
