Question:
What makes ECT so damaging? Bruce Wiseman emphasizes that the procedure always creates grand mal seizures: "Electroshock treatments send several hundred volts of electricity through the brain. The brain then becomes starved for oxygen and pulls more blood into the brain. This causes blood vessels to break, damage to the brain, and eventual brain shrinkage. As a result of the lack of oxygen and the destruction of the nerves in the brain, the person has a seizure.

Answer: Actually, it's electric shock treatment. But as the Citizens Commission of Human Rights points out, the people who profit from it like to call it electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), because this sounds a little better. Regardless of the label you give it, what this treatment amounts to is the destruction of brain cells by electricity. In other words, it's physician-induced brain damage.

When the patient's underlying problems return, she or he is even less able to deal with them than before the treatment, because of the brain injury that has been sustained. It should be noted that women are twice as likely as men to receive ECT.

The continued use of this medieval seeming therapy would perhaps be understandable if it had been shown to be effective. But as explained in a recent article in The Journal of Mind and Behavior,11 "Follow-up studies about the effects of ECT in which recipients themselves evaluate the procedure are both rare and embarrassing to the ECT industry. The outcomes of these studies directly contradict propaganda regarding permanent memory loss put forth by the four manufacturers of ECT devices in the United States (Somatics, MECTA, Elcot, and Medcraft), upon whom physicians and the public rely for information, much as the public relies upon pharmaceutical companies for information on drugs."