ElectroConvulsive Therapy: Treatment by Brain Damage

If you lose your memory, who are you? What defines you? For many who have undergone electroconvulsive therapy, this question is one they live with every day.

Ernest Hemingway felt that memory was what defined him, what made him who he was. After undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, he described the effects like this:

Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.

Not long after, he committed suicide. Hemingway did not die by depression. He died by psychiatry.

You might think that such a barbaric treatment would be relegated to the back pages of psychiatric textbooks—a warning to future psychiatrists of the excesses brought by hubris. But that’s not the case. ElectroConvulsive therapy (ECT) is actually making a comeback!

It’s now done in a “kinder and gentler” fashion. It’s no less brutal than it ever was, but the brutality is hidden behind drugs that render the patient unconscious and relax muscles so the body’s violent flailing—the convulsion, the goal of the treatment—can’t be seen. Though there are no longer broken bones and spines, as was once the case, the violence against the brain is unabated.

In no other context is a convulsion considered good. A convulsion is, in fact, the seizure or fit of epilepsy. It’s feared.  Enormous effort is put into preventing them. Yet, psychiatrists not only perform ECT, they often force patients to submit, even using court orders. The patient who is in a psychiatric hospital has no choice. If that’s what the psychiatrist prescribes, that’s what the patient gets.

Brain Damage: The Goal of ECT

Functional MRIs (fMRI) allow examination of blood flow in the brain. The greater the blood flow, the greater the brain activity. Unsurprisingly, emotions affect brain activity. So, researchers are now saying that they can see brain dysfunction in depressed people.

What’s frightening is that they’re presuming to define those changes as abnormal when it fits their paradigm. They’re using fMRIs to “prove” that a certain part of the brain of depressed people is overactive, resulting in “hyperconnectivity”. That’s the latest psychiatric buzzword in depression.

How did they come up with the term hyperconnectivity? That’s because a part of the brain that’s more active in sad people is an area that connects the amygdala, which is associated with the sense of smell and both positive and negative emotions, and the forebrain, which manages thought and the primal control of the body’s endocrine (glandular) system.

To play around with the interface between emotions and thought is obviously not something one should do casually. Yet, that’s precisely what psychiatrists are doing when they administer electric shocks to people’s brains. Worse, ECT destroys neurons, so the interface between thought and emotions—all emotions—may be shut down.

The Latest Thrust of Pseudo Research in ECT

A new study, Electroconvulsive therapy reduces frontal cortical connectivity in severe depressive disorder, published in PNaS claims that ECT causes a “a reduction in regional connectivity” associated with depression. The authors rather neatly sidestep the question of how ECT does this. It has, however, been documented that electric shock applied to the brain in the manner and method used in ECT causes brain damage.

Dr. Peter Breggin states:

Animal studies show diffuse brain damage following ECT: the most common findings are petechial or pinpoint hemorrhages throughout the brain and surrounding blood vessels, as well as areas of gliosis and neuronal degeneration, with patches of cell death (ghost cells and neuronophagia).  Occasionally larger hemorrhages and edema of the brain are found. These findings are also seen on human autopsies performed on ECT patients.

In other words, ECT functions by causing brain damage. The authors of that study are evading the fact that the changes they’re heralding are evidence of brain damage.

Psychiatrists and their researchers have posited that any variance in a brain they’ve diagnosed as sick must be the cause of that sickness. Therefore, they reason: Anything that reverses the change must be therapeutic. So ECT psychiatrists ignore the fact that it destroys brain cells. They ignore what the patients tell them. They ignore the complaints of memory loss. They also ignore what they surely must observe themselves: some patients reduced to a childlike dependence, some suffering loss in reasoning ability, and some sent into full-fledged dementia.

In the case of the PNaS study, the authors hubristically conclude:

The findings reported here add weight to the emerging “hyperconnectivity hypothesis” of depression and support the proposal that increased connectivity may constitute both a bio-marker for mood disorder and a potential therapeutic target.

They’re saying that a brain state they call hyperconnectivity is abnormal in the brains of people they’ve diagnosed as depressed. They found that ECT flattens mood, so they have defined the ECT effect as positive. They don’t concern themselves with what causes these changes. They don’t consider that they may be destroying brain cells to accomplish this so-called cure.

These psychiatrists are masters at ignoring salient facts:

• Many, possibly most, ECT patients suffer from memory loss.
• ECT has been clearly documented to consistently cause devastating brain damage, including cell death.
• It has never been demonstrated that the brains of people who are normally sad function differently from the brains of people who are abnormally sad. (Of course, at this point, it seems probable that anyone who is sad for any reason is, for psychiatry’s purposes, mentally ill.)

People who have undergone ECT are organizing to end this procedure that is both torture and life destroying. They’re the ones who know the real costs of ECT. Surely they should be considered the real experts, not the psychiatrists who profit from it.

Modern psychiatry has moved well past the dictates of reality. Psychiatry lives in the land of make believe. Sadly, though, their make-believe is imposed on the rest of us. And their make-believe is carried out in a world of real people. But that fantasy allows them to avoid seeing the effects of the poisonous drugs and ECT physical assaults that they’re imposing.

 For more info and support, you may contact:

• Mind Freedom, International
• The Mental Patients Liberation Alliance (New York), 1-800-654-7227

Tagged depression ect, depression electroconvulsive therapy, ect, electroconvulsive therapy, health articles, health articles 101, modern medicine, pseudo-science, pseudoscience, psychiatric hubris, psychiatrists ect, psychiatry, psychiatry ect