About ECT

Why ECT Stories?

To Tell the Truth

“If my mind is the place which my memories call 'home' and if I have lost it, then where am I to be found?" Irish psychiatrist Michael Corry (1948-2010)

"When doctors hear a patient say he or she is depressed, they are programmed to prescribe an antidepressant and look no further for the cause."Carolyn Dean MD ND, author of 'Death by Modern Medicine' and 'The Magnesium Miracle'

Is the diagnosis correct?

Patients are not treatment resistant.  Doctors are learning resistant. The prescription pad is the most lethal item in modern medicine.  In our current system of mental health 'care' an initial small problem often gets medicated into a larger more serious problem.

Does the doctor use pharmacogenomic testing to determine if a medication is the right medication for you?  Will the medication be effective or will you have serious (or potentially deadly) adverse effects?  Is your doctor still using the ‘trial-and-error’ method?  Is your doctor drugging you to ‘insanity’ and then prescribing ECT?  Is your doctor even aware of the information in your genetic code – information which could save your brain, your mind and your life?  Information which is readily accessible.

Does the doctor recognize akathisia?  - a tortuous “inner restlessness” with a constant urge to be moving with repetitive movements like foot tapping, pacing, rocking back and forth, or swaying. Many doctors don’t realize akathisia is a drug effect and keep increasing the dose or adding drugs instead of removing them.  And then they consider the patient to be treatment resistant and order ECT as the last and only hope.

The danger of polypharmacy was already recognized in the 1800s! “The battle against polypharmacy, or the use of a large number of drugs (the action of which we know little, yet we put them into the bodies … the action of which we know less) has not been fought to the finish … Do not use rashly every new product of which the peripatetic siren sings. Consider what surprising reactions may occur in the laboratory from the careless mixing of unknown substances.  Be as considerate of your patient and yourself as you are of the test-tube.”Sir William Osler (1849-1919)

“I wish I had died after this.  Polymed and ECT caused autoimmune encephalitis.  Severe brain damage.  I can't drive, watch TV, movies, read books, sleep without meds, or speak. I have aphasia and dysarthria.  I just continue to pray I die. I'm horrified. I'm living in a hell I can't escape. I cannot even escape into reading or writing or TV.  I am in constant physical, mental and cognitive anguish.  I wish to die." (A young woman who ended her own life a year after she wrote these words.

"Today I don't want to just join a movement, write a story, record a video or wear a t-shirt. Today I want to scream at the bastards that did this to me. Today I don't want to file a lawsuit, today I want to tell the doctor to his face what he did to me.  Anger is one of the only things that has kept me going for 17 years, and yet sometimes I just feel like screaming so hard hoping that my body faints into the eternity and calmness of death, but I can't seem to accomplish it... and I am too weak to put myself out of my own misery.  Today I want to remember that I have a mission." 

Andres Ibanez (ECT survivor) 

Individuals who can perceive the human energy field can ‘see’ the damage done by ECT.  Some ECT experiencers talk about having been ‘so delusional’ that they thought they were out of their body looking down at what was being done to them. They were not delusional.  ECT can be such a horrific procedure that ‘leaving the body’ is an act of self-preservation. 

"No One Should Be Given Shock Treatment.  ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) involves the application of two electrodes to the head to pass electricity through the brain with the goal of causing an intense seizure or convulsion. The process always damages the brain, resulting each time in a temporary coma and often a flat-lining of the brain waves, which is a sign of impending brain death.

After one, two or three ECTs, the trauma causes typical symptoms of severe head trauma or injury including headache, nausea, memory loss, disorientation, confusion, impaired judgment, loss of personality, and emotional instability. These harmful effects worsen and some become permanent as routine treatment progresses. ECT originated in 1938. Modifications have been used since the 1960s and are not new or safer. These changes make it harder to cause a seizure. As a result, modern ECT requires even stronger and more damaging doses of electricity."    

Peter Breggin MD, author of Brain -Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry

www.ectresources.com

In late 2018 a legal case on behalf of a small number of ECT victims was settled favorably on the eve of trial.  ECT machines manufacturer Somatics, LLC issued a warning of “permanent brain damage” in its new risk disclosures.

"When it comes to science, including medical science, history might even suggest that what 'everyone knows' at any given time turns out later to have been wrong to some degree. Scientific understanding has progressed after all, and it has often progressed by overturning earlier theories. But even as it's widely recognized that science has progressed, it's usually forgotten that this very progress has often meant superseding or rejecting earlier ideas. And the notion that a contemporary consensus might be wrong seems unbelievable to most people."  

Professor Emeritus Henry Bauer.

The Role of ECT/Electroshock in medicine needs to be reconsidered.