In a new study, researchers asked 858 ECT recipients about their experiences. On all five questions in the survey, the majority of responders stated that ECT either had no benefit or actively made their lives worse. About half (49%) said it made their lives “much worse” or “very much worse.” About two-thirds (62%) said it had a negative impact on their quality of life, while only 20% said their quality of life was “much improved” or “very much improved.”
While some patients found it helpful, more patients found it unhelpful in every category. For instance, a quarter of patients (25%) said their presenting problem was “much improved” or “very much improved.” However, 30% said it was “much worse” or “very much worse.” The remainder landed somewhere in the middle.
“In conjunction with the absence of evidence that ECT is more effective than placebo, and the known long-term adverse effects on memory, these survey findings lead us to recommend a suspension of ECT in clinical settings pending independent large-scale placebo-controlled studies to determine whether ECT has any effectiveness relative to placebo, against which the many serious adverse effects can be weighed,” the researchers write.
The most unique aspect of this study is that the researchers asked actual patients about their experiences. Patient voices are mostly absent from the research literature on ECT.
The study was led by prolific researcher John Read at the University of East London, along with psychologists Lucy Johnstone and Chris Harrop. The authors also included ECT survivors Sarah Price Hancock, Lisa Morrison, and Sue Cunliffe. This was another unique aspect of this study; including as researchers those whose lives are impacted by the research is accepted practice in many fields, but it is rarely done in psychiatry.
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This article literally is itself a victim of ECT because your life and energy and time and intelligence is being absorbed mounting an impotent response to the problem. Why is an article covering a research study of this nature an impotent response? These research findings could well have a place in a response that is not impotent but it is a concession to ECT therapy – even PR work for ECT – if you don’t then contextualize it with the rest of the research on ECT which no doubt shows the same things, hence this isn’t new, and therefore your article would need to go on to address the reasons why research on ECT and psychopharmacological drugs is eliciting no response from regulating agencies, government, medicine and psychiatry itself. Then you have brought out the full significance of any new research finding but still it would be an impotent response if you didn’t go one more distance and considered whether there is any hope trying to create change through a critique of psychiatry/psychopharmacology and through critical research studies at all. You could be investing everything in public awareness but you are fighting an enormous sea of contradictory opinions on every matter and only a small proportion of people are able to recognize whether someone is drawing on evidence or not, hence to them facts are heard as if they were an opinion that contradicts mine. This is the real coal face of the problem. Perhaps more intelligent action would be to try and raise awareness among teacher and parent groups, school governors, child mental health workers because these are the people most likely to respond to serious warnings that they are unwittingly partaking in the destruction of children. But ultimately I feel that there is no hope in the field at all because we don’t need it. We need the true answer, which is the most simple yet the most unreachable thing, and that’s to live natural, human lives again and thereby becoming natural, healthy human beings again. Industrial medicine is about patching up problems that are not deeply understood in unnatural ways and adjusting the human body to the demands of an unnatural way of life that destroys health. The best medicine imaginable would be to lead natural, healthy human lives, and if you don’t know what a natural healthy human life would look like then I feel this is because you’ve stopped remembering how to look at things simply. A natural human life is a human community working together for the community and looking after one another, and eating natural whole food and looking after the environment and living sustainably. It’s the most simple yet the most unattainable thing for us not least because we’ve all been conditioned to a life of mass culture, computers and technology, holidays and restaurants, all those things that have really destroyed our minds as well as our lives. So where does this all leave the problem of anti-psychiatry? You tell me. It’s been eclipsed many times by things like having a fascist government and the whole country becoming more obviously insane then most people regarded as mentally ill, and destroying the whole Earth environmentally as humanity destroys itself through war as well as it’s own almost infinite short sighted stubborn, arrogant stupidity. These are the people you are appealing to with your facts and rational arguments and research papers, which shows that in a way you mirror their own insanity, really. By taking all these disreputable players including psychiatrists on good faith by trying to have reasoned dialogues you are subscribing to their own delusional personae of being of sufficient integrity to discuss in good faith or be amenable to facts, and you are also appeasing them by doing this and helping to uphold their false status in the eyes of medicine and the public. You ought to be much more enquiring and searching and interviewing and quizzing professionals in order to find out the extent to which this resistance is self-defensive, is self-assertive greed, or fear of insecurity, or blind acceptance of the lies of the field and a disbelief that the whole field could be wrong. And then if you find this out you can be blisteringly honest about it, describe your evidence (including descriptions of observed facts as the need is to communicate human to human honesty and with true perspective and gravity), and shed light on what society is up against in hoping to merely reform the field. Because the answer will not be the reform of psychiatry but it’s destruction, and if we don’t begin to grasp this we will continue to pursue false hopes until the hope itself ends.
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I participated in the John Read et al. online study and have previously written about my own ECT experiences at age 16 and a review of ECT for MIA (“State Hospital Memories: More of My Story,” “Committed at 16: State Hospital Memories,” and “The Shady World of Shock Treatment.”)
My own experience with shock treatment was highly traumatic. I received the muscle relaxant without prior sedation numerous times, which causes an excruciatingly painful paralysis of the respiratory muscles. And following shock treatment, I experienced serious problems with memory, speech, and academic functioning, and painful recall of the traumatic events which lasted for years.
Dr. Read’s study consisted largely of elderly women. I would like to know what others my age thought of their shock treatment experiences. He found over half of his largely adult sample reported unfavorable outcomes. I would guess that children and adolescents who are undergoing brain development would experience an even worse outcome. The World Health Organization has said shock treatment for underage children should be prohibited.
The state hospital where I received my 20-30 shock treatments lost its accreditation in 1979 for not having a sufficient number of trained professionals or treatment programs, fire code violations, failure to do needed building repairs (there was no heat in the bedrooms in winter when I was there) and allowing patients to go idle most of the time.
As I recall their doctors were mostly from third world countries, many who had difficulties with English and doubtlessly had not passed the medical licensure exam in this country. They were operating under a program that allowed them to come here and practice under the supervision of a licensed physician. Many of them, however, probably did not share our values for humane patient care. Their social workers were Americans, but did not have the full educational credentials, and, likewise, were allowed to practice under a licensed social worker. In such situations, abuses are bound to occur and did.
Dr. Read’s study likewise highlights the poor regulation of shock treatment in this country where necessary studies on the safety and effectiveness of shock treatment were never done, and the practice of shock treatment allowed to continue despite this gross deficiency. I am hoping that Dr. Read’s study will help lead to a possible remedy, whether it be in the courts or the regulatory agencies finally stepping up to their responsibilities,
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I’ve had some further thoughts on why I think the side-effects of ECT (including severe memory loss and other problems) may be more severe in children and adolescents receiving ECT. I know that Dr. Read’s study did not deal specifically with the issue of differences in outcome for ECT patients of different ages, but I think it is worthy of consideration. I believe the problem for younger patients may be that their past learnings and mental faculties are still developing. What they do know has not had a chance to fully consolidate as compared to an adult. It is known that ECT memory loss most often occurs for the last year or two of a patient’s life prior to ECT. If they have not yet finished high school, this would mean they could lose relatively more of their learning than an older adult. Going forward they would then face greater obstacles created by what they lost, whether it be in further schooling, employment, relationships, etc. Younger patients may also be more prone to PTSD from their shock experiences, particularly if it was a very traumatic one as in my case (I was given the muscle relaxant, Anective, without prior anesthesia) because they have not developed the coping mechanisms to deal with it. This was also true of those who fought in the Vietnam War. They were younger than those in other wars and had a higher incidence of PTSD on returning.
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It may be worse to electrocute a developing brain than a fully developed one. But electrocution as a “treatment” for “mental illness” is rank insanity in any case! We generally do anything we can to avoid people having seizures. Why we’d want to induce one and imagine it is helpful is baffling beyond words!
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