While current restrictions remain in place, protesters have taken to the internet to voice their concerns about controversial electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) that’s being used on vulnerable patients in the UK.
Figures obtained from Mental Health Trusts under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal that in some areas, electroshocks have been increasing at a faster rate than others over the last decade.
In Bristol, figures show there has been a 90% increase in ECT treatments at the Linden Unit over a ten-year period. In 2019, there were 1009 treatments compared to 530 in 2010. In Manchester, there has been a 56% increase where electroshocks rose from 486 in 2011 to 759 in 2019. In Oxford, the increase was only 20%, rising from 666 electroshocks in 2011 to 809 last year.
Up to 460 volts of electricity is sent through the brain during the shock procedure to produce a grand mal seizure which psychiatrists claim will ‘reset’ or ‘reboot’ the brain.
It’s a theory that hasn’t been proven. According to the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) in the UK, a branch of an international mental health watchdog, there’s evidence ECT causes significant and irreversible brain damage.
Anaesthetics and paralysing agents used during the procedure can make ECT appear less barbaric, but that’s only for the person watching the torture. For the person being shocked, there’s little or no difference.
Increased current flow is required during ‘new and improved’ ECT. The anaesthetics raise the seizure threshold requiring more electricity to induce a convulsion. The increased current flow can tear holes in brain cells, killing them by generating heat. Scans taken of ECT patients have shown scarring and brain shrinkage.
Psychiatrists commonly blame a person’s ‘underlying mental illness’ as a way of deflecting responsibility for the harm and damage caused. CCHR says the procedure is cloaked in medical legitimacy: the hospital setting, white-coated assistants, anaesthetics, muscle-paralysing drugs and sophisticated looking equipment. The effects though are horrific, where the full ramifications are not explained to the patients or families.
Brian Daniels national spokesperson for CCHR in the UK said, “In spite of their sophisticated trappings of science, the brutality of ECT shows that psychiatry hasn’t advanced beyond the cruelty and barbarism of its earliest treatments.
“It has all the marks of physical torture methods that might instead belong in the armoury of a KGB interrogator, rather than in the inventory of a medical practitioner.”
Copies of the FOIA figures are available on request.
