ECT: Memories and trust lost
I am grateful for your excellent article on electroconvulsive therapy (“Shock Therapy and the Brain,” Nov. 17). I had multiple ECT [treatments] as a young adolescent. However, I was assaulted and damaged, and have spent my lifetime surviving this draconian treatment. By this I mean having little memory of childhood before the ECT, which was given at ages 11 and 13. I lost the memories, lost trust in caretakers who could allow this to happen and yet have survived with reasonable success.
Margo Bauer
Laguna Woods
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I am dismayed that anyone would seriously consider such an insane “treatment” as electroshock. Apply some simple logic: If someone has a problem with the mind, the solution is not to beat the guy over the head with a baseball bat. What is the solution? The Quakers used two simple therapies [on severely mentally ill people]: respect and kindness. Unfortunately, respect and kindness are not billable and generate no profits for psychiatrists. On the other hand, they create no zombies either.
Dave Silberstein
Altadena
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The idea that electroshocking works is so ludicrous and barbaric that I can only hope the public at large simply dismisses the idea. A five-minute search on the Internet will give people all they need to know. And they’ll hear it from people who have had their lives and the lives of loved ones destroyed by ECT.
Todd Gilbert
Tustin
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I was most pleased to read this story, though I am not in favor of ECT. My father had a series of three hospitalizations in New York where he underwent numerous ECTs, beginning in about the mid-1980s, then again in 1999 and in the summer of 2002. He was 90 years old when he received the last of at least 11 ECTs. I voiced my opposition, but he was nevertheless subjected to the jolts to his brain. They left him unable to remember where he lived; his memory was so impaired that the administering doctor decided he could not return to his home.
I had expressed concern to this doctor about the possible danger of administering the shocks to my father’s brain at his age. The doctor assured me that there was no danger. He failed to mention the deleterious effects the electroshock would have on my father’s memory.
Medicare pays for shock treatments for the elderly. I believe it is an abuse not only of the patient but of the Medicare system. I think a full investigation of the procedure and the physicians performing it should be undertaken.
Dolphin Reeves
Via e-mail
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I was shocked that you would condone electric shock on people. This practice belongs more to the world of the Dark Ages of medicine than it does to a scientific culture. It is a form of physical punishment at best -- for people who are already in a state of confusion. I know several people whose lives have been ruined by electric shock.
Kay Bailey
Via e-mail
