Psychiatric Drug Facts
Dr. Peter Breggin

By far the most up-to-date information of the dangers associated with ECT can be found in a chapter in Dr. Breggin’s book, Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex, Second Edition (2008). Dr. Breggin brings together and evaluates dozens of articles demonstrating permanent brain damage from ECT including irreversible severe memory loss and wide spread cognitive disabilities. Many patients lose their ability to practice their professions or to conduct their lives in a normal fashion. Dr. Breggin was the medical expert in the first and only electroshock malpractice suit won by the injured patient. He was also the expert in a recent malpractice suit against an ECT doctor that resulted in a settlement of more than $1 million.

In 2007 a long-term follow-up study of ECT patients conducted by a team of shock-advocates lead by Harold Sackeim confirmed Dr. Breggin’s observations that the “treatment” is devastating to the mental functions, frequently causing dementia with permanent disruption of memory and a variety of other cognitive functions.

The acronym ECT stands for “Electro Convulsive Therapy” (also called EST, for Electro Shock Therapy) a psychiatric treatment in which electricity is applied to the head and passed through the brain to produce a grand mal or major convulsion. The seizure brought about by the electric stimulus closely resembles, but is more rigorous or strenuous than that found in idiopathic epilepsy or in epilepsy following a wide variety of insults to the brain.

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