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Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment

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If you've ever wondered how generations of medical authority could have been so wrong about practices such as bleeding, consider shock treatment or ECT.

The author describes in fascinating detail the "30 year comeback" of electroshock.

I am honored to be mentioned as having attempted to expose the brain damage and amnesia at the beginning of the "PR era." I am a neurologist appalled by the practice of inducing convulsions. Convulsions are a catastrophe doctors should be dedicated to preventing.

Three decades later there is incontrovertible evidence that shock treatments always cause memory loss, sometimes cause seizures and not infrequently cause death.

The story of how psychiatry has defended the indefensible is told with awesome scholarship and remarkable wit by one of it's most indomitable critics.

This book is the truth about ECT. You won't find it anywhere else.

John Friedberg, MD
Board Certified Neurologist

Linda Andre had been blessed. With an I. Q. measured at 156, a powerful work ethic, a drive to succeed, a musician's ear and artist's eye, she sailed through her academic career to the heights of scholarship and was beginning a brilliant career as a writer and photographer when, at 25, the assault happened, like a horrific mugging and beating. Permanently brain damaged by the assault, her I. Q. had been chopped down to 118. Gone also was her gift for photography. Perhaps worse of all was the complete erasure of five years of her memory, one-fifth of her lifetime, including all her prestigious academic training, as if she'd never lived those lost years.
Any other mugging would have thrown the perpetrators into jail for years and cost them millions in civil penalties. But this was a legal mugging. And the perpetrators even made $20,000 for destroying much of Ms. Andre's life. They were, after all, licensed doctors of medicine and, instead of using a baseball bat on her head (which would have been kinder), they sent up to 200 volts of electricity into her brain with their electro convulsive "therapy" machine.
Why would doctors, of all people, inflict such physical and emotional harm to another? Ms. Andre, having no memory of the events leading up to her assault, can only go by what other people have told her and the existing documentation. So she spends most of her affecting and exhaustively researched book looking for the answer then joining and later becoming a leading voice in the struggle against ECT machines and other instruments of this medical holocaust which claims thousands of victims each year, robbing them of their day-to-day abilities to function and up to decades of memory.
Here Ms. Andre documents the countless efforts to ask the questions and tell the mental patient's stories through various media only to learn that even the most trusted outlets have their own visions of what the answers are, regardless of the facts put in front of them. Few readers of this book will be able to sit complacently in front of their TVs afterwards, just as none of us should ever sheepishly allow any "expert" with certain conflicts of interest to lead us to ruin.
It is also a pleasure to read the facts behind ECT rather than the gushing accolades of Carrie Fisher (who receives regular shocks and has lost, so far, 4 months of her life-memories) and of Kitty Dukakas (who, along with lost memories, must constantly write notes to herself before her damaged short-term memory loses the information).
My deepest hope is that medical school students will read Ms. Andre's book, take it to heart and dare to ask those questions.

Earlier this year, Marcia Angell, writing in The New York Review of Books, lamented, "It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine." Angell's review laid out the many ways in which the medical field, particularly psychiatry, has allowed itself to be thoroughly corrupted by its extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

In her compelling new book, Doctors of Deception, Linda Andre demonstrates that this corruption extends to the big business of shock treatment (also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)). For decades a small group of psychiatrists, many with financial interests in shock machine manufacturers, has controlled the principal source of funds for ECT research, the National Institute of Mental Health, thereby insuring that studies which could demonstrate the extent of shock's devastating memory, attention and learning effects were never undertaken.

Those same gatekeepers wrote the American Psychiatric Association (APA) task force reports on electroconvulsive therapy so that negative findings regarding shock would never reach a broader audience. The reports were created to serve as public relations documents and psychiatrists have cited them regularly before federal and state governmental bodies as proof that shock is safe and effective in the absence of any real proof that it is.

Andre shows us how psychiatrists have for decades buried evidence, falsified reports, and employed a "new and improved" public relations mantra to sell a brain damaging procedure. To this day the shock sales pitch dominates media coverage of ECT. Shock, we are told, is effective and prevents suicide, and new techniques - oxygenation, anesthesia, less electricity, and different electrode placements - make the "new" shock safe. The fact that there is not a shred of medical evidence that any of this is true - and much to prove it false - has not prevented the message from being repeated endlessly.

Fraud and criminality within the psychiatric drug industry is so egregious that it can no longer be overlooked and well respected voices like Angell are beginning to be heard. Prior to Andre's book, however, there was a dearth of information about the covert machinations of the shock industry. Doctors of Deception goes a long way towards remedying that scarcity, while giving those who care about informed consent and human rights in the mental health field a powerful weapon with which to battle the Doctors of Deception.

Linda Andre has written a brilliant and detailed account of her damaging experience with ECT. She also examines the shameful marriage between the makers of the shock machines, the doctors, the American Psychiatric Association, the Federal Drug Administration, and the media, taking us beside her on her long, painstaking journey to hold all of them accountable for their deplorable actions and to educate the public on the very real dangers of ECT. As one who lived through 40 barbaric combined insulin-coma/ECT "treatments" in 1961, without any anesthesia, and suffered memory loss and other cognitive impairment, I have long been outraged that patients and the public in general are still uneducated about this dangerous "treatment." This book should be read by everyone! Thank you, Ms. Andre, for a groundbreaking and important book.

by Ron Thompson
Linda Andre has spent over 20 years trying to alert the public to the inevitable harm done by the psychiatric treatment known as 'electroconvulsive treatment', or more simply, as ... shock.
Now she's written DOCTORS OF DECEPTION: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (2009), published by Rutgers University Press.
Unlike other books written by former patients of psychiatry who feel their treatment was much worse than any problems they had prior to their encounter with psychiatry, Linda's book is relatively short on her personal story and long on scholarship about the history of shock since it's appearance in 1938. This makes her book at once excellent investigative reporting and serious history, as well as a compelling personal story.
One of many things that suggest the importance of this book is the startling statement that the dangers of shock treatment were far better recognized in the 1940's than they are now.
Andre discusses the main reason such a 'shocking' fact is true.
In two early chapters, she makes a strong case that eugenical thinking, the pseudo-scientific idea that certain races, or certain categories of people, are biologically inferior to others - an idea which had a dismayingly wide vogue for the first four decades on the 20th century - has never really gone away regarding mental patients.
If this inferiority is assumed to be true, then any damage caused by treatment must be of less harm than if committed against 'normal' human beings.
Such a mindset of general discriminatory thought encouraged by the fake science of Eugenics has largely disappeared or significantly eroded, at least in mainstream thought, as applied to African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and others
But Andre makes a strong case that it still thrives when applied to mental patients, especially by psychiatrists. I think most mental patients,former or current, voluntary or involuntary, true believers or not in biology as the basis of their problems, would agree.
Next , Andre dissects in convincing detail how the Shock industry, when it came under increasing criticism in the 1960's as part of the general cultural upheaval of protest in that now distant period, decided to adopt a Public Relations strategy rather than a scientific strategy to meet these attacks.
That is, instead of doing valid scientific research on the outcomes of sending electricity through human brains, the shock doctors and the manufacturers of shock machines - which over the years have increasingly become the same people - decided on a pure no-holds barred public relations campaign that is pro-shock and anti-every critic, with especially no-holds-barred opposition to former patient critics. (Andre documents that damning research on the effects of shocking animal brains was done and published in the 1940's and early 50's).
Unfortunately this brazen Public Relations strategy has been a major success over the last 35 or more years.
Andre marshals a large volume of evidence to prove this. Her discussion of the aggressive PR approach by the shock doctors (both in public and behind-the-scenes) with regard to government-funded research, the FDA, professional journals, and the ever-complacent media, are the most revealing aspects of her research. For the really determined reader, she provides 30 pages of footnotes.
Along the way, she discusses the story of Marilyn Rice, the once highly placed government economist who lost her professional working knowledge as a result of shock, who then became the first major ex-patient activist against this particular psychiatric mistreatment, and eventually friend and mentor to her successor, Linda Andre.
She reports her conversations with some of the major shock doctors or propagandists she has confronted, with one particularly charming or chilling description of how a doctor tried to convince her that any damage to her memory or IQ had to have one of three or four other causes, but could not possibly be due to shock.
The final contribution of Andre's book is in a late chapter which discusses whether ect (shock) treatment should be banned, and what the moral context of that debate should be. In this chapter, which is in part a return to the earlier charge that shock doctors think in terms of eugenics about their patients, she charges that there is an unpleasant hidden moral agenda concerning the use of shock that lies beneath the overt or publicly professed reasons for the treatment.
Her indictment of this hidden moral agenda could hardly be harsher. It's on p. 271 of the book, and I will not spoil it for the reader by trying to give it in shorthand here.
Any particular faults in this book? Not really for this reviewer. Although it's true that shock doctoring can fairly be called an industry, I probably would have used the word profession much more often, if only because members of a profession are held to a higher standard or performance and ethical behavior than members of an industry. On the other hand, since we've had such a recent avalanche of stories on how so many in the medical profession and in research are embracing conflicts of interest and the ethics of entrepreneurialism rather than the ethics of science and of being professionals, maybe Andre's not wrong to refer relentlessly to shock doctors as an industry.
Last, this superior example of in-depth investigative reporting seems particularly relevant to recommend to those in the Washington area. This is because, even though there are some very good stories in big regional papers around the country about the mounting concerns of 'biological' psychiatry in more and more categories of psychiatric patients, the Washington Post (along with the New York Times) is, for reasons not entirely clear, peculiarly neglectful and incompetent in its coverage of psychiatry.
This is an especially tragic dereliction of journalistic duty if the paradigm of brain-centered biological psychiatry, triumphant since about 1980 over person-centered psychiatry, has really been about the stealth rebirth of Eugenics and has had nothing to do with actual science.
This means that the community of our national political leadership located here in Washington is woefully uninformed, at least through the papers it is most apt to read, about an issue that many groups around the country are increasingly concerned about.
Linda Andre has been a well-known speaker on the issues surrounding shock treatment for many years. The book she has now written about the moral and scientific issues surrounding that treatment deserves wide attention.

In addition to patients considering ECT as a treatment for themselves, this book should also be required reading for every medical school professor, medical school student, psychiatrist, and hospital administrator in the country who is interested in learning how to avoid being misinformed by profit-driven medical industry marketing and PR. Rutgers University Press has published a book on ECT that finally reveals the scholarly literature on the dangers of ECT, and the surprising *lack* of scholarly literature on clinical trials that could support claims of safety and effectiveness. For too long too many people and authorities with good intentions have been blindly trusting so-called "experts" on ECT who have blatant financial ties to the ECT machine manufacturers. This book goes into detail about the clever and disturbing PR games that have been played that keep boosting the opinions of the same "experts" on ECT treatment who have been paid by the ECT manufacturers to promote their products. The author does a wonderful job presenting in layman's terms the academic evidence about the dangers of ECT; as well as throroughly and carefully detailing the significant flaws, shortcomings, and unsupported assumptions in the academic literature that is commonly presented as support for claims of ECT safety and effectiveness. If the academic literature descriptions are not interesting enough for you, then the startling stories of ex-patients living with permanent amnesia that has erased years of memories will certainly keep you engaged in this compelling book. The value of ECT continues to be debatable, but this book shows that the "informed consent" process for this controversial treatment is woefully, tragically inadequate for patients and the doctors who try to help them.

Doctors of Deception is a terrific book. Reading it will not only inform you about the experience, politics, PR, and science of electroshock, it will also change your understanding of psychiatry, forever.

Doctors of Deception: What They Don't want you to know about Electro Convulvive Shock, by Linda Andre.
Everyone should read this book and you will know what Electro Convulsive Shock is doing to people.
Linda writes clearly why they do not want you to know, because the vested industry keep on misleading the public. Electro Convulsive Shock is not a "Treatment" or "Therapy". It is an assault to the most vital part of the body, the brain. After reading this book you will not trust a doctor, therapist or law maker.
If you can do something to get it out-lawed, do it!
Anna de Jonge
Patients Rights Advocate, NGO New Zealand

Andre's own experience and research combine to make her voice sure and clear. The carefully reported deceptions parallel what is now being reported about lacking ethics around other psychiatric interventions and diagnoses. The selected use of the first person is convincing, underscores the truth of this account, and makes the findings compelling.

Sylvia Caras
People Who

This book is interesting for me because I am an ECT practitioner.

Basically I am against this thrapy, but we cannot help administering it in some cases(catatonia, mania, severe depression...).

I am deeply impressed that the ECT survivors reported the experiences by their own words. Regretfully, the conditions(electrode placement, total charge, pulse width...) for each trial are not made clear.

So, we cannot tell whether misery side-effects described in this book are the inevitable or the accidental by inadequate procedures.

Unlike the author of this book, some conscience researchers/practitioners have disclosed their clinical outcomes FOR FREE.
[...]

If I were a patient or a member of his/her family, I would ask the doctor to explain the condtions more detail.