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

Linda Andre (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Linda Andre's book is both a powerful memoir of her own experience as an ECT "patient" and a documented account of the underbelly of the 'shock industry.' It raises profound questions about ECT that both psychiatry and the National Institute of Mental Health--if they want to be honest with the American public--desperately need to address." ----Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill

"For many years, activist and writer Linda Andre has been forcefully and cogently examining the reigning (and mostly unchallenged) professed claims and practices of our medical establishment's wizards of shock therapy. In this thoroughly-researched, pathbreaking, and essential book, the author undraws the curtains that have for too long cloaked these claims, practices, and wizards. It is a work of courage, heart, and brains." --Jonathan Cott, Author of On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering

"This book is brilliant analysis. It is successful on many levels, including its most important task: presenting an overview of the history, safety and efficacy of electro-convulsive therapy. The book is also a masterpiece of scientific writing. Through her extensive personal and professional research, Andre explained things I had already known about ECT, but with additional clinical facts and exceptional insight. She detailed the people and places that have formed the basis for the historical foundations of ECT at the same time that she described the politics and organizations that have continued to promote ECT as a safe and effective modality." --Stefan Kruszewski MD, International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine

"This superb study documents a development that is an ongoing controversy in the field of psychiatry: electro convulsive therapy (ECT) and the appropriateness of using it to treat a host of conditions. Weaving her own, often poignant, experiences with ECT into the narrative, Andre contends that ECT proponents/practitioners undercut informed consent through systemic deceit, including failure to reveal negative consequences. The audience for this excellent resource should include those who make mental health policy. Highly recommended." --Choice

Product Description

Mechanisms and standards exist to safeguard the health and welfare of the patient, but for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) used to treat depression and other mental illnesses approval methods have failed. Prescribed to thousands over the years, public relations as opposed to medical trials have paved the way for this popular yet dangerous and controversial treatment option.
Doctors of Deception is a revealing history of ECT (or shock therapy) in the United States, told here for the first time. Through the examination of court records, medical data, FDA reports, industry claims, her own experience as a patient of shock therapy, and the stories of others, Andre exposes tactics used by the industry to promote ECT as a responsible treatment when all the scientific evidence suggested otherwise.
As early as the 1940s, scientific literature began reporting incidences of human and animal brain damage resulting from ECT. Despite practitioner modifications, deleterious effects on memory and cognition persisted. Rather than discontinue use of ECT, the $5-billion-per-year shock industry crafted a public relations campaign to improve ECT s image. During the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatry's PR efforts misled the government, the public, and the media into believing that ECT had made a comeback and was safe.
Andre carefully intertwines stories of ECT survivors and activists with legal, ethical, and scientific arguments to address issues of patient rights and psychiatric treatment. Echoing current debates about the use of psychopharmaceutical interventions shown to have debilitating side effects, she candidly presents ECT as a problematic therapy demanding greater scrutiny, tighter control, and full disclosure about its long-term cognitive effects.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press; 1 edition (February 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813544416
• ISBN-13: 978-0813544410
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #193,375 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars They still do shock treatment?, February 25, 2009

By	John Friedberg (Berkeley, CAlifornia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (Hardcover)

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

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Daring to take the Business of Electroshock by the Prods., February 14, 2009

By	Philip Bennett - See all my reviews

This review is from: Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (Hardcover)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A detailed and Brilliant Account of the Shock Industry, March 4, 2009

By	Dorothy W. Dundas - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (Hardcover)

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.