A Barbaric and Dangerous Relic of the Asylum Age: How Electroshock Evaded Science, Law and Ethics
Despite decades of evidence of brain injury and cognitive harm, the FDA and Medicare still sanction this unconscionable medical practice.
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Branded “safe and effective,” just like other medical atrocities known to harm, Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) was born in the 1930s and remains a devastating reality of what happens when captured science and propaganda replaces human conscience and compassion of care. ECT is a device psychiatrists use to shock the brains of America’s most vulnerable into a severe grand mal seizure as a form of “treatment” — including children and elderly — while taxpayers foot the bill. Now, the Global Wellness Forum, with CCHR, Stand for Health Freedom, and a growing coalition of truth and health-freedom advocates, is taking action to end it.
A Call to End a Medical Atrocity
The Global Wellness Forum (GWF) is leading a historic national coalition to end Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) — a federally subsidized medical atrocity still inflicted on more than 120,000 Americans every year.
In alliance with the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), Stand for Health Freedom, and a growing network of informed-consent, health-freedom, and human-rights organizations, we are launching a coordinated campaign to expose, defund, and abolish ECT in the United States.
How does ECT Work?
ECT is a medical device used by hospitals and psychiatrists that floods the brain with up to 900 milliamperes of current and 450 volts of electricity for up to as long as 8 seconds, delivered in either ultra-brief pulses or continuous waves — forcibly inducing a generalized grand mal seizure that can last up to two minutes.
The goal of this procedure is simply to trigger the seizure, not to heal. In practice, the electrical dose is set above the patient’s seizure threshold and then increased even further in later sessions — often from nearly double to as much as six times the amount needed to cause a seizure — escalating the risk of neurological injury with every treatment.
This is what happens when medicine forgets its purpose.
This is barbaric practicae and seems like something from a fictional horror movie.
Yet this is a hidden reality today in America and other parts of the world.
When our medical system stops asking why and makes no attempt to understand root causes for mental illness or neurochemistry impacts, and starts silencing symptoms instead of understanding them, it becomes a machine of suppression rather than healing.
The tragedy of ECT is not just in its physical and emotional damage but also in what it represents — a profession that has lost connection to consciousness, to cause, and to care itself.
And it’s time we end this traumatic and abusive practice disguised as therapy — together.
Visit StopECT.com to learn more, take action, and join the movement.
The Unthinkable Truth About “Modern Psychiatry”
The history of psychiatry is marked by interventions born more of fear than of wisdom: lobotomies in the mid-20th century severed brain tissue in a desperate search for control, while Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) induced seizures as if the mind could be “reset” by force rather than understood through compassionate, root-cause healing.
Though heralded as breakthroughs, both were introduced with minimal testing, scant ethical oversight, and a willingness to sacrifice patient autonomy—inflicting literal brain injury in the name of “therapy.” Their legacy is not one of healing, but of harm and abuse.
And yet, one of these barbaric relics still persists today: ECT continues to be performed on hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. When medicine abandons understanding for convenience, the infirm become experiments and their suffering becomes invisible. Reckoning with that truth is the first step toward ending it.
Every year, tens of thousands of Americans — including veterans, pregnant women, the elderly, and even children as young as five — are subjected to up to 450 volts of electricity through the brain under anesthesia. As comparison, that’s the equivalent force of being struck by a lightning bolt at close range — delivered directly through the skull.
The procedure, known as Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) or “electroshock”, has never been truly proven safe or effective, yet is reimbursed by Medicare, Medicaid, and the Department of Veterans Affairs based upon a regulatory loophole approval from 1976.
ECT does not bring healing — instead for most patients they suffer irreversible trauma, permament memory loss, brain injury, and sometimes, tragically, even death.
“ECT causes persistent or permanent memory loss and brain damage in up to 55% of recipients.” — Expert testimony, Nebraska Supreme Court (2025)
This is the reality we’re facing:
A government-funded brain-damage protocol masquerading as therapy.
Watch: Therapy or Torture?
To understand how such a practice could still exist in modern medicine, watch the revealing documentary from our coalition partner, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR):
🎥 Therapy or Torture: The Truth About Electroshock (YouTube)
The Anatomy of a Medical Crime: Regulatory Negligence
ECT was never grounded in real science — it endures through fraudulent research, wasteful taxpayer funding, and abusive experimentation on the vulnerable.
Since 1976, ECT devices have existed in a regulatory gray zone — never approved through the FDA’s required premarket (PMA) process, never proven safe or effective, yet continually protected by non-enforcement. When Congress first classified high-risk medical devices, ECT manufacturers were ordered to submit PMAs within thirty months; none did, and the FDA failed to act. In 2009, amid public pressure, the agency opened a review docket, but manufacturers again produced no credible safety or efficacy data.
Despite decades of documented brain injury, cognitive impairment, and death — and numerous lawsuits won against ECT manufacturers for failing to warn of these dangers — the FDA has never exercised its authority under 21 U.S.C. § 360f to ban the devices for posing an “unreasonable and substantial risk.”
Instead, in 2018, the FDA quietly reclassified ECT from “high risk” (Class III) to “moderate risk” (Class II) for certain psychiatric disorders — doing so without new safety trials and largely relying on data supplied by the device makers themselves. This move preserved Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, ensuring the procedure’s survival even as the agency now mandates a label on this device that admits that “the long-term safety and effectiveness of ECT has not been demonstrated.”
The result is a federally enabled practice built on biased science, regulatory capture, and systemic negligence — one that continues to harm patients while claiming legitimacy through silence.
In the course of my research for GreenMedInfo, I encountered what can only be described as a devastating body of evidence: more than sixty documented adverse effects tied to ECT, including permanent memory loss, delirium, suicidality, cardiac arrest, and even death. The science does not vindicate this practice — it indicts it.
“The long-term safety and effectiveness of ECT has not been demonstrated.” — FDA Regulation 21 CFR 882.5940
This statement isn’t from an advocacy group — it’s from the FDA itself, published in the Federal Register when the agency reclassified ECT devices in 2018. In other words, the federal government admits it does not know whether electroshock is safe or effective, yet continues to allow and reimburse its use on Americans.
The Economics of Abuse
ECT is a $3-5 billion-a-year industry built on taxpayer funding and human suffering.
Because its effects wear off in weeks, 84% of recipients require “maintenance” shocks — often for years.
Cost per session: $2,500
Average annual cost: $25,000 per patient
Total national cost: $3–5 billion per year
The Department of Veterans Affairs spent $22.8 million on ECT on Veterans alone, between 2018–2023. Medicare reimbursements have risen 72% since 2020.
Meanwhile, victims are left with traumatic brain injury and cognitive destruction that can never be undone.
This isn’t just malpractice. It’s systemic, state-funded abuse.
The Human Toll
Imagine awakening from anesthesia only to discover that the faces you love most are now strangers — that your memories, your very sense of self, have been wiped clean. This isn’t “treatment.”
It’s mind erasure masquerading as medicine, an attempt to silence symptoms by destroying the consciousness that feels them.
ECT patients describe losing entire decades of memory — names, faces, skills, and the ability to function independently.
Women and the elderly suffer the most profound cognitive losses.
Children in some states, are electroshocked for “behavioral issues.”
Veterans are told it’s a treatment “for their PTSD.”
What it actually delivers is neurological trauma and despair. Experts have demanded this medical device be banned. Now is the time.
“ECT doesn’t heal. It harms — often irreversibly.” — Global Wellness Forum
The Global Condemnation
The United Nations and World Health Organization classify involuntary ECT or ECT conducted on children as abuse and torture.
Their statement is unequivocal:
“There can be no justification for the use of ECT without free and informed consent.”
Yet in the United States, many states have no laws at all governing ECT use, and most have no enforcement mechanisms to ensure true and informed consent, monitor the off-label usage or accurate or required forms of record-keeping.
It is a human-rights crisis — hiding in plain sight.
Legal Reckoning Is Coming
From Rice v. Nardini (1975) to Himes v. Somatics (2024), courts are beginning to recognize that ECT manufacturers and practitioners failed to warn patients of known risks, violating informed consent and human dignity.
Major manufacturer MECTA Corporation even filed for bankruptcy under the weight of lawsuits — a rare moment of accountability in a field long shielded from scrutiny.
This same manufacturer includes this warning in its own device manual:
Warning: When used as intended this device provides short-term relief of symptoms. The long-term safety and effectiveness of ECT treatment has not been demonstrated.
Justice is coming. But it depends on public awareness — and your voice.
Go to StopECT.com and help us end this abusive practice in America.
Coalition Campaign & Media Toolkit
To amplify the message, we developed a media toolkit — a ready-to-share collection of campaign assets.
You can find and share all materials at StopECT.com.
Toolkit Includes:
We encourage allied groups, journalists, faith leaders, and policy advocates to use these resources freely.
What You Can Do Right Now
Visit StopECT.com and sign the petition to end ECT funding and ban this practice.
Share this article on Substack and across social media.
Click our media kit and start sharing the assets for this campaign.
The Final Word: No More Silence, No More Shocks
ECT is not “treatment.” It is the state-sponsored destruction of the human mind — made legal through deception and inertia.
We must end it.
For the veterans who trusted their doctors.
For the mothers who lost decades of memory.
For the children who should never have known what a “shock treatment” feels like.
This is our moment to turn outrage into action. The conscience of a nation is watching.
Learn more, join the coalition, and take action at StopECT.com.
Global Wellness Forum
In alliance with the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), Stand for Health Freedom, and allied informed consent and medical freedom groups nationwide.
 | A guest post by
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Thank you so much for this! My dear mother was subjected to this treatment decades ago! And when I had a bout with severe depression in my 50s, my first thought was, "Oh God! Am I heading down the same path as my mother?" I thank God for holistic integrative medicine doctors who put me on a path of restoration, regeneration and wholeness.
I survived 22 ECT. I lost about 18 months to 2 years of memory, if not more.