When the basic premises of a subject are whacky, it doesn’t take long to find oneself swimming in a  surreal sea of topsy-turvy values, priorities, and morality.

     The Penn State College of Medicine has just released a study that shows that  hospital patients who have undergone electroconvulsive therapy were hospitalized twice as long and had twice as high health care costs as patients who received non-ECT care for their depression or bipolar disorder.

     “Although ECT is an effective therapy for treatment-resistant depression, its high cost is a deterrent,” said the study author Edeanya Agbese. “If this therapy were delivered in an outpatient setting, it’s possible that the potential of reduced cost burdens to patients and insurers could increase utilization of ECT in the U.S.”

     Wonderful.

     We are off into the hazy la-la land created by the pro-ECT crowd.

     Frankly, ECT sessions are charged at $300 to $1000 per session these days, and the normal course of initial treatment consists of 6-12 sessions. How is anybody losing any money here anyway?

     More importantly, there have been no extensive studies of the overall effects from ECT for the last forty years, so no one knows for sure how harmful – okay, or how beneficial – this treatment is.

     We do know that running up to 460 volts through a person’s brain is horrific enough that their body has to be paralyzed and  anesthetized beforehand. We know also that every other doctor on the planet is trying to prevent seizures, not cause them.

     Add to that the large amount of anecdotal evidence of permanent memory loss and the known, post-ECT incidence of cardiac failure, and what are the chances, really, that this barbaric “therapy” has any positive value?

     Yet, Ms. Agbese is angling for even more ECT to be delivered to out-patients so that hospitals don’t lose money because private insurers refuse to pay for the increased costs of impatient ECT delivery.

     First, doesn’t the fact that patients take twice as long to recover from ECT as they do from other treatments for depression raise red flags about the amount of physical damage done by ECT?

     Second, the big downside here, per Ms. Agbese, is the lack of reimbursement to the hospital, not the apparent trauma of the ECT recipient.

     Third, a lot more of this horrific procedure can be delivered if we would only increase the number of outpatient vendors of it? If someone is a mess for twice as long afterward, that’s no problem. At least it won’t be costing the hospital valuable revenue.

     When we are being told black is white and up is down – as we consistently are by these people – we have entered a psychiatric Twilight Zone that may be entertaining fiction, but reflects only horror when it is real life.