FDA’s Approval of ECT Device Use Parallels 1950s Psychiatric Mind Control Experiments

     For several years past we have been treating severe resistant depression with long periods of sleep treatment. We can now keep patients asleep or very drowsy for up to 3 months if necessary. During sleep treatment we also give them ECT,” wrote British psychiatrist William Sargant in the early 1950s. “We may be seeing here a new exciting beginning in psychiatry…”

     Sargant adds, “Many patients unable to tolerate a long course of ECT can do so when anxiety is relieved by narcosis. What is so valuable is that they generally have no memory about the actual length of the treatment or the numbers of ECT used.”

     In 1957 Sargant’s book Battle for the Mind was published and it became known as one of the first “manuals” on brainwashing.

     Sargant’s work had already become known by psychiatrist Donald Cameron, who had been trying to “correct” schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the mind. He used ECT at thirty to forty times the usual voltage to do so, and he ran the CIA funded MKUltra mind control experiments at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute from 1957 to 1964.

     Both Cameron and Sargant were proponents of those early “chemical balance” theories that considered mental illness a genetic disorder. Both psychiatrists claimed society needed to be cleansed of the mentally ill so they didn’t contaminate others by passing on their mental disorders to their children.

      In his lecture entitled Dangerous Men and Women Cameron had said, “Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form, and we shall find ways to put an end to them.” He was speaking about the Germans after WWII, but he also said that mental disorders were contagions and that anyone in any society could be infected by mental disorders. Hence, ECT was used to eliminate them.

     Sargant, too, considered that mental illness was biologically based, and he advocated anyone with a mental disorder be treated early and quickly with ECT and heavy medication…and with deep sleep therapy for those who resisted those brutal treatments.

     Today the FDA refuses to rule on the use of ECT because they say they don’t rule on “the practice of medicine.” They somehow consider ECT’s jolt of 460 volts of electricity through a patient’s brain to induce a grand mal seizure to be “medicine.” The FDA did, however, downgrade ECT devices in 2018 to a Class II classification – moderate risk requiring general and specific control precautions – but only when a patient is diagnosed with catatonic  schizophrenia or unresponsive severe mental disorders.

     These are the two conditions Sargant and Cameron claimed they were trying to eradicate with their use of ECT and other treatments…the same treatments Sargant based his mind control book on.

     Today a patient is only given ECT after they have been fully anaesthetized. They are put to sleep so they don’t feel the extreme discomfort of the body paralysis drug they are given to reduce the risk of broken teeth or cracked vertebrae because of the violence of their grand mal seizures.

     We don’t know what overt pressure from psychiatrists the FDA might have received to prompt their downgrading of the ECT device from a Class III (high risk) to a Class II (moderate risk) category so that ECT could be used on these “mental disorders.”

     The ideological collusion between their decision and these earlier mind control experiments by psychiatrists is noteworthy, however, and it suggests an uncomfortable strain of punishment and control is still prevalent in today’s psychiatric model.