Since the earliest days of ECT, there have only been eleven studies to measure the effect of ECT against a placebo group on its target audience, the depressed. Amazingly, the most recent of those studies took place way back in 1985.

     The studies showed that while some patients did show some improvement right after the initial ECT session, few showed long term improvement. Many, however, showed significant memory loss, and died because of cardiac arrest.

     Could it be that the psychiatric community and the FDA have had no real interest for the lasts forty years in seeing what data surfaces about the actual efficiency and safety of ECT as measured by a properly run trial?

     The Royal College of Psychiatrists today  maintains that “death caused by ECT is extremely rare,” and the American Psychiatric Association reports only one death per 10,000 ECT recipients. However, that statistic increases significantly when you factor in that each patient is given ECT an average of ten times. More recent studies have shown that death from a “major adverse cardiac event”  occurs for one in every fifty ECT patients.

     Much of the objective and anecdotal evidence available points to the mental and physical dangers of passing up to 460 volts through a patient’s brain, but  psychiatric authorities hang on to their opinion that any of those negative effects from ECT are outweighed by that initial boost in a patient feeling better for a short time.

     But what if that initial boost in emotional  improvement did not come from the ECT itself?

     The authors of a new, placebo controlled study of the effects of ECT note that “It could very well be that the primary therapeutic agent is the psychological meaning of the treatment to the patient … The influence of the unusual amount of care and attention which all receive could be studied further.”

     In other words, patients improve only because of the extraordinary attention and care they receive surrounding the ECT treatment, not because the ECT itself.

     Perhaps because of the observable brutality of the ECT procedure, the hospital aides, nurses, anesthesiologists and the doctors attending ECT patients may give them even greater kindness and care and show them even greater hope that they will feel better after the session.

     And so these patients do…despite, but not because of, the horrific ECT  procedure itself.