State Legislators Do Have a Tool to Curb ECT Abuse

     Americans remain vulnerable to permanent damage from electroconvulsive treatments because the FDA has refused to regulate the ECT industry. The FDA claims that ECT is “the practice of medicine” and therefore it is beyond their jurisdiction to rule. The FDA has also kept the ECT devices in a Class II (moderate risk) classification for some applications instead of the Class III (high risk) category they had uniformly been in before 2018 when the FDA grandfathered in the legal use of them, without any evidence for their safety or effectiveness.

     ECT is consequently a virtually unregulated practice today and there is not even a requirement to report the number of ECT treatments given in America, let alone the results, positive or negative, from its use. Americans therefore remain at risk to permanent damage from up to 460 volts being run through their brains. ECT is also too often administered without a psychiatrist giving a patient a standard informed consent consultation that not only
specifies the risks of permanent memory loss, increased cardiac problems, and potential suicidal urges, but must also go over the safer alternative treatments that are available.

     Individual state legislatures could legally ban the use of ECT until standard clinical trials are done which show its safety and effectiveness – not that any standard trials are likely to ever show that. The handful of ECT studies that were done forty years ago do not conclusively show ECT is either effective of safe. However, the financial pressure that Big Pharma dollars exert on legislators not to pass such laws is enormous, of course…not just through handsome donations to indiidual political campaigns, but through even more handsome donations to academic institutions and hospitals within a legislator’s district.

      Only four states – Tennessee, Texas, Colorado, and California – have passed legislation that restricts the administration of ECT on minors, if special circumstances are not cited. Tennessee, however, has also just passed legislation that further protects its residents from the indiscriminate use of ECT. State legislators have more fully restricted the use of ECT on minors, and they have also mandated a standard and thorough use of informed consent procedures with all prospective ECT recipients.

     Beyond that, they have passed a “Conscience Law.” It allows practitioners to legally refuse to give any medical treatment to patients if they feel it goes against their moral, ethical or religious convictions. The new law does not specifically cite ECT, but that specific application can greatly reduce the number of ECT patients.

     These new laws actually protect citizens in two ways. First, they make it far less likely that indiscriminate, unjustified ECT will be given to anyone. Second, they provide a new legal framework that gives citizens a greater legal opportunity to sue ECT practitioners who have administered the brutal treatment without fully informing the patient of the consequences or of the alternative forms of help available. That alone will slow down indiscriminate use of ECT on patients.

     Legal mandates for stricter use of informed consent protocol, when passed by state legislatures, can help reduce the 100,000 Americans who receive ECT each year and risk permanent memory loss, significant cardiac problems, and higher probabilities for suicide.

     Those mandates will not only help limit the use of ECT, but they will also significantly lower the incidence of indiscriminate and dangerous prescriptions for antidepressants which has led to 43,000,00 Americans being prescribed dangerous and often unnecessary medication.