Why Electroshock Statistics Are So Secret in America

     Since 1995 the benchmark estimate of the number of electroshock treatments performed in America has been 100,000. That figure was taken from a 1995 study linked to research recently done by Dr. Richard Hermann. The Food and Drug Administration and the American Psychiatric Association then used that 100,000 figure in their official 1999 Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health, which compared the volume of annual ECT procedures to the numbers for appendectomies or hernial surgeries.

     “Electroshock is applied to about 100,000 patients each year in the U.S., a figure comparable to the number of appendectomies or hernial surgeries performed,” Max Fink had written in a March, 2000 article for American Scientist. Max Fink, of course, was America’s leading proponent of ECT for fifty years and was the founder of what is now The Journal of ECT.

     In actuality, approximately 250,000 to 300,000 appendectomies are performed annually in the United States and between 1 million and 1.5 million hernia procedures are performed. So much for numerical accuracy from psychiatrist Fink, the FDA or the APA. That 100,000 annual ECT figure was therefore dubious at best, but it has remained the presumed ECT count.

     There have been no valid studies since of the number of electroshock treatments performed in America.

     Today only four states – California, Colorado Massachusetts, and Texas – are mandated by their local governments to report any figures at all about ECT delivery, and the figures they do report are fragmentary, at best. However, even those sketchy numbers hint at a far higher number of ECT treatments than 100,000.

     For instance, Mclean hospital in Boston is known to deliver at least 10,000 ECT sessions per  year. The hospital’s delivery of ECT is also known to have risen from 2500 sessions in 1999 to that 10,000 figure in the mid-2010s. That’s an increase of 400 percent.

     The delivery of ECT in Texas is known through its state health department numbers to have risen 67 percent since 2001. From 2012 to 2013, 2343 patients in Texas were given 14,176 ECT treatments, although federal hospitals such as those for the military and for veterans are not included.

     Historically, these four reporting states deliver less ECT than psychiatric facilities in the Midwest, which consistently has had the highest rates of ECT delivery per capita. The South and the West deliver far fewer ECT sessions, yet still California and Texas both report about 15,000 to 16,000 ECT sessions per year.

     Based just on those figures, it is probable that the overall delivery of ECT is far higher than the vintage and untrustworthy figure of 100,000 ECT sessions per year.

     Why so much secrecy?

     Profit, for one. Even if that 100,000 figure is only doubled, at $2500 for each three minute ECT session, and at a standard run of ECT treatments tallying about a dozen sessions – to start with – that’s minimally $5 billion in annual revenue. That’s an outrageous profit margin that any industry would want to keep secret.

     Second, the brutality of the treatment and the destruction of memory and cognitive agility it causes is not something anyone wants to publicize in that great a number of patients. John Read’s extensive 2025 study of ruined lives of ECT patients demonstrates the human damage from ECT. The WHO has called involuntary application of ECT “torture.”

     To reveal that so much human torture is a $5 billion dollar a year industry in America alone would be too much for psychiatry, Big Pharma, or the FDA to want to have revealed.