The Committee for Truth in Psychiatry

The Committee for Truth in Psychiatry, or CTIP, is a national organization of over 500 former electric shock patients. They are an important organization in the context of Human Rights. here is a snippet from their front page:

None of us was truthfully informed about the nature or consequences of this treatment before consenting to it, and we have pooled our experience-gained knowledge to provide truthful information about it for future psychiatric patients.

Over the years, many individual recipients of "electroconvulsive therapy" (ECT) (shock treatment) have related their personal experiences, verbally or in writing, emphasizing whatever aspects were most important in each one's special circumstances. What the CTIP has done as a group is to highlight and emphasize the common demoninators in the shock experience. Accordingly, though our members differ widely in the details of their own stories, including how they got into ECT and how much good or (more often) harm it did them, we can agree on the most certain effects of ECT and that future patients should be informed of them before they give their consent to it.

Following are the most important points we make:

• If a person is in a state of physical suffering of nervous origin, ECT will almost certainly relieve it temporarily. ECT relaxes the nervous system and the relaxing effect lasts from a couple of days to a couple of months. Sometimes people stay well after the relaxing effect has worn off, but, typically, they quickly relapse.
  
  
• Regardless of any beneficial effect, there is always a permanently deleterious effect on memory. This consists of erasure of a good deal of pre-shock memory and dimming of more, and it frequently includes also a permanent reduction in retentiveness for post-shock experience and learning.
  
  
• These two effects in combination---the temporary feeling of well-being and the permanent harm to memory---imply that ECT "works" by damaging the brain. These are the classic symptoms of acute brain injury by any means---strokes, asphyxiation, concussion, carbon monoxide poisoning, etc. In all these events, the patient feels very well for a while but can't remember. If further evidence were needed of the principle at work in ECT's beneficial effect, it could be noted that the memory loss from ECT has always the distinctive pattern of brain damage forgetting (recent memories hardest hit) and that ECT is sometimes followed by other brain damage phenomena (examples common among our members are impairment of sense of direction and a touch of aphasia, or difficulty saying the words you meant to say).

As a vehicle for communicating these few salient points about ECT to future patients, we have incorporated them (along with other information) in a model informed consent statement which we should like to see sponsored by the FDA or some governmental body. All CTIP members have endorsed the statement.

They also note that:

ECT is one of a number of drastic psychiatric treaments, including insulin coma and psychosurgery, that relieve suffering temporarily. All of them "work" by destroying brain tissue. That is their common denominator. In ECT both the electrical shocks and the grand mal seizures are destructive. For some still unknown reason, reducing the size of the brain not only reduces the amount of stored memory but also counteracts states of physical pain and any kind of emotion.