DISTURBING NEWS ABOUT ECT from Dr. Peter Breggin

                                                                             

                                       

Disturbing News for Patients and Shock Docs Alike
By Peter Breggin, MD – Huffington Post
A team of investigators has recently published a follow up study of electroshock therapy. They have confirmed that electroshock causes permanent brain damage and dysfunction.
The investigators found persisting memory and mental dysfunction 6 months after ECT. The study’s summary said, “Thus, adverse cognitive effects were detected six months following the acute treatment course. This study provides the first evidence in a large, prospective sample that adverse cognitive effects can persist for an extended period.”
Traumatic brain damage that persists for six months is likely to remain stable or even to grow worse, (especially if brain-altering psych drugs are also being taken).
Therefore, the study confirms that routine clinical use of ECT causes permanent damage to the brain and its mental faculties.
The term cognitive dysfunction covers the entire range of mental faculties from memory to abstract thinking and judgment. In other words, the patients continued to have trouble learning and remembering new things, they were slower in their mental reaction times, and they were mentally impaired across a broad range of faculties.
Many patients also had persistent abnormalities on the EEGs (brain wave studies), indicating even more gross underlying brain damage and dysfunction. The results confirm that the post-ECT patients, as I have described in numerous publications, were grossly brain-injured with a generalized loss of mental functions.
Some of the older forms of shock therapy produced the most severe damage; but all of the treatment types caused persistent brain dysfunction. The greater the number of shocks given to patients, the greater was the loss of memory. Elderly women are particularly likely to get shocked — probably because there is no one to defend them. The study found that the elderly and females were the most susceptible to severe memory loss.
Destroying Lives
I have evaluated dozens of patients whose professional and family lives have been wrecked, including a nurse who lost her career but who recently won a malpractice suit against the doctor who referred her for shock “therapy”. Her story is told at my website at www.breggin.com.



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