Madam, - The letter of June 28th from spokespersons for the Irish College of Psychiatrists and the Irish Psychiatric Association is headlined "ECT still a valuable psychiatric treatment". I beg to differ.
Nearly three years after I commenced training in psychiatry, towards the end of 1968, as I stated in my book, Music and Madness, "I began to have deep reservations about the efficacy of ECT and the long term damage which can ensue from this procedure. I was becoming increasingly uneasy about these crude forms of physical intervention; my feeling was growing that there must be a more humane way to work in psychiatry."
As I gradually reached the "use of reason" as to the true nature of mental health, I decided that I would only countenance giving ECT to a patient if I could find no better alternative and if their very survival was at stake.
Since then, I have never had to give anyone ECT, though over all those years I have dealt with the full range of psychiatric disturbance. There were occasionally very difficult situations where, for example, someone was refusing food and in danger of dying, but I always managed to find an alternative.
Back in those days I was not yet fully aware of the extent to which punitive procedures have been meted out to psychiatric patients over several centuries, frequently without their consent. I knew of the purging, the bleedings, the swinging chairs, freezing baths, the beatings and so on which were perpetrated during the 18th and 19th centuries. But I didn't realise that such abuses continued in different forms throughout the 20th century right up to the present day.
We have had the debacle of lobotomies, deep insulin coma therapy, and ECT - all, one after the other, being shown to be highly damaging and therapeutically ineffective.
Even worse, by 1939 the plan to murder most mental patients in Germany was put into operation with the support of most of the professors of psychiatry and senior psychiatrists. "By September 1941, over 70,000 mental patients had been killed with carbon monoxide. . .the total figure for Germany alone is well over a quarter of a million." (Models of Madness, Ed. John Read, Loren R. Mosher, et al.) The entire procedure, which was later used in the Holocaust, was developed by psychiatrists.
In Canada, Dr Ewen Cameron, at McGill University's Allen Memorial Institute, instituted a method of "complete depatterning" of the personality of his patients (frequently without their consent), to return their minds to a state of "tabula rasa". He then intended to recreate an entirely new personality - which was absurd and of course a total failure. To achieve this he used continuous electroshock, giving a terrifying 360 shocks to each patient, combined with an array of drug therapies and sensory deprivation.
At this time he was at the pinnacle of his profession, being at various times president of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association. This vicious programme was funded by the CIA and the methods he pioneered have formed the basis of the interrogation, rendition and torture being carried out by American intelligence to this day.
Over many years studies of ECT have shown no long-term benefit, only a temporary relief of symptoms due to confusion and brain damage.
When will psychiatrists finally accept that we are dealing with sensitive, delicately poised human beings, not machines to be tinkered with; that the very definition of life is one of self-organisation and self-management.
The only real, lasting change comes when we help a person to bring about the painful work of change within themselves. - Yours, etc,
IVOR BROWNE, Professor Emeritus, UCD, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.