FDA’s Refusal to Order ECT Trials Is Criminal Neglect

     Psychiatrists and proponents of ECT tend to minimize the importance of the amount of “lived experience” personal stories published about the crippling effects of shock therapy on thousands of people. ECT advocates try to diminish the significance of these stories by claiming they are “merely anecdotal,” not scientific, and psychiatrists add that “There is no clinical trial evidence that ECT causes memory loss or brain damage.”

     That’s true, but that’s only because there have been no placebo-based clinical trials of ECT since 1986, and the handful that were done before that were also conducted under questionable scientific standards. So, while there may not be any evidence that ECT is dangerous, there is also no evidence that it does anybody any good…particularly in the long term.

     We don’t even know how many people receive ECT today. The last publication about national trends for ECT was in 1992, and the most quoted figure since then has been that 100,000 Americans receive ECT each year. However, since the FDA reclassified the ECT shock devices from Class III (very high risk) to Class II (moderate risk) in 2018, for some mental disorders, that 100,000 number may have increased considerably.

     Today there is no national mandate requiring the number of ECT sessions performed to be reported, let alone reporting anything about the negative effects from the procedure. What little public information that has recently gleaned about patients who have received ECT shows only their short term responses to the procedure. No long term studies exist on ECT’s negative effects.

     Consequently, the vast accumulation of personal stories by those individuals who have suffered negative effects from ECT are the only real evidence we now have of its long term negative effects. The lived experience of these people may be “anecdotal” evidence, but it’s the only evidence we have. We need to pay attention to it.

     Too many of these personal stories show the damage ECT can do to a life: staggering memory loss, dangerous cardiac events, seriously diminished cognitive ability. A recent petition to the FDA to stop ECT, for example, contained 2200 signatures and 800 comments from ECT survivors. The three most common words they used to describe ECT were “damage,” “barbaric,” and “torture.”

     One 2025 survey of 858 people from 44 countries who had received ECT did show that about 40 percent of those surveyed found ECT helpful, especially in the short term. However, 60 percent of those who had received ECT found it “not at all helpful.” A full 50 percent of those who had received ECT reported their quality of life as “much worse” or “very much worse” after ECT. Almost 84 percent of ECT recipients reported memory loss, and half of those people said their memory loss lasted more than three years.

     Is all the “evidence” from this 2025 study also anecdotal? Sure. But the numbers of ECT recipients who reported severe long term negative effects from ECT shows that the FDA’s continuing refusal to conduct standard scientific research on ECT is nothing but criminal neglect.

     Every other US governmental health agency that should be concerned about the welfare of Americans, but is doing nothing about ECT, is also complicit.