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ELECTROSHOCK: A CHRONOLOGY OF PSYCHIATRIC ABUSE Leonard Roy Frank, editor 26 June 2005

1938 — Italian psychiatrists Ugo Cerletti and Lucino Bini introduced electroconvulsive treatment (ECT, EST, electric shock treatment, shock treatment, electroshock, and convulsive therapy) at the University of Rome in April 1938. The subject of the first experiment with the procedure was a vagrant identified only as “S. E.” He had been picked up by the police who had found him wandering about in a railway station. The Police Commissioner of Rome turned him over to Cerletti’s institute, where “a diagnosis of schizophrenic syndrome was made based on his passive behavior, incoherence, low affective reserves, hallucinations, deliriant ideas of being influenced, neologisms.” The first attempt to induce a convulsion with electricity on S. E. failed because insufficient current was applied. According to Cerletti, “It was proposed that we should allow the patient to have some rest and repeat the experiment the next day. All at once, the patient, who evidently had been following the conversation, said clearly and solemnly, without his usual gibberish: ‘Not another one! It’s deadly!’” Despite the subject’s demand, Cerletti administered a second and stronger shock, this time triggering the seizure. Thus, the first ECT was carried out against the subject’s will, without his or anyone else’s permission. Earlier in Rome, Cerletti had experimented with pigs and later wrote, “Having obtained authorization for experimenting from the director of the slaughterhouse, Professor Torti, I carried out tests, not only subjecting the pigs to the current for ever-increasing periods of time, but also applying the current in various ways across the head, across the neck, and across the chest.” Referring to the first use of electroshock on a human being, Cerletti wrote, “When I saw the patient’s reaction, I thought to myself: This ought to be abolished” [Editor’s summary based on Frank J. Ayd Jr., “Guest Editorial: Ugo Cerletti (1877-1963),” Psychosomatics, November-December 1963 and Cerletti, “Old and New Information About Electroshock,” American Journal of Psychiatry, August 1950].

1940 — These sundry procedures [i.e., lobotomy and several forms of shock treatment] produce “beneficial” results by reducing the patient’s capacity for being human. The philosophy is something to the effect that it is better to be a contented imbecile than a schizophrenic. HARRY STACK SULLIVAN (U.S. psychiatrist), referring to lobotomy and shock treatment (in his phrase psychiatry’s “decortication treatments”), “Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry,” Psychiatry, February 1940

1942 — Case 1. M.C. Philadelphia State Hospital. Reg. No. 51103. Paranoid dementia praecox in a woman of 45. Electrical convulsion treatments, 62 [in 16 of which no convulsion was produced], over a period of 5½ months. Numerous punctate hemorrhages in the cerebral cortex, medulla, cerebellum and basal ganglia. Areas of perivascular edema and necrosis....Comment. The foregoing case is the first reported instance, so far as we know, of hemorrhages in the brain attributable to electrical convulsion treatment.... BERNARD J. ALPERS and JOSEPH HUGHES (U.S. physicians), “The Brain Changes in Electrically Induced Convulsions in the Human,” Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology, April 1942

1942 — The disturbance in memory [caused by ECT] is probably an integral part of the recovery process. I think it may be true that these people have for the time being at any rate more intelligence than they can handle and that the reduction of intelligence is an important factor in the curative process.

ABRAHAM MYERSON (U.S. psychiatrist), in discussion of Franklin G. Ebaugh et al., “Fatalities Following Electric Convulsive Therapy: A Report of 2 Cases with Autopsy Findings,” Transactions of the American Neurological Association, June 1942

1948 — We started by inducing two to four grand mal convulsions daily until the desired degree of regression was reached.... We considered a patient had regressed sufficiently when he wet and soiled, or acted and talked like a child of four....

Sometimes the confusion passes rapidly and patients act as if they had awakened from dreaming; their minds seem like clean slates upon which we can write.

CYRIL J. C. KENNEDY and DAVID ANCHEL (U.S. psychiatrists), “Regressive Electric-Shock in Schizophrenics Refractory to Other Shock Therapies.” Psychiatric Quarterly, vol. 22, p. 317-320,

1949 — [While filming Annie Get Your Gun in 1949, Judy Garland] began to arrive at the studio late or not at all, often staying home, unable to rise from her bed. Her weight dropped to 90 pounds, and her hair began to fall out, a side effect, most likely, of her profligate use of amphetamines. In an effort to lift her out of her depression, a new doctor, Fred Pobirs, persuaded her to undergo a series of six electroshock treatments. GERALD CLARKE (U.S. writer), Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, 2000. Garland returned to the set after undergoing ECT, but, as she recalled later, “I couldn’t learn anything. I couldn’t retain anything; I was just up there making strange noises. Here I was in the middle of a million-dollar property, with a million-dollar wardrobe, with a million eyes on me, and I was in a complete daze. I knew it, and everyone around me knew it.” The studio soon suspended her from the film.

1951 — Shock therapy never builds. It only destroys, and its work of destruction is beyond control. It is not new. The only new thing about it is the method of delivering the shock. A hundred and fifty years ago a well-recognized shock-treatment method was to flog or frighten the patient, and in some instances the results were excellent. Now we “do it electrically,” and we get about the same percentage of good results, but with some breaking of bones, and memory losses which frightening and flogging never produced.

Memory losses in modern shock therapy may be passed off as infrequent, limited, and temporary, but they are really frequent, they cannot be limited, and they are usually permanent. I have heard doctors laugh about them as they laugh about other things in mental patients, but the losses are serious to the patients themselves. And along with such losses go changes in general intelligence and personality, but when these changes are too obvious to be overlooked they are ascribed to the mental illness with no mention at all of the treatment. JOHN MAURICE GRIMES (U.S psychiatrist), When Minds Go Wrong, 2nd ed., 20, 1954 (1951)

1956 — One of us (J. A. E.) has collected these statements over a period of eight years in Britain and the United States. Most of them have been heard on many occasions. Colleagues who have seen the list of comments have confirmed our findings that many affect-laden colloquialisms are regularly used by shock therapists in referring to their therapy.... l. “Let’s give him the works.” 2. “Hit him with all we’ve got.” 3. “Why don’t you throw the book at him?” 4. “Knock him out with EST [i.e., ECT].” 5. “Let’s see if a few shocks will knock him out of it.” 6. “Why don’t you put him on the assembly line?” 7. “If he would not get better with one course, give him a double-sized course now.�� 8. “The patient was noisy and resistive so I put him on intensive EST three times a day.” 9. One shock therapist told the husband of a woman who was about to be shocked that it would prove beneficial to her by virtue of its effect as “a mental spanking.” 10. “I’m going to gas him.” 11. “Why don’t you give him the gas?” 12. “I spend my entire mornings looking after the insulin therapy patients.” 13. “I take my insulin therapy patients to the doors of death, and when they are knocking on the doors, I snatch them back.” 14. “She’s too nice a patient for us to give her EST.” DAVID WILFRED ABSE and JOHN A. EWING (British-born U.S. psychiatrists), “Transference and Countertransference in Somatic Therapies,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, January 1956

1961 — Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.

JANET FRAME (New Zealand electroshock survivor and writer), Faces in the Water, 1.1, 1961

1961 — Suddenly the inevitable cry or scream sounds from behind the closed doors which after a few minutes swing open and Molly or Goldie or Mrs. Gregg, convulsed and snorting, is wheeled out. I close my eyes tight as the bed passes me, yet I cannot escape seeing it, or the other beds where people are lying, perhaps heavily asleep, or whimperingly awake, their faces flushed, their eyes bloodshot. I can hear someone moaning and weeping; it is someone who has woken up in the wrong time and place, for I know that the treatment snatches these things from you, leaves you alone and blind in a nothingness of being, and you try to fumble your way like a newborn animal to the flowing of first comforts; then you wake, small and frightened, and tears keep falling in a grief that you cannot name. JANET FRAME, Faces in the Water, 1.1, 1961

JANET FRAME, Faces in the Water, 2.1, 1961

1961 — I tried to forget my still-growing disquiet and dread and the haunting smell of the other ward, as I became to all appearances one of the gentle contented patients of Ward Seven, that the E.S.T. which happened three times a week, and the succession of screams heard as the machine advanced along the corridor, were a nightmare that one suffered for one’s own “good.” “For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make man agree to his own destruction. JANET FRAME, Faces in the Water, 2.1, 1961

1963 — The name on my admission chart at the Allan Memorial reads “Linda Helen Cowan (nee Macdonald).” It was March 28, 1963. A young wife and mother, I was to become one of the last victims of Dr. Ewen Cameron’s experiments on the human brain. I am 49 years old today. I accept my age only because my birth certificate validates the time, day, and the place of my birth. In reality, my reality, I am 23. I have no memory of existing prior to October 1963, and the recollections I do have of events of the following years until 1966 are fuzzy and few.... Dr. Cameron’s “brainwashing” experiments wiped my brain clean of every experience I had ever known.... My parents were introduced to me that winter of 1963/64. Of course, I did not know them. The children came back from wherever they had been living. I had no idea who they were, and I certainly had no sense of what a ‘mother’ was. They were all “older” than I; the oldest could read and write—their mother could not.... A woman robbed of her life. I had decided to share my life with you. If sharing my personal experience can help to educate the public so that such abusive experimentation will not, for any reason, with or without consent, be performed on human beings ever again, indeed something positive will have emerged from a living hell. LINDA MACDONALD (Canadian electroshock survivor), “Breakthrough” (1986), in Bonnie Burstow and Don Weitz, eds., Shrink Resistant: The Struggle Against Psychiatry in Canada, 1988

1964 — A person who does not have a memory is not able to perform as an actress. I’m still able to do things—that is, I’m able to do them in a very limited way as a kind of hobby. I have to work terribly hard to do it. Recently, I did a public theater appearance. I had to drive around with the tape on saying the lines over and over and over and over. Previously, I’d just do a couple of readings... and that would be enough. I don’t have this quick ability anymore. I don’t like to appeal to emotionalism, but I’m furious about the whole thing. I mean my life changed radically.... Since the shock treatment [in 1964] I’m missing between eight and fifteen years of memory and skills, and this includes most of my education. I was a trained classical pianist.... Well, the piano’s in my house, but I mean it’s mostly just a sentimental symbol. It just sits there. I don’t have that kind of ability any longer.... I lost people by losing those eight to fifteen years. People come up to me and they speak to me and they know me and they tell me about things that we’ve done. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what they’re talking about although obviously I have been friendly with them.... [The shock treatment] diminished me.... I am certainly nothing like I was, and my life is nothing like it would have been. CONNIE NEIL (Canadian electroshock survivor), testifying at electroshock hearings conducted by Toronto’s Board of Health, January 1984, in Phoenix Rising (Electroshock Supplement), April 1984

1974 — The day after I was discharged, my hospital roommate, Ruth, escaped and jumped from the University of Texas tower. She died on impact—a heap of broken bones to go with her broken spirit. Only three days previous she had told me that she was tired of walking around like a zombie. She blamed this zombiness on a series of shock treatments she had recently received. JIMMIE BREWER (U.S. psychiatric survivor), in “NAPA News,” Madness Network News, June 1974

1974 — He [the old personality] was dead. Destroyed by order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain. Approximately 800 mills of amperage at durations of 0.5 to 1.5 seconds had been applied on twenty-eight consecutive occasions, in a process known technologically as “Annihilation ECS” [i.e., ECT]. A whole personality had been liquidated without a trace in a technologically faultless act that has defined our relationship ever since. I have never met him. Never will. ROBERT M. PIRSIG (U.S. electroshock survivor and writer), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 7, 1974

1974 — Interviewer: You say you’d rather have a lobotomy than electroconvulsive shock? Do you have some pretty solid ideas about what electroconvulsive shock does? Pribram: No—I just know what the brain looks like after a series of shocks—and it’s not very pleasant to look at. KARL PRIBRAM (U.S. psychologist and neurosurgeon), “From Lobotomy to Physics to Freud... an Interview with Karl Pribram,” APA Monitor (American Psychological Association), September-October 1974

1974 — I came home from the office after that first day back feeling panicky. I didn’t know where to turn. I didn’t know what to do. I was terrified. I’ve never been a crying person, but all my beloved knowledge, everything I had learned in my field during twenty years or more, was gone. I’d lost everything that professionals take for granted. I’d lost my experience, my knowing. But it was worse than that. I felt that I’d lost my self. I fell on the bed and cried and cried and cried. MARILYN RICE (U.S. electroshock survivor and government official), describing her return to work following a series of 8 ECTs in the early 1970s, in Berton Roueché, “As Empty as Eve,” New Yorker, 9 September 1974. Rice was cited as Natalie Parker, a pseudonym, in the article.

1977 — [Electrically induced seizures] are an iatrogenic injury to the brain. Even if they could be proved to relieve mental anguish more often than they cause it, and even if some patients ask for ECT and are pleased with its effects, the question of whether to pursue happiness through brain damage cannot be decided scientifically. This is a value judgment, which, in the interest of freedom and dignity, must be left to the fully informed individual. JOHN FRIEDBERG (U.S. neurologist), “ECT as a Neurologic Injury,” Psychiatric Opinion, 14:18, 1977

1977-1978 — Between February 1977 and October 1978 Freeman and Kendell interviewed 166 patients who had ECT during either 1971 or 1976 in Edinburgh. Of this group, 64% reported “memory impairment” (25% “thought symptom severe,” 39% “thought symptom mild”). Twenty-eight percent agreed with the statement that “ECT causes permanent changes to memory.” Squire reported findings of his three-year follow-up study of 35 people who had received an average of 11 bilateral ECTs. Of the 31 people available for interview, 18 (58%) answered “no” to the question, “Do you think your memory now is as good as it is for most people your age?” All but one of the 18 attributed their memory difficulties to ECT. LEONARD ROY FRANK (U.S. electroshock survivor and editor), “Electroshock: Death, Brain Damage, Memory Loss, and Brainwashing,” Journal of Mind and Behavior, Summer-Autumn 1990. The article by psychiatrists C. P. L. Freeman and R. E. Kendell was published under the title of “ECT: I. Patients’ Experiences and Attitudes” in the British Journal of Psychiatry, July 1980; psychologist Larry Squire’s study was summarized in his letter to American Journal of Psychiatry, September 1982

1980 — One advantage in the use of this treatment as far as hospital staff is concerned is that the effect of successive shock treatments makes the patient more and more confused, regressed, compliant, and—above all—forgetful, until the patient no longer remembers that he is fighting his hospitalization and the use of electroshock treatment. If there is any question whether the patient meets the criteria for commitment, several shocks later all doubts will have disappeared as the patient becomes increasingly more disoriented and confused. JONAS ROBITSCHER (U.S. psychiatrist), The Powers of Psychiatry, 16, 1980

1984 — It’s a matter of losing skills, losing learning that I had accumulated.... My entire college education has been completely wiped out and besides that all the reading and learning that I did on my own in the past three years.... I guess the doctors would consider [that ECT] had beneficial effects because it has “cured my depression,” but it’s cured my depression by ruining my life, by taking away everything that made it worth having in the first place.... It’s really important to point out what [ECT] does to the emotions. It’s like I exist in this kind of nowhere world right now. I don’t feel depressed. On the other hand I don’t feel happy. I just kind of feel nothing at all. LINDA ANDRE (U.S. electroshock survivor, director of the Committee for Truth in Psychiatry, and writer), after undergoing 15 ECTs at New York’s Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in 1984 at the age of 24, radio interview, WBAI (New York), 1985

1984 — My behavior [following ECT in 1984] was greatly changed; in a brain-damaged stupor, I smiled, cooperated, agreed that I had been a very sick girl and thanked the doctor for curing me. I was released from the hospital like a child just born. I knew where I lived, but I didn’t recognize the person I lived with. I didn’t know where I had gotten the unfamiliar clothes in the closet. I didn’t know if I had any money or where it was. I didn’t know the people calling me on the phone.... Very, very gradually—I realized that three years of my life were missing. Four years after shock, they are still missing. LINDA ANDRE, “The Politics of Experience,” testimony before the Quality of Care Conference, Albany (New York), 13 May 1988, in Leonard Roy Frank, “Electroshock: Death, Brain Damage, Memory Loss, and Brainwashing,” Journal of Mind and Behavior, Summer-Autumn 1990

1985 — I told my shrink I didn’t want to be cured of being a lesbian. He said that just proved how sick I was. He said I needed shock treatment. SHEILA GILHOOLY (Canadian electroshock survivor and writer), in Persimmon Blackbridge and Gilhooly, “Still Sane,” Still Sane, 1985

1989 — We were unable to confirm earlier reports that treatment with ECT or adequate amounts of antidepressants are associated with lower mortality in depressed persons. In fact, neither general (all cause) mortality rates nor suicide rates varied significantly among treatment groups. DONALD W. BLACK, GEORGE WINOKUR (U.S. psychiatrists) et al., among conclusions in “Does Treatment Influence Mortality in Depressives? A Follow-up of 1076 Patients with Major Affective Disorders,” Annals of Clinical Psychiatry, September 1989. This follow-up study conducted at the University of Iowa Psychiatric Hospital in Iowa City divided 1076 inpatients admitted between 1970 and 1981 into four “treatment groups”: ECT (372 patients), adequate antidepressants (180), inadequate antidepressants (317), and neither ECT nor antidepressants (207).

1989 — [Gary] Aden was a founder and first President of the International Psychiatric Association for the Advancement of Electrotherapy (now the Association for Convulsive Therapy)... A newspaper account dated September 27, 1989, in the San Diego Union [reported]: “Dr. Gary Carl Aden, 53, of La Jolla gave up his medical license effective September 8 after allegations that he had sex with patients, beat them and branded two of the women with heated metal devices, including an iron that bore his initials.” In another story a patient describes Aden as drugging her with a hypodermic before sexually abusing her and beating her with a riding crop [San Diego Union, 1 January 1989]. Aden was permitted to forfeit his license without admitting guilt. He was not subjected to being psychiatrically diagnosed or treated involuntarily, nor was he criminally charged. PETER R. BREGGIN, Toxic Psychiatry, 9, 1991. Aden was Medical Director of the San Diego Neuropsychiatric Clinic for Human Relations Center in addition to being the plaintiff in Aden v. Younger, which challenged the 1976 law regulating the use of ECT and psychosurgery in California.

1992 — There is an extensive literature on brain damage from ECT as demonstrated in large animal studies, human autopsy studies, brain wave studies, and an occasional CT scan study. Animal and human autopsy studies show that shock routinely causes widespread pinpoint hemorrhages and scattered cell death. PETER R. BREGGIN, “The Return of ECT,” Readings (a publication of the American Orthopsychiatric Association), March 1992. Glen Peterson, a major ECT proponent and a former Executive Director of the International Psychiatric Association for the Advancement of Electrotherapy, sees the brain-damage issue differently: “The possibility of brain damage is absolutely refuted by brain scans, by neuropsychological studies, by autopsies, by animal studies, and by analysis of cerebrospinal fluid and blood chemicals that leak from damaged cells that aren’t detected in ECT patients.” (in Russ Rymer, “Electroshock,” Hippocrates, March-April 1989)

1993 — ECT may effectively silence people about their problems, and even convince some people that they are cured by numbing their faculties and destroying their memories. It may fulfill a socially-valued function in reinforcing social norms and returning people to unhappy or abusive situations, or to isolation and poverty without any expenditure on better services or community development. It is easier to numb people and induce forgetfulness than to try to eradicate poverty, provide worthwhile jobs and deal with people’s demands to be listened to, understood, loved and valued as part of the community. JAN WALLCRAFT (British electroshock survivor and writer), “ECT: Effective, But for Whom?” OPENMIND (British journal), April-May 1993

1994 — One may see in the faces of patients condemned to electroconvulsive therapy an expectation that they are scheduled for torture; the casual order—”No breakfast for you, you’re getting shock this morning”—can produce hysteria and panic. Even were it beneficial, which it is not, the patient’s conviction that he or she is subjected to torture makes it such. As arms and legs are held down and the body thrashes under the force of the electrical charge, one is observing torture under the guise of “treatment.” KATE MILLETT (U.S. psychiatric survivor and writer), The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment, pp. 89-90, 1994

1995 — Psychiatrists don’t make much money, and by practicing ECT they can bring their income almost up to the level of the family practitioner or internist. CONRAD SWARTZ (U.S. psychiatrist), in Dennis Cauchon, “Shock Therapy,” USA Today, 6 December 1995. Swartz is co-owner of Somatics, Inc., manufacturer of the Thymatron ECT device. Cauchon reported that, according to the American Medical Association, psychiatrists earned an average of $131,300 in 1993.

1996 — Among the small fraternity of electroshock experts, psychiatrist Richard Abrams is widely regarded as one of the most prominent. Abrams, 59, who retired recently as a professor at the University of Health Sciences/Chicago Medical School, is the author of psychiatry’s standard textbook on ECT. He is a member of the editorial board of several psychiatric journals. The American Psychiatric Association’s 1990 task force report on ECT is studded with references to more than 60 articles he has authored.... Yet Abrams’s 340-page textbook [Electroconvulsive Therapy, 2nd ed., 1992] never mentions his financial interest in Somatics, the company he [co-]founded in 1983.... Financial ties between device manufacturers, drug companies and biotech firms “are a growing reality of health care and a growing problem,” said Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. For doctors “the questions that such financial conflicts of interest generate are, do patients get adequate full disclosure of options or are you skewing how you present the facts because you have a financial stake in the treatment and you personally profit from it every time it’s used?” Caplan asked. “It’s especially disturbing with ECT because it’s so controversial” and public mistrust of the treatment is so great, he added.... Abrams declined to say how much he has earned from Somatics. Approximately 1,250 machines, priced at nearly $10,000, have been sold to hospitals worldwide, he said. Between 150 and 200 machines are sold annually, according to Abrams. Somatics also sells reusable mouthguards for $29, which are designed to minimize the risk of chipped teeth or a lacerated tongue. SANDRA G. BOODMAN, “Shock Therapy: It’s Back,” Washington Post (Health, p. 18), 24 September 1996. Responding to the same failure-to-disclose issue raised in Dennis Cauchon’s two-part series on ECT (“Shock Therapy,” USA Today, 6-7 December 1995), Abrams concluded his letter to the editor (11 December 1995) as follows: “If there is any shame attached to ECT, it is that it has too often been given by inexperienced and poorly trained doctors with unsafe and obsolete equipment. A copy of my book, and one of my ECT devices, placed in each hospital offering this treatment should go along way toward correcting this problem.” Abrams, in the 3rd edition of Electroconvulsive Therapy (1997), disclosed that he is “President of Somatics, Inc., a firm that manufactures and distributes the Thymatron ECT device” not in the book’s text but on the back flap of the book jacket.

1996 — One moment that I remember clearly from my hospital stay for ECT in 1996 is the horror I felt when after one of my treatments I couldn’t remember how old my children were. Not only did the ECT not work for me, but my suffering was compounded when I realized that approximately 2 years of my life prior to the ECT had been erased. My retention of new information is also severely impaired. If anyone had told me that this could happen, even a remote chance, I never would have consented to ECT. I would much rather have lost a limb or 2 than to have lost my memory — my “self.” JACKIE MISHRA (U.S. electroshock survivor), in Loren R. Mosher and David Cohen, “The Ethics of Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT),” Virtual Mentor (Ethics Journal of the American Medical Association), October 2003

2000 — My long-term memory deficits far exceed anything my doctors anticipated, I was advised about, or that are validated by research. To the contrary, either I am one in a thousand, a complete anomaly, to be able to document memory loss still remaining after three years and extending as far back as incidences eight to nine years ago, or the profession in general, after all these years of treatment with ECT, has still failed to identify and come to grips with the true potential risks. While the more distant incidents may be random events, they are hardly insignificant ones: hosting and driving Mother Teresa for a full-day visit to Los Angeles in 1989; the dinner reception for my National Jefferson Award in Washington, D.C. in 1990, where I met and sat beside my co-honoree, General Colin Powell; my brother’s wedding in 1991—the list goes on, and keeps growing as people bring up references to the past in casual conversations. Human memory seems to me to be one of the most precious aspects of our personality, since our memories are so critical to who we are and how we see ourselves and others. The memories of our past give us an understanding of where we fit in the world. I have experienced more than a “cognitive deficit.” I have lost a part of myself. ANNE B. DONAHUE (U.S. electroshock survivor and attorney), referring to the memory loss she experienced following two ECT series in 1995 and 1996, 33 treatments in all, which she reports saved her life, “Electroconvulsive Therapy and Memory Loss: A Personal Journey,” Journal of ECT (“Official Journal of the Association for Convulsive Therapy”), July 2000

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