In 2018 Kings College London debated the motion ‘ECT has no place in modern medicine’. Professor John Read and Dr Sue Cunliffe (an ECT survivor) made the case. John Read has published four reviews of research on ECT and has found only ten placebo studies of the use of ECT with depression. Five of those ten found no difference between the two groups. The remaining five found a temporary lift in mood during the treatment period in about a third of the patients.
In the debate, John Read pointed out that psychiatry is littered with brutal treatments that some psychiatrists believed to be effective, such as spinning people round in chairs and removing parts of their brain. There is an argument that recent changes to the ECT procedure has made it safer, but many people still suffer ‘marked and persistent memory loss’ and that comes from one source: brain damage.
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