Letter: Documented effects of shock therapy

Sir: In response to your recent correspondence about electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), can I refer anyone who seriously believes that ECT does not cause brain damage to two North American publications, Electroshock, its Brain Disabling Effects, by Dr Peter Breggin (published by Springer, New York, 1979), and Electroshock: The Case Against, edited by Dr Robert Morgan (IPI, Toronto, 1991).

These publications, the first written by a psychiatrist, and the second by the same psychiatrist, a neurologist, two professors of psychology and a survivor of ECT, document hundreds of research papers showing bleeding into the brain, the large-scale destruction of nerve cells, and a variety of other effects, causing permanent memory loss and intellectual dysfunction.

The advocates of ECT have consistently ignored this research, but common sense, as well as a basic knowledge of biochemistry, would suggest that you cannot pass relatively large electrical currents through tissue without disorganising cellular processes that, in the brain, are the basis of thought and memory.

It is a shame that similar publications have not been produced here.

Yours faithfully,

DONNARD WHITE

(on behalf of the executive)

City and Hackney Association

for Mental Health (Mind)

London, E9

17 December