Shock treatment. They say it's safe now; new and improved. They say it can't damage your brain or cause permanent memory loss.But who are they and why should you believe them? Doctors of Deception is the first history of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), or shock treatment, to consider the controversial procedure in a social, legal, financial, medical, and moral context. Through the investigation of court records, medical research, FDA archives, and other primary sources, Linda Andre shows that claims of safety and efficacy made by doctors who promote and profit from ECT are not supported by science or evidence. She reveals how the shock industry and organized psychiatry abused public trust and waged a masterful, multi-decade public relations campaign to improve ECT's image, deceiving the media, the government, and the public about its risks while exploiting negative stereotypes of mental patients to silence survivors.The book documents the struggles of these former patients and their allies who have worked for over thirty years to inform others about the dangers of ECT, and includes vivid firsthand accounts of its permanent adverse effects on memory and cognition. Meticulously researched, Doctors of Deception builds a solid case that ECT can never be justified scientifically, medically, or morally.
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Review
"Andre provides a useful contrast to the claims made in Edward Shorter and David Healy's recent paean to ECT and the men who were instrumental in its development, and offers a potentially devastating critique of both ECT and the modern American psychiatric profession."
Social History of Medicine
"Linda Andre’s book is both a powerful memoir of her own experience as an ECT 'patient' and a documented account of the underbelly of the 'shock industry.' It raises profound questions about ECT that both psychiatry and the National Institute of Mental Health—if they want to be honest with the American public—desperately need to address."
Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
"For many years, activist and writer Linda Andre has been forcefully and cogently examining the reigning (and mostly unchallenged) professed claims and practices of our medical establishment's wizards of shock therapy. In this thoroughly-researched, pathbreaking, and essential book, the author undraws the curtains that have for too long cloaked these claims, practices, and wizards. It is a work of courage, heart, and brains."
Jonathan Cott, Author of On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering
"This book is brilliant analysis. It is successful on many levels, including its most important task: presenting an overview of the history, safety and efficacy of electro-convulsive therapy. The book is also a masterpiece of scientific writing. Through her extensive personal and professional research, Andre explained things I had already known about ECT, but with additional clinical facts and exceptional insight. She detailed the people and places that have formed the basis for the historical foundations of ECT at the same time that she described the politics and organizations that have continued to promote ECT as a safe and effective modality."
Stefan Kruszewski MD, International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine
"This book is absolutely fascinating and extraordinarily well-written. It is a major contribution to the current literature."
Michael Perlin, Professor of Law, New York Law School
"This superb study documents a development that is an ongoing controversy in the field of psychiatry: electro convulsive therapy (ECT) and the appropriateness of using it to treat a host of conditions. Weaving her own, often poignant, experiences with ECT into the narrative, Andre contends that ECT proponents/practitioners undercut informed consent through systemic deceit, including failure to reveal negative consequences. The audience for this excellent resource should include those who make mental health policy. Highly recommended."
Choice
Social History of Medicine
"Linda Andre’s book is both a powerful memoir of her own experience as an ECT 'patient' and a documented account of the underbelly of the 'shock industry.' It raises profound questions about ECT that both psychiatry and the National Institute of Mental Health—if they want to be honest with the American public—desperately need to address."
Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
"For many years, activist and writer Linda Andre has been forcefully and cogently examining the reigning (and mostly unchallenged) professed claims and practices of our medical establishment's wizards of shock therapy. In this thoroughly-researched, pathbreaking, and essential book, the author undraws the curtains that have for too long cloaked these claims, practices, and wizards. It is a work of courage, heart, and brains."
Jonathan Cott, Author of On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering
"This book is brilliant analysis. It is successful on many levels, including its most important task: presenting an overview of the history, safety and efficacy of electro-convulsive therapy. The book is also a masterpiece of scientific writing. Through her extensive personal and professional research, Andre explained things I had already known about ECT, but with additional clinical facts and exceptional insight. She detailed the people and places that have formed the basis for the historical foundations of ECT at the same time that she described the politics and organizations that have continued to promote ECT as a safe and effective modality."
Stefan Kruszewski MD, International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine
"This book is absolutely fascinating and extraordinarily well-written. It is a major contribution to the current literature."
Michael Perlin, Professor of Law, New York Law School
"This superb study documents a development that is an ongoing controversy in the field of psychiatry: electro convulsive therapy (ECT) and the appropriateness of using it to treat a host of conditions. Weaving her own, often poignant, experiences with ECT into the narrative, Andre contends that ECT proponents/practitioners undercut informed consent through systemic deceit, including failure to reveal negative consequences. The audience for this excellent resource should include those who make mental health policy. Highly recommended."
Choice
From the Inside Flap
Doctors of Deception is a revealing history of ECT (or shock therapy) in the United States, told here for the first time. Through the examination of court records, medical data, FDA reports, industry claims, her own experience as a patient of shock therapy, and the stories of others, Andre exposes tactics used by the industry to promote ECT as a responsible treatment when all the scientific evidence suggested otherwise.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Carol Read
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover
In physical medicine, doctors recognize that electricity harms the body and seizures harm the brain, and they do everything to protect patients from these two assaults. (The exception is shocking the heart in the case of heart failure, when the patient is technically dead.) In psychiatry, an electricity/grand mal combo has been used for almost eight decades now, on human beings labeled mentally ill. ECT, or shock therapy, is a treatment that applies enough electricity to a patient's frontal lobes that the patient has a grand mal seizure. When the procedure was created in the 1930s,some doctors mistakenly believed that madness and epilepsy couldn't co-exist. So, create epilepsy to drive out the demons...
In 1984, "the new shock therapy" erased the most recent five years of Linda Andre's life--one fifth of her lifespan at the time. Shock impaired her cognitive functions, lowering her IQ significantly. It took her over two years to regain her ability to retain new memories. Therefore, it could be argued that shock really erased at least seven years from her life. She lost her career as a photographer, her relationship with the man she loved, her university education, and her child. She became an activist.
"Doctors of Deception" is a brilliant combination of scientific reporting, investigative journalism, historical writing, and memoir. Andre uses her own notes from her twenty-five years of activism, documents on the shock industry that go back decades, scholarly articles, and interviews. She provides a complete picture of ECT: its discovery; how it works; the lies and cover-ups of the shock industry; the bad science of the shock doctors; and the shock survivor movement. The book finishes with its most persuasive section, a few of the letters shock survivors have written to the FDA.
I found this a compelling, though tough, read. Andre writes extremely well, with fairness, compassion and a sense of humor. If only the law required shock doctors to give patients this book!
In 1984, "the new shock therapy" erased the most recent five years of Linda Andre's life--one fifth of her lifespan at the time. Shock impaired her cognitive functions, lowering her IQ significantly. It took her over two years to regain her ability to retain new memories. Therefore, it could be argued that shock really erased at least seven years from her life. She lost her career as a photographer, her relationship with the man she loved, her university education, and her child. She became an activist.
"Doctors of Deception" is a brilliant combination of scientific reporting, investigative journalism, historical writing, and memoir. Andre uses her own notes from her twenty-five years of activism, documents on the shock industry that go back decades, scholarly articles, and interviews. She provides a complete picture of ECT: its discovery; how it works; the lies and cover-ups of the shock industry; the bad science of the shock doctors; and the shock survivor movement. The book finishes with its most persuasive section, a few of the letters shock survivors have written to the FDA.
I found this a compelling, though tough, read. Andre writes extremely well, with fairness, compassion and a sense of humor. If only the law required shock doctors to give patients this book!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.1 out of 5 stars
16 reviews
42 of 48 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
They still do shock treatment?
Feb 25 2009
By John Friedberg
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
If you've ever wondered how generations of medical authority could have been so wrong about practices such as bleeding, consider shock treatment or ECT.
The author describes in fascinating detail the "30 year comeback" of electroshock.
I am honored to be mentioned as having attempted to expose the brain damage and amnesia at the beginning of the "PR era." I am a neurologist appalled by the practice of inducing convulsions. Convulsions are a catastrophe doctors should be dedicated to preventing.
Three decades later there is incontrovertible evidence that shock treatments always cause memory loss, sometimes cause seizures and not infrequently cause death.
The story of how psychiatry has defended the indefensible is told with awesome scholarship and remarkable wit by one of it's most indomitable critics.
This book is the truth about ECT. You won't find it anywhere else.
John Friedberg, MD
Board Certified Neurologist
The author describes in fascinating detail the "30 year comeback" of electroshock.
I am honored to be mentioned as having attempted to expose the brain damage and amnesia at the beginning of the "PR era." I am a neurologist appalled by the practice of inducing convulsions. Convulsions are a catastrophe doctors should be dedicated to preventing.
Three decades later there is incontrovertible evidence that shock treatments always cause memory loss, sometimes cause seizures and not infrequently cause death.
The story of how psychiatry has defended the indefensible is told with awesome scholarship and remarkable wit by one of it's most indomitable critics.
This book is the truth about ECT. You won't find it anywhere else.
John Friedberg, MD
Board Certified Neurologist
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
First do no harm. No. Strike that. First do a survey
Mar 24 2009
By Richard Warner
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Earlier this year, Marcia Angell, writing in The New York Review of Books, lamented, "It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine." Angell's review laid out the many ways in which the medical field, particularly psychiatry, has allowed itself to be thoroughly corrupted by its extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
In her compelling new book, Doctors of Deception, Linda Andre demonstrates that this corruption extends to the big business of shock treatment (also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)). For decades a small group of psychiatrists, many with financial interests in shock machine manufacturers, has controlled the principal source of funds for ECT research, the National Institute of Mental Health, thereby insuring that studies which could demonstrate the extent of shock's devastating memory, attention and learning effects were never undertaken.
Those same gatekeepers wrote the American Psychiatric Association (APA) task force reports on electroconvulsive therapy so that negative findings regarding shock would never reach a broader audience. The reports were created to serve as public relations documents and psychiatrists have cited them regularly before federal and state governmental bodies as proof that shock is safe and effective in the absence of any real proof that it is.
Andre shows us how psychiatrists have for decades buried evidence, falsified reports, and employed a "new and improved" public relations mantra to sell a brain damaging procedure. To this day the shock sales pitch dominates media coverage of ECT. Shock, we are told, is effective and prevents suicide, and new techniques - oxygenation, anesthesia, less electricity, and different electrode placements - make the "new" shock safe. The fact that there is not a shred of medical evidence that any of this is true - and much to prove it false - has not prevented the message from being repeated endlessly.
Fraud and criminality within the psychiatric drug industry is so egregious that it can no longer be overlooked and well respected voices like Angell are beginning to be heard. Prior to Andre's book, however, there was a dearth of information about the covert machinations of the shock industry. Doctors of Deception goes a long way towards remedying that scarcity, while giving those who care about informed consent and human rights in the mental health field a powerful weapon with which to battle the Doctors of Deception.
In her compelling new book, Doctors of Deception, Linda Andre demonstrates that this corruption extends to the big business of shock treatment (also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)). For decades a small group of psychiatrists, many with financial interests in shock machine manufacturers, has controlled the principal source of funds for ECT research, the National Institute of Mental Health, thereby insuring that studies which could demonstrate the extent of shock's devastating memory, attention and learning effects were never undertaken.
Those same gatekeepers wrote the American Psychiatric Association (APA) task force reports on electroconvulsive therapy so that negative findings regarding shock would never reach a broader audience. The reports were created to serve as public relations documents and psychiatrists have cited them regularly before federal and state governmental bodies as proof that shock is safe and effective in the absence of any real proof that it is.
Andre shows us how psychiatrists have for decades buried evidence, falsified reports, and employed a "new and improved" public relations mantra to sell a brain damaging procedure. To this day the shock sales pitch dominates media coverage of ECT. Shock, we are told, is effective and prevents suicide, and new techniques - oxygenation, anesthesia, less electricity, and different electrode placements - make the "new" shock safe. The fact that there is not a shred of medical evidence that any of this is true - and much to prove it false - has not prevented the message from being repeated endlessly.
Fraud and criminality within the psychiatric drug industry is so egregious that it can no longer be overlooked and well respected voices like Angell are beginning to be heard. Prior to Andre's book, however, there was a dearth of information about the covert machinations of the shock industry. Doctors of Deception goes a long way towards remedying that scarcity, while giving those who care about informed consent and human rights in the mental health field a powerful weapon with which to battle the Doctors of Deception.
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Comprehensive Indictment of a 70-yr old Treatment Fraud
Mar 26 2009
By Ron Thompson
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
by Ron Thompson
Linda Andre has spent over 20 years trying to alert the public to the inevitable harm done by the psychiatric treatment known as 'electroconvulsive treatment', or more simply, as ... shock.
Now she's written DOCTORS OF DECEPTION: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (2009), published by Rutgers University Press.
Unlike other books written by former patients of psychiatry who feel their treatment was much worse than any problems they had prior to their encounter with psychiatry, Linda's book is relatively short on her personal story and long on scholarship about the history of shock since it's appearance in 1938. This makes her book at once excellent investigative reporting and serious history, as well as a compelling personal story.
One of many things that suggest the importance of this book is the startling statement that the dangers of shock treatment were far better recognized in the 1940's than they are now.
Andre discusses the main reason such a 'shocking' fact is true.
In two early chapters, she makes a strong case that eugenical thinking, the pseudo-scientific idea that certain races, or certain categories of people, are biologically inferior to others - an idea which had a dismayingly wide vogue for the first four decades on the 20th century - has never really gone away regarding mental patients.
If this inferiority is assumed to be true, then any damage caused by treatment must be of less harm than if committed against 'normal' human beings.
Such a mindset of general discriminatory thought encouraged by the fake science of Eugenics has largely disappeared or significantly eroded, at least in mainstream thought, as applied to African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and others
But Andre makes a strong case that it still thrives when applied to mental patients, especially by psychiatrists. I think most mental patients,former or current, voluntary or involuntary, true believers or not in biology as the basis of their problems, would agree.
Next , Andre dissects in convincing detail how the Shock industry, when it came under increasing criticism in the 1960's as part of the general cultural upheaval of protest in that now distant period, decided to adopt a Public Relations strategy rather than a scientific strategy to meet these attacks.
That is, instead of doing valid scientific research on the outcomes of sending electricity through human brains, the shock doctors and the manufacturers of shock machines - which over the years have increasingly become the same people - decided on a pure no-holds barred public relations campaign that is pro-shock and anti-every critic, with especially no-holds-barred opposition to former patient critics. (Andre documents that damning research on the effects of shocking animal brains was done and published in the 1940's and early 50's).
Unfortunately this brazen Public Relations strategy has been a major success over the last 35 or more years.
Andre marshals a large volume of evidence to prove this. Her discussion of the aggressive PR approach by the shock doctors (both in public and behind-the-scenes) with regard to government-funded research, the FDA, professional journals, and the ever-complacent media, are the most revealing aspects of her research. For the really determined reader, she provides 30 pages of footnotes.
Along the way, she discusses the story of Marilyn Rice, the once highly placed government economist who lost her professional working knowledge as a result of shock, who then became the first major ex-patient activist against this particular psychiatric mistreatment, and eventually friend and mentor to her successor, Linda Andre.
She reports her conversations with some of the major shock doctors or propagandists she has confronted, with one particularly charming or chilling description of how a doctor tried to convince her that any damage to her memory or IQ had to have one of three or four other causes, but could not possibly be due to shock.
The final contribution of Andre's book is in a late chapter which discusses whether ect (shock) treatment should be banned, and what the moral context of that debate should be. In this chapter, which is in part a return to the earlier charge that shock doctors think in terms of eugenics about their patients, she charges that there is an unpleasant hidden moral agenda concerning the use of shock that lies beneath the overt or publicly professed reasons for the treatment.
Her indictment of this hidden moral agenda could hardly be harsher. It's on p. 271 of the book, and I will not spoil it for the reader by trying to give it in shorthand here.
Any particular faults in this book? Not really for this reviewer. Although it's true that shock doctoring can fairly be called an industry, I probably would have used the word profession much more often, if only because members of a profession are held to a higher standard or performance and ethical behavior than members of an industry. On the other hand, since we've had such a recent avalanche of stories on how so many in the medical profession and in research are embracing conflicts of interest and the ethics of entrepreneurialism rather than the ethics of science and of being professionals, maybe Andre's not wrong to refer relentlessly to shock doctors as an industry.
Last, this superior example of in-depth investigative reporting seems particularly relevant to recommend to those in the Washington area. This is because, even though there are some very good stories in big regional papers around the country about the mounting concerns of 'biological' psychiatry in more and more categories of psychiatric patients, the Washington Post (along with the New York Times) is, for reasons not entirely clear, peculiarly neglectful and incompetent in its coverage of psychiatry.
This is an especially tragic dereliction of journalistic duty if the paradigm of brain-centered biological psychiatry, triumphant since about 1980 over person-centered psychiatry, has really been about the stealth rebirth of Eugenics and has had nothing to do with actual science.
This means that the community of our national political leadership located here in Washington is woefully uninformed, at least through the papers it is most apt to read, about an issue that many groups around the country are increasingly concerned about.
Linda Andre has been a well-known speaker on the issues surrounding shock treatment for many years. The book she has now written about the moral and scientific issues surrounding that treatment deserves wide attention.
Linda Andre has spent over 20 years trying to alert the public to the inevitable harm done by the psychiatric treatment known as 'electroconvulsive treatment', or more simply, as ... shock.
Now she's written DOCTORS OF DECEPTION: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (2009), published by Rutgers University Press.
Unlike other books written by former patients of psychiatry who feel their treatment was much worse than any problems they had prior to their encounter with psychiatry, Linda's book is relatively short on her personal story and long on scholarship about the history of shock since it's appearance in 1938. This makes her book at once excellent investigative reporting and serious history, as well as a compelling personal story.
One of many things that suggest the importance of this book is the startling statement that the dangers of shock treatment were far better recognized in the 1940's than they are now.
Andre discusses the main reason such a 'shocking' fact is true.
In two early chapters, she makes a strong case that eugenical thinking, the pseudo-scientific idea that certain races, or certain categories of people, are biologically inferior to others - an idea which had a dismayingly wide vogue for the first four decades on the 20th century - has never really gone away regarding mental patients.
If this inferiority is assumed to be true, then any damage caused by treatment must be of less harm than if committed against 'normal' human beings.
Such a mindset of general discriminatory thought encouraged by the fake science of Eugenics has largely disappeared or significantly eroded, at least in mainstream thought, as applied to African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and others
But Andre makes a strong case that it still thrives when applied to mental patients, especially by psychiatrists. I think most mental patients,former or current, voluntary or involuntary, true believers or not in biology as the basis of their problems, would agree.
Next , Andre dissects in convincing detail how the Shock industry, when it came under increasing criticism in the 1960's as part of the general cultural upheaval of protest in that now distant period, decided to adopt a Public Relations strategy rather than a scientific strategy to meet these attacks.
That is, instead of doing valid scientific research on the outcomes of sending electricity through human brains, the shock doctors and the manufacturers of shock machines - which over the years have increasingly become the same people - decided on a pure no-holds barred public relations campaign that is pro-shock and anti-every critic, with especially no-holds-barred opposition to former patient critics. (Andre documents that damning research on the effects of shocking animal brains was done and published in the 1940's and early 50's).
Unfortunately this brazen Public Relations strategy has been a major success over the last 35 or more years.
Andre marshals a large volume of evidence to prove this. Her discussion of the aggressive PR approach by the shock doctors (both in public and behind-the-scenes) with regard to government-funded research, the FDA, professional journals, and the ever-complacent media, are the most revealing aspects of her research. For the really determined reader, she provides 30 pages of footnotes.
Along the way, she discusses the story of Marilyn Rice, the once highly placed government economist who lost her professional working knowledge as a result of shock, who then became the first major ex-patient activist against this particular psychiatric mistreatment, and eventually friend and mentor to her successor, Linda Andre.
She reports her conversations with some of the major shock doctors or propagandists she has confronted, with one particularly charming or chilling description of how a doctor tried to convince her that any damage to her memory or IQ had to have one of three or four other causes, but could not possibly be due to shock.
The final contribution of Andre's book is in a late chapter which discusses whether ect (shock) treatment should be banned, and what the moral context of that debate should be. In this chapter, which is in part a return to the earlier charge that shock doctors think in terms of eugenics about their patients, she charges that there is an unpleasant hidden moral agenda concerning the use of shock that lies beneath the overt or publicly professed reasons for the treatment.
Her indictment of this hidden moral agenda could hardly be harsher. It's on p. 271 of the book, and I will not spoil it for the reader by trying to give it in shorthand here.
Any particular faults in this book? Not really for this reviewer. Although it's true that shock doctoring can fairly be called an industry, I probably would have used the word profession much more often, if only because members of a profession are held to a higher standard or performance and ethical behavior than members of an industry. On the other hand, since we've had such a recent avalanche of stories on how so many in the medical profession and in research are embracing conflicts of interest and the ethics of entrepreneurialism rather than the ethics of science and of being professionals, maybe Andre's not wrong to refer relentlessly to shock doctors as an industry.
Last, this superior example of in-depth investigative reporting seems particularly relevant to recommend to those in the Washington area. This is because, even though there are some very good stories in big regional papers around the country about the mounting concerns of 'biological' psychiatry in more and more categories of psychiatric patients, the Washington Post (along with the New York Times) is, for reasons not entirely clear, peculiarly neglectful and incompetent in its coverage of psychiatry.
This is an especially tragic dereliction of journalistic duty if the paradigm of brain-centered biological psychiatry, triumphant since about 1980 over person-centered psychiatry, has really been about the stealth rebirth of Eugenics and has had nothing to do with actual science.
This means that the community of our national political leadership located here in Washington is woefully uninformed, at least through the papers it is most apt to read, about an issue that many groups around the country are increasingly concerned about.
Linda Andre has been a well-known speaker on the issues surrounding shock treatment for many years. The book she has now written about the moral and scientific issues surrounding that treatment deserves wide attention.
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