The FDA and Medicare still sanction Electroconvulsive Therapy
Branded “safe and effective,” just like other medical atrocities known to harm, Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) was born in the 1930s and remains a devastating reality of what happens when captured science and propaganda replaces human conscience and compassion of care
ECT is a device psychiatrists use to shock the brains of America’s most vulnerable into a severe grand mal seizure as a form of “treatment” — including children and elderly — while taxpayers foot the bill.
Now, the Global Wellness Forum, with CCHR, Stand for Health Freedom, and a growing coalition of truth and health-freedom advocates, is taking action to end it.
A Call to End a Medical Atrocity
The Global Wellness Forum is leading a historic national coalition to end Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) — a federally subsidized medical atrocity still inflicted on more than 120,000 Americans every year.
In alliance with the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), Stand for Health Freedom, and a growing network of informed-consent, health-freedom, and human-rights organizations, we are launching a coordinated campaign to expose, defund, and abolish ECT in the United States.
How does ECT Work?
ECT is a medical device used by hospitals and psychiatrists that floods the brain with up to 900 milliamperes of current and 450 volts of electricity for up to as long as eight seconds, delivered in either ultra-brief pulses or continuous waves — forcibly inducing a generalized grand mal seizure that can last up to two minutes.
The goal of this procedure is simply to trigger the seizure, not to heal. In practice, the electrical dose is set above the patient’s seizure threshold and then increased even further in later sessions — often from nearly double to as much as six times the amount needed to cause a seizure — escalating the risk of neurological injury with every treatment.
This is what happens when medicine forgets its purpose.
This is barbaric practicae and seems like something from a fictional horror movie. Yet this is a hidden reality today in America and other parts of the world.
When our medical system stops asking why and makes no attempt to understand root causes for mental illness or neurochemistry impacts, and starts silencing symptoms instead of understanding them, it becomes a machine of suppression rather than healing.
The tragedy of ECT is not just in its physical and emotional damage but also in what it represents — a profession that has lost connection to consciousness, to cause, and to care itself.
And it’s time we end this traumatic and abusive practice disguised as therapy — together.
Visit StopECT.com to learn more, take action, and join the movement.
The Unthinkable Truth About “Modern Psychiatry”
The history of psychiatry is marked by interventions born more of fear than of wisdom: lobotomies in the mid-20th century severed brain tissue in a desperate search for control, while Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) induced seizures as if the mind could be “reset” by force rather than understood through compassionate, root-cause healing.
Though heralded as breakthroughs, both were introduced with minimal testing, scant ethical oversight, and a willingness to sacrifice patient autonomy—inflicting literal brain injury in the name of “therapy.” Their legacy is not one of healing, but of harm and abuse.
And yet, one of these barbaric relics still persists today: ECT continues to be performed on hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. When medicine abandons understanding for convenience, the infirm become experiments and their suffering becomes invisible.
Reckoning with that truth is the first step toward ending it.
Every year, tens of thousands of Americans — including veterans, pregnant women, the elderly, and even children as young as five — are subjected to up to 450 volts of electricity through the brain under anesthesia.
As comparison, that’s the equivalent force of being struck by a lightning bolt at close range — delivered directly through the skull.
ECT does not bring healing — instead for most patients they suffer irreversible trauma, permament memory loss, brain injury, and sometimes, tragically, even death.
“ECT causes persistent or permanent memory loss and brain damage in up to 55 percent of recipients.” — Expert testimony, Nebraska Supreme Court (2025)
This is the reality we’re facing:
A government-funded brain-damage protocol masquerading as therapy.
ECT was never grounded in real science — it endures through fraudulent research, wasteful taxpayer funding, and abusive experimentation on the vulnerable.
Since 1976, ECT devices have existed in a regulatory gray zone — never approved through the FDA’s required premarket (PMA) process, never proven safe or effective, yet continually protected by non-enforcement.
When Congress first classified high-risk medical devices, ECT manufacturers were ordered to submit PMAs within thirty months; none did, and the FDA failed to act. In 2009, amid public pressure, the agency opened a review docket, but manufacturers again produced no credible safety or efficacy data.
Despite decades of documented brain injury, cognitive impairment, and death — and numerous lawsuits won against ECT manufacturers for failing to warn of these dangers — the FDA has never exercised its authority under 21 U.S.C. § 360f to ban the devices for posing an “unreasonable and substantial risk.”
Instead, in 2018, the FDA quietly reclassified ECT from “high risk” (Class III) to “moderate risk” (Class II) for certain psychiatric disorders — doing so without new safety trials and largely relying on data supplied by the device makers themselves.
This move preserved Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, ensuring the procedure’s survival even as the agency now mandates a label on this device that admits that “the long-term safety and effectiveness of ECT has not been demonstrated.”
The result is a federally enabled practice built on biased science, regulatory capture, and systemic negligence — one that continues to harm patients while claiming legitimacy through silence.
In the course of my research for GreenMedInfo, I encountered what can only be described as a devastating body of evidence: more than sixty documented adverse effects tied to ECT, including permanent memory loss, delirium, suicidality, cardiac arrest, and even death.
The science does not vindicate this practice — it indicts it.
“The long-term safety and effectiveness of ECT has not been demonstrated.” — FDA Regulation 21 CFR 882.5940
This statement isn’t from an advocacy group — it’s from the FDA itself, published in the Federal Register when the agency reclassified ECT devices in 2018.
In other words, the federal government admits it does not know whether electroshock is safe or effective, yet continues to allow and reimburse its use on Americans.
See more here substack.com
Header image: The Independant
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