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.
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