The lawmaker sponsoring the bill to prohibit ECT on Utahns under 18 has withdrawn it from consideration for this year’s session, vowing it will be back soon—retooled and ready for the next round in the battle against psychiatric exploitation.
“We are going to make it an interim study item so we can bring the data along with personal stories,” Representative Jake Sawyer told Freedom Magazine.
If the bill passes, Utah would join California, Texas, Tennessee, Minnesota and West Virginia in prohibiting the use of ECT on minors at different age thresholds.
Incredibly, as of 2024, 12 states have no defined legal age limit on ECT.
“I suffered long-term damage and memory loss.”
A Utah ban on youth ECT would represent a major step in curbing a brutal, inhumane practice that brings in large profits for the psychiatric industry. The average ECT treatment cost is $2,500 apiece, with the average patient treatment program running 6 to 12 sessions. With at least 100,000 Americans receiving ECT every year, you do the math.
If anyone would know the cruel toll of this lucrative form of torture, it’s Sawyer. Diagnosed with PTSD after a car crash at the age of 16, he underwent a dozen sessions of electroshock.
That was in 1988. He hasn’t been the same since.
“I suffered long-term damage and memory loss,” he told Freedom. “My vocabulary is nowhere near what it used to be, and making new memories is vastly more difficult than it was before.”
Even Dr. Jeremy Kendrick, head of the treatment-resistant mood disorders clinic at the University of Utah, who himself administers ECT, admits: “It is an invasive treatment. It can cause headaches, nausea, muscle aches and short-term memory impairment. Some patients report longer-lasting, and in some cases permanent changes to memory and cognition following the procedure. These risks are real, and any physician who minimizes them is failing their ethical duty.
“And it does impact memory encoding.”
Even worse, ECT has been implicated in countless fatalities—from heart attacks, arrhythmia, pulmonary embolism and edema to heart failure and cardiac arrest.
The death rate from ECT is 50 times higher than the US murder rate.
And, according to JAMA Psychiatry, ECT is recommended after two antidepressants failed to solve a patient’s problems.
More often than not, such patients are never warned that ECT can cause brain damage, memory loss, cognitive impairment, cardiac arrest and death. One study found that half of ECT survivors said it made their lives “much worse.”
The experience, as one survivor put it, is horrifying: “It felt like being raped.”
Jan Eastgate, president of mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), endured ECT as a young woman. When she awoke, she could not recognize the woman sitting by her bed.
It was her mother.
“ECT should never be used,” she said. “In two countries, it already is banned. It is a brutal, barbaric treatment.”
CCHR has called for an end to ECT, and both the World Health Organization and the United Nations Human Rights Office have called for an outright ban on electroshock for children.
Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) opposes ECT, stating that the procedure constitutes “torture without consent,” adding, “We support a ban on the use of ECT in the treatment of children and young adults up to the age of 21, and the indiscriminate use on adults.”
“Everybody agrees and has the same reaction when I tell them that we are still shocking people.”
The late Dr. Norman Shealy, a neurosurgeon and famed pioneer of holistic medicine, once said, “ECT should have been banned 50 years ago.”
Anyone with a lick of sense ought to know it’s not wise to use jolts of electricity to fry the brains of youth—damaging their recall, their vocabulary and their reasoning powers.
Just imagine the agony of being a child forced into ECT and having your memories stolen from you before you can even create them. Imagine not being able to remember the names of your pets or friends, what presents you received on your last birthday, or your trip to Disney World with your mom and dad, thanks to ECT.
Imagine the terror of realizing that your mind has been reduced to fragments, a vague shadow of what it once was.
Yet the FDA still approves the use of ECT for children as young as 13.
“Everybody agrees and has the same reaction when I tell them that we are still shocking people,” Sawyer told Freedom. “It’s barbaric. Why are we doing it?”
Why indeed?
ECT should be consigned to the same graveyard as other reviled psychiatric horrors—frontal lobotomies, trephination, bloodletting and the cruel isolation of asylum patients in chains.
These are America’s children we are talking about. We must save them.
Once and for all, it is time to stop the torture.
