Shocking the Brain: Electroshock Therapy

Last week a sixty-year-old woman came to us from a small town in England. She was severely depressed. What does depression feel like, Numb, Not getting anything out of life. Despair, She was depressed like that twenty years ago. She had no idea what brought it back.

As she started her three weeks of therapy we had the big Los Angeles earthquake (January 1994) and her bed and she shook uncontrollable. That event reawakened something that changed all the rules of the game. She stopped crying and reported the following relentless symptoms: a constant hissing sound in her ears, night and day; numbness in the face, a feeling of electricity all over her body (she shook and jerked all the time), a complete feeling of discomfort.

Her session changed complexion. She lost her motor control in her legs and in the session when she tried to stand up she started to collapse. There were no words to her agony, she felt disconnected and had no idea what was going on in her. She began flopping uncontrollably exactly like the triggering event of the earthquake. She was reliving electroshock therapy she had undergone twenty times some twenty years before.

When we pressed on her temples (where the original electrodes were placed) she arched back and flopped and jerked exactly as though she were again undergoing shock thereapy. She relived pieces of the experience each session for weeks, and had to do so before she could get to the feelings that had lay behind her depression; the very feelings that had led doctors to shock her in the first place. Sometimes when I put my fingers on her temples the right side of her face went numb, something that no doubt occurred originally. When a pencil was put in her mouth at the appropriate time she clamped down on it as hard as one could imagine, her face grimaced in agony, and she was back there in shock again reliving the time they put cotton or a rubber device in her mouth to keep her from biting her tongue or breaking her teeth during the experience.

So what's the first lesson about this?; a lesson very important since electroshock is making a comeback particularly with children, believe it or not---what goes in must come out. The electroshock is like any shock, a trauma, a trauma that must be relieved in its entirety. What does the shock do? It does what any shock does; raises the level of serotonin, the inhibitory brain chemical which enhances repression. It therefore does what any state of souped-up repression. It therefore does what any state of souped-up repression does; it renders the person ahistoric, bereft of emotional memory for days, weeks, and sometimes forever. Again we see that it is the overall charge value of an electrical impulse that produces an overload and shutdown.

Electroshock is a neutral electrical stimulus but it has the same effect as a ten year old seeing his mother killed in a car crash. They both add up to an overload, increased serotonin to meet the overwhelming input and finally, shutdown. The memory is blotted out and unconsciousness sets in. In electroshock it is global unconsciousness. In the accident it is the same; the situation is blotted out, and above all, the meaning of the situation is hidden away, I'll never have a mommy again in my life. There will be no one to protect and take care of me. What matters in both cases is the level of electrical charge of the stimulus. The content is simply the vehicle for the power of the incident. As we see in electroshock, there need be no content whatsoever.

After a time of reliving the shock we will be able to get to the traumas below. So long as that event is superimposed on childhood pain it will take precedence in the primal reliving sequence. It's charge value is such as to blot out almost anything else. Interestingly, as she relived more and more of the shock therapy she began covering her head and hearing the bombs over London during the blitz in World War II. After that, we expect her to begin to relive traumas even earlier, finally arriving down deep to the imprints that caused the depression that originally precipitated the necessity for ECT.

We systematically measure the vital functions, heart rate, body temperature and blood pressure, before and after each session. This woman came in with consistently high vital signs, body temp of over one hundred every day. They would drop only moderately, which is as it should be since the event could only be felt a small piece at a time; therefore, we would not expect major drops after any single session. We would expect major drops toward the end of the feeling, some weeks or months later when the full charge value of the twenty shocks had been experienced and integrated. Along with this moderate drop was the picture of a disconnected, fragmented human being. She had no idea what she was undergoing, had no idea why her body was shaking or why her face went numb, had no insights and seemed blank. In short, the whole shock experience was still on its way to consciousness, disrupting it, blotting out memory and preventing deep access; after all, that was the point of the shock, in the first place; to prevent deep internal access to one's pain. It would seem that her face went numb in the original experience because during the Primal when I tapped strongly on her right cheek she reported feeling only pressure but no pain.

Again, we are not going to expect a connected lucidity until a major portion of the electroshock therapy is relived. Then automatically, it will all fall into place and no one will have to offer her any understanding or insights. It is no different than a child reliving losing her mother early on. The catastrophic meaning of it will be lost until months into Primal Therapy when the whole event with its painful meaning will finally be fully experienced. The original event blasted third-line coherence just so the whole meaning would no longer be apparent. It fragmented through patterns, cut short attention span and ruined the ability to concentrate. The shock was doing what it was supposed to do; reducing the coherence of the third-line. If a shocking trauma did not do this and the person were to feel the shock in a focused way in its entirety the level or reactivity such as blood pressure and heart rate could be lethal. Thus, a fragmented response is necessary, and that has implications for things such as poor physical coordination. To be fragmented means not to have your body, not to be connected.

The original doctors, either through belief, lack of time or technique did not bother to talk to her about the possible causes of her depression. All they knew was that she was crying all of time. They did not seem to understand that childhood pain lay below the surface, and they did not make an effort, therefore, to penetrate deep down to see what was bothering her. When that happens there seems to be no alternative but to shock someone's brains. The problem is that afterward she carried around that shock inside her just as if she had the shock at ten of watching her mother die in an auto accident.

The need for shock often happens when ordinary pills aren't adequate. That is, when the underlying pain is so great that simple medication won't suppress it. Then the big guns of electroshock are called in to blast the pain and memory and history out of existence. In a society where results are paramount, shock offers a quick fix. One can see it, the patient attests to its benefits and everyone seems happy. Meanwhile, churning below the surface is that very shock, doing its damage by stealth. The aim in conventional therapy is to get people productive again; back to the factory, the office and the computer. Part of the person is back at work; she has the emotional her back at the shock room in the hospital. So she is now a productive member of society, a robot in the service of results; eviscerated, devitalized, desensitized, hollow and dehumanized at work churning out product while her real feelings grind away in the deep unconscious. She can work but she can't love.

The effects of electroshock therapy are monstrous and unnecessary. We must talk to the patient, allow her to feel. Be concerned and realize that there is a history in human beings that must be addressed.