After electroconvulsive shock therapy, ECT, getting help is almost impossible.

You're dealing with repetitive electrical injury, repetitive brain trauma.

Medicine calls it safe and effective.

The FDA says something completely different.

That's when the real heavy-handed medical gaslighting begins.

We are your whistleblowing shrinks, Dr.

Tara Lynn and Therapist Jen, and this is the Gaslit Truth Podcast.

Before we rip this wide open, hit like, smash, subscribe, and if you're on YouTube, ring that bell so you don't miss a thing.

And everybody who is out here listening and watching us, just remember that Terry and I are de-perscribers.

What does that mean?

It means that we help people get off psychiatric medications safely for the brain and for the body.

So if you're interested in learning a little bit more about that or starting your deprescribing journey, reach out to us at thegastliftruth podcast at gmail.com.

So our guest today, everyone, that we have is Sarah Price Hancock.

Sarah is a nationally certified rehabilitation counselor and former professor of clinical psychiatric rehabilitation at San Diego State University.

After developing neurological complications following electroconvulsive shock therapy, Sarah began a years-long journey to uncover what had gone wrong, a search that revealed patterns of electrical injury never before recognized in ECT research or in medical literature.

Guided by the simple truth that the natural laws governing electricity's contact with the human body do not bend for benevolent intent, she shifted from academia to independent investigation and patient advocacy.

Today, as the CEO and co-founder of the Ionic Injury Foundation and consultant for Life After ECT, Sarah works to advance safety standards, informed consent and rehabilitation for those living with electrical injury, sequal in any form.

Her co-authored publications, including a cautionary statement in the Lancet Psychiatry, which is co-authored with the World Health Organization and United Nations, and a series of articles co-authored with Professor John Reid, Dr.

Lucy Johnston, and Dr.

Chris Harrup, and Dr.

Sue Cunliffe and Lisa Morenson, which expose real-world evidence of ECT experiences based on the largest ever international survey of ECT recipients, family members, and friends.

Nearly 1,150 respondents from across 44 countries shared their experience, which highlight critical concerns about informed consent and worsening quality of life post-procedure, severity and the duration of memory loss, and other topics that are currently in various stages of this peer-reviewed process regarding ECT.

The survey is reshaping how the medical community understands the true risks and outcomes of ECT.

Sarah Bridges, clinical expertise with lived experience, bringing a uniquely credible and uncompromising voice to the intersection of medicine, ethics, and recovery.

We are honored to have you on the show.

You're kind.

Thank you.

I think I'm out of breath for reading that.

You have done in in a in your lifetime what people would spend decades in multiple lifetimes of trying to accomplish.

Truly.

Yes.

Would you like to start by sharing a little bit of your wild journey?

Because we really want to start sharing the research that you've done as a result of this wild journey.

Certainly.

So I was uh given electro-convulsive therapy when psychiatry deemed me treatment resistant.

At that point, I had been catatonic for an extended period of time, and I was getting to the point where my it was causing problems because I also was not recognizing food or the world around me really to eat or understand how to even peel an orange or pick up a fork.

And my doctor called it agitated catatonia because I also had all of the acadhesia from the what we later identified as toxic psychiatric medication levels.

My body could not break down the psychiatric medication that had been prescribed.

So I had toxic ammonia levels.

That's ultimately what was causing my what's it called?

And my other caregiver just arrived, so I need to let my caregiver know.

That's okay.

What's her name?

Bernadette just arrived.

And I'm recording, so live.

We just need to let our people know.

I have my right now part of the problems with living with electrical injury is we get to have progressive motor dysfunction.

And so I use a wheelchair, and I diagnosed, I've been formally diagnosed with myoneural disorder and specified, but I use a tilt recline power wheelchair, and right now the battery is dead, and I have to wait for an insurance coverage and prescription for new batteries.

So I'm stuck in a recliner.

And so with that typically, I'm in my library when I do these interviews.

Sorry about that.

Where I can close the door behind me, but this recliner does not move there.

There's no need to apologize for anything on this show, Sarah.

There's no need for apologies here.

Yes, yes.

So oh, you'd mentioned you'd asked about my personal experience.

So I was neurotoxic with ammonia.

My doctors did not recognize the original reason I was having problems that triggered the psychiatric symptoms was because I actually had hepatic encephalopathy.

And so they were throwing psychiatric medication at me when I really needed an antifungal power uh regimen.

And so I just became increasingly neurotoxic with encephalopathy, which is what triggered the catatonia.

And 17 years after the fact, I was correctly diagnosed with the fungal hepatic encephalopathy and put on a rigorous regimen of antifungals, multiple antifungals, because by that time I'd been having this infection for more than two decades.

And uh I'm still on antifungal herbs.

I still have a very rigid antifungal dietary program protocol that was developed by a psychiatrist who first identified hepatic encephalopathy, fungal hepatic encephalopathy as a consequence, as a as a plausible cause of some of these psychiatric disorders.

And so, because originally psychiatry, mainstream psychiatry identified the symptoms as a schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type with catatonia, treatment resistant, because I wasn't responding to the psychiatric medications, because you were responding, but just not in the way that uh not the way they wanted me to.

Yeah, I was totally responding the way my body responds to poison.

So exactly.

Yep, exactly.

So then after that, so the the course of action then at that time, where did the ECT come into play?

When I was catatonic, they gave me shock treatment.

I call it shock treatment because that's actually what the original Italians called it.

That's actually what Max Fink, the grandfather of ECT, calls it.

I refuse to call it therapy.

It is not therapy.

It is my husband, whenever I call it ECT, it actually gets him a little upset.

Um, he refers to it.

I love whenever I call it electro-convulsive therapy, it makes him mad.

He prefers I call it ECT because uh, or shock treatment because his acronym for ECT is electroconvulsive torture.

Ah.

And I have to agree, that is my that's how I define ECT, electroconvulsive torture.

Sarah, how does one consent for electro-convulsive torture torture when they're catatonic?

Yeah, that's the uh amusing thing.

My signature is on the informed consent paperwork.

Um I was able to put a my they put a pen in my hand and I have motor memory, so I was able to sign my name.

Mike, I can't even but there is no like, I mean, it's the irony is all of these people that are getting ECT uh on holds, you know, on psychiatric holds, they're technically illegal to like go out and do any number of things outside of the hospital because they're on a psychiatric hold, but yet they're citing a quote informed consent paper.

And the informed consent paper is inadequate and grossly underinformed, in part because it's written by psychiatrists who have no formal subspecialty training and electrical injury or the neurological consequences of the treatment they're giving.

I'm just gonna call it a procedure from here on out because it's not a treatment, it's a procedure.

And so, yeah, it's a psychiatric procedure that uses, as the FDA calls it, intense electrical current um and yeah.

Wow, so I'm I'm still in shot.

I'm just sitting here speechless because that was probably the best question, Jen.

Like, how does one who's catatonic consent to anything, really, let alone something this terrifying?

And the hard thing is we also have, you know, for all of the people who are on psychiatric holds or who's have determined that they're not interested in ECT and so they're deemed incompetent, and then the court can, you know, like California care court or any court can can prescribe it for them.

The problem is these uh policymakers are not aware of the recent developments of the court cases that say, like, for example, in California, the Supreme Court deemed that if a reasonable if a if a reason if a patient has a reasonable uh concern with the risk benefit profile, basically, the patient has the right to refuse treatment, a recommended treatment by their psychiatrist or by any doctor.

So that's really a court precedent that everyone needs to know that we as human beings have the right to refuse recommended treatment, and there's court precedent for that.

And so in the in the past, psychiatry could just say, well, they have antisognosia, they don't understand how important this treatment is for them, and so really, you know, this treatment that because of their anasognosia, you know, this deems them incompetent, and so they need I need to bring them out of this using this treatment.

I mean, if Peter Bregan were sitting here right now, he would be disgusted by the idea that the definition of anasygnosia that's actually not what he is trying to say.

They took the definition of being spellbound and not understanding what's happening to use it against a patient.

Yeah.

That's true.

It's that's the flip of it, right?

Like that's Bregen's whole argument is that you we are in these spaces of being spellbound because of the medications that we are taking, and they have turned off higher order thinking.

They're shrinking our amygdala, they're decreasing the brain volume weight.

And now this the courts, it's a you know, of course, it's convoluted, but they took that definition, flipped it, and said, actually, no, that's that's not what it is.

It's it's the patient lack of insight.

Yeah, lack of insight, and they're absorbing spell battle.

And it's actually from the psych treatment in the first place, or not treatment, it's a psych drug in the first place.

So, anyways, I just oh my gosh, and I got still in my roll.

I'm getting all grow, I'm getting all hot already here.

It is all hot and bothered drinking.

It's so it's so massive.

Clearly understand the the sorry, I gotta catch my breath.

You clearly understand the psychiatric drugs and the injury that they can cause.

So let me help you understand how that is compounded with electricity.

So when you pulse electricity through rapid fire, we're talking milliseconds of electricity, more than a thousand one hundred in a second, when you rapidly pulse it by positive, negative like that, it acts as a jackhammer to the cells essentially.

It opens up the cells and causes when electroporation occurs, all of the medication, all of the histamine, all of the viruses, all of whatever is in that bloodstream, whatever is surrounding the exterior of that cell, the exterior of, for example, the blood brain barrier, that has direct access into the cell and into the blood brain barrier.

And so think of all of the acathesia you've heard about, think of all of the toxic effects that you already understand from the psychiatric medications, and then consider that occurring at a cellular level because the cells that are typically protected from like the blood-brain barrier or other things typically don't are don't have an open gateway.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And so it kind of magnifies, it doesn't kind of, it definitely magnifies, and it also allows like histamine or virus, you know, we all have a history of viruses that live in our body.

It it it all has access to our body and to the brain in places that it typically wouldn't have access to.

So there's no protection essentially when that's when those floodgates open, anything and everything can have access to that, specifically at a at a cellular level.

So there's nothing protecting.

And I want to remind everybody here that just because it is done on your head doesn't mean that the rest of your body isn't also impacted.

I think we have these ideas that ECT is just for the brain.

When when you pulse electricity through your body, it doesn't know to not go anywhere else.

It's an equal opportunity employment.

There are no rubber bumpers.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

There are no rubber bumpers in your brainstem that prevent it from going all the way down your spine.

And your your blood has iron in it, right?

Iron is a highly conductive substance.

Then you also your your your nervous system was designed to conduct electricity.

And so, you know, we have what in the electrical injury community they call it diffused electrical injury.

And so if you think back, I mean, when I was in second grade, or actually third grade, I had a really fun, I had a really fun teacher.

Actually, it might have been fourth grade.

Honestly, I have no reality of it, but people have told me about this experience, and I was like, my brother was like, hey, our teacher had one of those.

And I was like, Oh, okay.

So, anyway, in elementary school, I'll just put it up like that.

Some teachers have like a little generator that they stand, like they have the entire class stand in a circle, and they can kind of like grind this device, and and you want to hold on, and you can kind of feel the electricity going through you.

And you the idea is you don't want to let go because the last person that lets go will get the shock, you know, the shock of it.

And so, you know, so that's that's that's just a minuscule amount of electricity that's being touched by someone that you are not even touching it, right?

That's how the electricity travels through the body because the blood is highly conductive, the nervous system is highly conductive, the nervous system functions on two to four milliamps, which I'm not really into math, but that's like a teeny tiny bit of electricity, two to four milliamps.

If if we touch other people, we do not feel shocked unless they've had electrical injury, or unless, you know, like like you know, it's really dry and whatever.

I can my husband is always complaining because I shock him when I touch him, or like when we try to kiss, I'll shock him.

But he's always just like, This is so bizarre.

I can shock myself going past rose bushes in my yard.

If I touch the rose bushes, I can get shocked.

But that's just how the electricity permanently changes how your body uses electrolytes, and so you become kind of a conductor.

You become a conductor, yeah.

Okay.

Can I ask how many rounds of ECT you went through?

Oh, I had 116 treatments.

What I had what they refer to as maintenance ECT.

Maintenance ECT can be given in perpetuity, and Medicare does not have any limitations, limits.

Um, it's literally the only medical treatment I can think of using general anesthesia that can be reimbursed in perpetuity without proper medical documentation.

I mean, if that doesn't make sense and it is an indication of a high risk of overuse, I don't know what is.

For example, example of overuse, the disability rights in Connecticut was contacted by a gentleman who was court-mandated ECT, and he was refusing, and he said, Please, you've got to help me, and they said, We'll help you, we'll do what we can.

The court issued a stay of no ECT.

The hospital said we know better, they gave him the ECT anyway.

Despite there was a stay, and then ultimately the man won.

He got discharged with no more ECT.

And as he was leaving, the way I understand the story, a woman came to him and said, How did you get out?

You were getting ECT, how did you get out?

and he said, I I contacted the disability rights in in Connecticut, and uh she said, Can they help me?

So I was speaking with Kathy Flattery, who's one of the uh lawyers at this uh Connecticut disability rights, and evidently this uh patient had had more than 500 ECT treatments in five years.

So there this is like America's most uh dark medical uh scandal, they are literally using ECT recipients as basically to fund their hospitals because these treatments are funded in perpetuity.

That's interesting.

I uh I knew a physician who would make fun of psychiatrists and would say this is the only way that they can make money outside of prescribing medications is doing this type of surgery.

Surgery, he called it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and and it in some ways it that's accurate because you know, in 1974, 76, Congress actually held a human rights investigation into human experimentation, and they were investigating psychosurgery, and at the time they defined psychosurgery as anything that stimulated the brain, except ECT.

The reason they didn't include ECT is because when Congress requested all of the experiments, human experiments on the brain, the National Institute of Mental Health looked at each other and probably said, if we give them so much data they don't have enough to in to wade through, then we they won't wade through all of it.

So they released all of the records.

They were doing horrific, they had done horrific experiments embedding electrodes into African American children and African Americans to quote unquote prohibit or prevent violent behavior.

I mean, this is back in the 60s, just absolutely atrocious, horrific things that they were doing in the name of quote science or medicine.

And so they released those and they released the uh records on the lobotomies, but they put a little caveat in the letter.

I've actually read the letter, and it says, if you want any more information, please just let us know.

But that was literally thousands of pages of documents that they the Congress had no ability to wade through that.

So I find it very interesting that they were willing to say psychosurgery is anything that is used to stimulate the brain, except EC.

Because I would think that I mean, I don't know much about TMS, but I would think that TMS is also psychosurgery because it stimulates it stimulates the brain, it impacts the brain.

I have a friend who is grossly injured from his TMS, and he has the symptoms of electrical injury because TMS generates electricity, then it's an electrical injury in both cases.

The FDAA has no record of any what's it called, dosing consensus standards.

I mean, in the case of TMS, we've got like high school graduates that are just dialing these things in.

They're not even they have no formal subspecialty training in biophysics or histopathology of electrical injury or neuropathology of the treatment they're giving.

Well, and it's given in like a like boutique type settings now, like it's like this spa for your head, right?

A TMS spa for your brain.

Yeah, so oh my gosh.

And I mean, I I don't know how many doses there are for TMS, but I know that for ECT, there are at least two most commonly used manufacturers.

And there's a in one of the books, it has like a a table that has all of the available ECT devices that were available in America, the United States, and hospitals were using in 2009.

They were even using side machines.

They've never taken any of the ECT devices off the market.

Just in the in the modern ECT devices, I mean, there's literally more than 2,000 doses of electrical field streak.

Can you imagine?

In this in medicine, typically, they will not allow a doctor to give a treatment if they do not understand how the treatment will affect the patient or if they're not like specialized in that, right?

So, for example, you know, your your gynecologist is not going to be doing cardiothoracic surgery on you because that is outside their scope of practice.

But in the case of psychiatry, we have psychiatrists who have been privileged to give ECT.

And in their privileging process, it did not include studying neuropathology slides of ECT to patients.

It did not include histopathology of electrical injury, it did not include some specialty training in biophysics to configure, you know, to identify where the strength of the electrical field strength is going to be greatest, and you know, what part of the brain is going to be impacting.

So, I mean, when you have bilateral ECT, the electrodes are on both sides of your head.

And so the trigeminal nerve is right underneath that, and all of your cradle nerves are really within this electrical field.

So these are gateways, like all of your vessels, other veins, they go through little holes in your skull right into the brainstem, the reticular formation of the brainstem.

And like that's the gateway to the brain.

So it goes, the electricity like floods into both the vascular and the nervous system, and then it floods the entire, you know, goes down the spine.

When we were talking to Dr.

Bennett Amalu about this, he's a forensic neuropathologist.

He's the one who first identified chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and he was being talked to by one of the nurses who is she was a trauma nurse who she had ECT and it forced her into retirement.

And she contacted him because she wants him to do her neuropathology study when the time comes, and he said, if you cannot get me your entire body, you need to have in your you know in your will, you need to have that.

They need to send me at least your brain, your eyes, and your entire spine.

Wow.

Sure.

So if a neuropathologist is saying that, you know that well, it makes so much it makes so much sense more.

It the because I think about concussions alone, like this is like a electrical concussion repeatedly over and over and over again.

And I I would think that TMS is a very similar experience.

Uh so the way it happens is the reason why it's considered a brain injury in the case of electrical.

Uh electroconvulsive therapy.

It instantaneously so we talked about how the nervous system functions on two to four milliamps.

Yes.

Well, recently they just published a paper psychiatrist did acknowledging that the ECT devices are fixed at either 800 milliamps, that's the MECTA devices, or 900 milliamps, that's the thymotron devices.

So that's exponentially more than the nervous system can withstand.

The reason why we don't die is because the body has a defense mechanism to diffuse the electricity through the entire vascular and entire nervous system.

So that way it's not melting things right underneath these electrodes and whatnot.

So when you get shocked with 900 milliamps for eight seconds, instantaneously your heart rate goes through the room.

That causes your blood perfusion to spike three to four times bigger, more blood perfusion in your brain than normal.

So that's essentially an internal intracranial blast injury.

Then, because then after that, it causes the seizure.

So you will have what they psychiatry refers to as post-ctical suppression.

But in epilepsy signs, they refer to it as you know brain activity silence.

So the brain activity is turned off, and the brain activity is turned off different for a different amount of time for each individual.

One of the research that actually looked at it back in the 70s, with the older devices that were actually weaker than the modern devices, the older devices that's a we could explore that later, but they had people in this 12-person EEG study.

One of the individuals, their brain activity shut off for more than six minutes.

Now, they had a recent article that talked about how the electrode is placed on the trigemial nerve, this and it triggers a trigemial cardiac reflex.

And so it literally says that acute bradycardia, which is the acute slowing of the heart rate, and I might be saying this word wrong, but acistole or acystole, which is electrical silence of the heart, is common in ECT.

Common.

So when your brain activity turns off, your your brain does not breathe for you, your heart is not beating for you.

And so psychiatry says, Oh, but we gave them lots of oxygen, so that's all right.

But the even the APA says that the seizure consumes oxygen at 200% normal, and that the glucose in the brain is also consumed at 200%.

So psychiatrists think, oh well, you know, we've got an ambo bag on them, we're breathing for them, no big deal.

What they forget is that the heart is not pumping blood.

So that means that essentially each ECT recipient is getting a perfusion injury, so it's the instantaneous blast, and then the absence of blood, and then the reperfusion injury when that blood starts regoing back into the body into the brain.

And so it's essentially hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy afterwards, because that's that's that's what we've suffered from.

We've suffered from the absence of blood in our brain, and some of those studies, I mean, when they're having patients draw clocks after ECT, you'll look at those clocks, and they've got like maybe one or two numbers on like a stroke victim would do, yeah.

Yeah, partial numbers on one side, and it literally takes them up to a half an hour to be able to regain the ability to draw a clock.

Well, that means that all that blood perfusion and those areas that were unable to access to draw the clock, that they didn't have perfusion in those areas, and then finally the blood finally got back into circulation sufficiently for them to be able to redraw that clock.

So, I mean, the FDA in 2018, in the day after Christmas, made this huge announcement, and they said, you know what, we are going to reclassify this device for major depressive disorder and catatonia, because psychiatries had 50 years of research, and so there should be sufficient information for them to create special controls.

So, special controls is like specific dosing protocol, dosing consensus protocols, so that everyone gets the same protocol.

Because until now, that's not going on, even now.

That's that's an affliction of all psychiatry.

Exactly, exactly.

There's there's six dosing methods for electroconvulsive therapy, five are most common.

The sixth is a Scandinavian one that they're trying to reintroduce worldwide.

There's obviously more than the 2,000 doses we spoke of earlier.

Then there's also 30 different ways that psychiatrists can administer ECT.

And so the FDA is like, you know what, you've had funding for 50 years, you should have all of this be able to dial in.

So we are requiring all of the manufacturers to submit you know their dosing consensus standards and their so we can have established protocols for this.

And if you do not submit that for major depressive disorder or cat and catatonia by June of 2019, then this device will be deemed adulterated.

And for any other diagnosis, they haven't done sufficient research to prove safety and efficacy.

And so that is still a class three device, experimental.

And so if you do not submit pre-market approval amendments, so we're talking animal studies that establish dosing consensus protocols and safety limits from dosing.

If you do not submit this by March 26, 2019, it's the day before my birthday, that's how I can remember the date.

If you do not submit that by March 26th, then this device will be deemed adulterated, subject to seizure and condemnation.

So that means that the federal government literally ruled there was this insufficient data for safety and effectiveness, and this device will be deemed adulterated if you don't comply.

So fast forward from 2019 to 2023, there was a federal court case and in Florida, and there was one in California, then they had a medical device expert who went through all of the FDA documents and detailed how the manufacturer never submitted any safety studies, never submitted any safety testing.

So the real question is why didn't the FDA put a moratorium on ECT in the United States?

They said that if they did not receive this data, then it would be deemed adulterated, subject to condemnation seizure, and that the only way to give ECT is if a hospital filed an official investigational device exemption with the FDA, meaning that it is for a clinical trial that will have IRB supervision over the trial.

That's the only way ECT can be given legally, according to federal law, today, since 2019.

And it's really like I need to have a conversation with Robert Kennedy because he needs to understand what he's over right now as secretary of the HHS.

He is over the human experimentation, he is over the FDA, and he is also over Medicare.

And in fiscal year 25, members of the American Psychiatric Association, I assume, petitioned the Center for Medicare System, CMS, to increase reimbursement rates for ECT.

So in fiscal year 25, cumulative reimbursement for all of Medicare went down.

I forget the exact percentage, but for ECT it went up 72%.

The first thing that comes to my mind is why aren't neurosurgeons doing this?

Why is neurology not part of any of these conversations?

Why is it psychiatry?

I don't that's the one thing I don't understand.

Like if you're if you're looking at who is more equipped to do this, well, that's who would be more equipped to prescribe any kind of medication.

Yeah, that's any kind of treatment.

The problem is in American medicine right now, they're getting dual board certified.

So we have neurologists who are board certified now in psychiatry and neurology.

And so the problem is the textbooks say that ECT is safe enough to be able to do that.

Imagine those neurologists don't even prescribe meds because they're like, nope.

Not touching.

They probably don't, right?

Like they're they're probably very like ineffective prescribers because it really depends.

It really depends on the neurologist because some neurologists are getting swept up in this.

I mean, they're like I had a neurologist the other several months ago.

I had an entire EEG survey, three days video survey of my brain.

And the psychiatrist or the neurologist is telling me, well, I can prescribe youpra, which is an anti-seizure medicine.

And I said, I can't take kepra.

And he's like, Why not?

I said, because it acts on potassium channels, and I have nomocalemic hypochalemia.

And because of the electrical injury, my my body does not, it has problems taking up some potassium.

And I said, if you if you lower my potassium rates, you will stop my heart.

And he just looks at me and he's like, Keper doesn't act on your potassium channels.

And I was like, That's the mechanism of action of that drug.

That was the mechanism of action of that drug.

Like, I'm just like, can you please document that in my file, please?

Verbatim.

I was, I was like, All right, let's let let's let go of the whole neurologist.

Maybe they they're too smart and they won't prescribe drugs theory.

I'm sorry, throw that one out the window.

I do, I was just I do want to absolutely switch gears a little bit and talk because we only have we don't have that much time left.

But I would really like to talk about the research because I believe it's more focused on informed consent, if that's my correct belief of the research that you've been part of.

The first I talk about all the other stuff.

This is what I should have put.

Oh, you're good.

The first, so we did we have the largest international survey ever.

And in this survey, we have more than 1100.

It was a 1144 people response after we took out all the duplicates based on IP address.

And so and the straight lacers, you know, the people who do all good or all bad.

We took out all of that.

And afterwards, it was 1,144.

That's a lot of good responses, by the way.

When you take out all the other stuff, that's a really good sample size.

Yeah.

It's a huge, huge goal.

40, 44, 46 percent, I don't remember the exact number, of them were people who were living in America.

They were it was largely English speaking respondents because we did not have the capacity to translate the survey into other languages.

So that's an unfortunate consequence, but it is a very large null.

And since internationally and you know locally, nationally, internationally, there are no dosing consensus standards.

So it really doesn't matter, you know, where the person is from.

We can compare it because in community settings, doctors are have free reign to use whatever medical tradition they choose to follow in their prescribing practices.

So um, yeah.

So there were 80 questions in this survey.

There's way too much data to publish in just one article.

So we actually have 10 to 12 articles in the works, seven of which or eight of which are in some portion of the peer review process.

We just ref, I just received word today that another one of our articles will be published on October 22nd.

But that is specifically with the answers to the questions of ECT consequences outside of memory loss.

That will be published in the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing.

Why you mentioned we did publish our first article, it was actually in the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, and that same week uh that article was about whether ECT works and how it impacts quality of life.

And then we have the that same week we had our journal article that published in the Journal of Medical Ethics that was specific to whether or not people felt that they were adequately informed.

And a large portion portion, a large portion.

Do you have the stats right?

So I have some stats here, and I don't I don't know if they're correct.

Among ECT recipients, 59% reported they had not been given adequate information prior to treatment, and 17% say they were unsure, which means only about probably less than 24% felt they had been given adequate information.

And I would think that that 24% was probably I'm I'm gonna make some gross generalizations here.

Maybe they felt they were adequately informed because they weren't as harmed as some of the others, you know, so that they felt like they knew what they were going into.

I don't know.

I I think that that's correct because I can guarantee you they were not informed about the delayed consequences of electrical injury.

And so, like I have a friend who feels that ECT saved his life.

Who am I to deny him?

Right, he clearly had a massive change after his ECT.

Fortunately, now he's starting to experience the symptoms of delayed electrical injury, so difficulty swallowing, difficulty speaking, you know, slurred speech.

And this these, you know, when you were electrocuting these nerves right here, that's that is your speech, that is your swallowing.

And so, you know, I they did a I'm gonna go back to our research.

Yes, we the majority of the people who responded, both the patients and their family members and friends, said that they felt that they were inadequately informed.

That really spoke to my heart because a documentarian interviewed my mom.

We're working on a documentary series of my journey.

And when they interviewed my mom, my mom just started bawling because she recounted it.

She recounted picking me up from outpatient ECT in tears because I looked at her after she just dropped me off an hour before and said, Who are you again?

I didn't even recognize my mom.

And she said something went wrong.

They were not consented.

My parents were doing their very best with the information that they were given.

And I want anyone within the sound of my voice to know they cannot hold themselves or any family member accountable for what they did not know.

This has destroyed families because there are some people who were given ECT because the family member signed off on it.

The family member acted on the best information they had.

That were they were given by a doctor who never studied it and was just speaking to medical tradition.

And I really my heart breaks for the families who have been destroyed.

I have one friend who participated in the survey.

Her sister-in-law was killed shortly after the very first treatment because that instantaneous perfusion ruptured a bleed in her brainstem.

So she awoke in a panic, and then they could not intubate her because they did not have intubation supplies in the outpatient clinic, so they had to call and wait for an ambulance.

Meanwhile, she's having this blade brainstem bleed, and so this woman is being carted off to an ER with a brainstem bleed, and they had to do emergency surgery on her to alleviate the pressure.

And her daughter, who was a newly minted adult, had to make the decision two weeks later whether or not to turn off her mom's life support.

Because she never regained consciousness after the bleed.

Because we are the least of these.

We are people who have psychiatric diagnoses are not being taken considered as humans, they are not being recognized.

We have been subject to unmonitored human experimentation, which was outlawed after World War II.

And when I say that, it's not hyperbole.

No, nobody has taken me seriously.

The World Health Organization says that giving ECT without informed consent is a form of torture.

And I have to agree because finding help for yourself after ECT, you I have cannot count the number of doctors who have turned me away because after they do the exam, after they understand what's happened, after they recognize the extent of my electrical injury, they say, I'm sorry you are outside of my scope of practice.

You need to find a doctor who understands electrical injury.

Electrical injury is not a common topic in medical school.

Finding a doctor who understands electrical injury.

There's literally not a subspecialist, subspecialist training in America medical schools on electrical injury.

So basically, ECT, my psychiatrist, forced me into a medical field that is outside of everyone's scope of practice, which is basically patient abandonment.

We have no ability to get help for the injuries that we have.

So that's why when you look at the Journal of International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, when it talks about the survey response, do you have that one where it says, Does ECT work?

And it asks about quality of life after ECT?

I do not.

I don't have it.

I did, and now it's gone.

But I did have a qu I did have a question about that because I can't stand the word works.

Does ECT or anything else work?

What is the word work?

What does that word even how is how is that defined?

Yeah.

How is that defined?

And people define it in so many different ways.

But I the the biggest the biggest thing for me as you were talking was thinking about when when because I've had clients that do have done ECT, and they're they are mostly told about short-term memory loss, is the thing, but that's it.

Like it's well, there might be a little short-term memory loss, and that's it.

Well, of course, by that if you're if it's presented like that, like really benign, but if you present it, let me tell you, if you made the informed consent video that every patient had to listen to, if this episode becomes the full informed consent video for anyone trying or thinking about ECT, let this be the video for you to watch because I was like, all this video is is informed consent.

Like everything you've done here today has been given full informed consent to our listeners.

And for that, I am so appreciative for you sharing your story with us today.

Powerful, difficult, yeah, empowering because I think we have dismissed ECT as you know just something relatively harmless done every day, blah, blah, blah.

Same with TMS, all these things.

But if this is the full informed consent video, people need to watch.

They need to share this video to people who are thinking about it, they need to share this video with people who have been injured because their voices are not being heard at all.

So we need to share this interview with policymakers, physicians, your psychiatrists, like everywhere.

Share this video with Robert Kennedy because he needs to understand.

I mean, when you perfuse the brain, that intense three to four times intensity as normal that creates microvascular ruptures.

And the only way you can actually see the damage is by looking for the iron deposition that's left behind.

That iron deposition oxidizes as you age, so you develop a rusty brain.

So that's why you develop this continuing to progressive injury, whether it's later diagnosed as ALS or Parkinsonism or PSP, any of these other neurodegenerative diseases, it's a consequence of having this rust in your nervous system that is just progressively deteriorating your body's ability to send signals back and forth to the important organs of your body.

When they were first trying to identify what had happened to me, they were testing all of my peripheral organs, they're testing my bladder, they're testing my heart, they're testing my like eyes, they're testing like all of the my my ears.

It's a brain issue.

And Dr.

Bragan was absolutely right when he said it causes global dysfunction.

This is global dysfunction.

This is what happens to us as our body ages away from ECT.

Well, thank you so much for being here.

I could listen to you talk for another day and a half on this, I'm sure.

And my research team is probably really sad that I didn't go into all of the other things.

But we have an entire series of articles and you can add them to the show notes.

So they're open and you also have more research coming out.

So whenever you want to share that, we're open to you coming back and sharing all the wonderful work you're doing.

Unfortunately, because of your own injury.

But, you know, if this helps you make sense of it and can help other people, then keep on keeping on, Sarah.

So if you guys have hung out with us for this far, this is the Gaslit Truth Podcast.

Please make sure you give us all five stars, nothing less than five, all of them.

Share this episode with all of your friends and family.

And also feel free to share with us your gaslit truth at thegaslit truth podcast at gmail.com.