- Posted December 15, 2025
Most Receive Shock Therapy Without Psychological Counseling, Survey Says
MONDAY, Dec. 15, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Most people receiving shock therapy for mental health problems aren’t receiving any sort of psychological counseling before having their brains zapped, a new study says.
Only a third of patients said they’d been asked about recent stressful events or childhood traumas like abuse or neglect before being given electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), according to a report published in the December issue of the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing.
“This is a disturbing example of what happens when you medicalize human distress,” lead researcher John Read, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of East London, said in a news release.
“How can electricity possibly address child abuse, or domestic violence?” he continued. “These findings are a stark wake up call for a system urgently in need of a fundamental paradigm shift.”
ECT is administered to a million people around the world each year, researchers said in background notes.
The therapy involves administering electricity to the brain while a person is under general anesthesia, researchers said. Typically, six to 12 sessions are performed over several weeks.
For the new study, researchers surveyed 858 ECT patients and 286 family members and friends from 44 countries, including the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, Spain, Ireland and New Zealand.
About 74% said they’d received ECT for depression; 17% for psychosis or schizophrenia; 15% for bipolar disorder or mania; and 8% or catatonia.
Results show that 84% of ECT recipients had endured childhood traumas and 81% suffered at least one significant source of stress prior to their treatment. The most common stressors were loneliness or abuse.
Most patients felt these traumas and stresses were contributing to their mental health problems, with 78% citing childhood trauma and 67% recent sources of stress.
However, only 32% said a mental health provider had asked them about childhood trauma before giving them ECT, and only 34% said they’d been asked about recent stresses.
“These reports suggest that several hundred ECT recipients, family members and friends, believe that both childhood adversities and recent stressors had played a role in causing the problems for which ECT was being prescribed,” researchers concluded.
“These psychosocial causal factors are, according to recipients and those who know them, frequently not being addressed, or even asked about,” the team wrote. “Survey respondents indicate that for some people ECT is being prescribed without trying psychological therapy first.”
A researcher who has personally been treated with ECT reacted to the findings.
“The results of our ECT patient survey highlight the absence of routine identification and treatment of the real causes of our symptoms,” researcher Sarah Hancock, CEO of the Ionic Injury Foundation, said in a news release.
A former professor of clinical psychiatric rehabilitation at San Diego State University, Hancock herself received dozens of ECT sessions to try to cure misdiagnosed treatment-resistant mental illness.
“These results demonstrate I am far from the only person prematurely prescribed ECT without finding out what was really going on and what I really needed,” Hancock said.
Another researcher, Dr. Sue Cunliffe of London, received ECT to treat depression.
“The hopelessness and entrapment caused by domestic abuse gave me just one option, suicide, to ease the pain. For that I was given ECT and ended up so brain damaged I had to give up my job as a doctor,” Cunliffe, a former pediatrician, said in a news release. “In a recent report my GP wrote ‘domestic abuse misdiagnosed and ECT given in error … causing brain damage’.”
More information
The American Psychiatric Association has more on electroconvulsive therapy.
SOURCES: University of East London, news release, Dec. 10, 2025; International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, December 2025
