Something most remarkable and unexpected has occurred in the field of psychiatry. Led by lifelong defender and promoter of shock treatment Harold Sackeim, a team of investigators recently published a follow-up study of 347 patients given the currently available methods of electroshock, including the supposedly most benign forms, and confirmed that electroshock causes permanent brain damage and dysfunction (Sackeim et al., 2007). Based on numerous standardized psychological tests, 6 months after the last ECT every form of the treatment was found to cause lasting memory and mental dysfunction. In the summary words of the investigators, "Thus, adverse cognitive effects were detected six months following the acute treatment course" (p. 244). They concluded, "This study provides the first evidence in a large, prospective sample that adverse cognitive effects can persist for an extended period, and that they characterize routine treatment with ECT in community settings" (p. 253). After traumatic brain damage has persisted for 6 months, it is likely to remain stable or even to grow worse. Therefore, the study confirms that routine clinical use of ECT causes permanent damage to the mental faculties. The term cognitive dysfunction covers the entire range of mental faculties from memory to abstract thinking and judgment. The ECT-induced persistent brain dysfunction was global. In addition to the loss of autobiographical memories, the most marked cognitive injury occurred in "retention of newly learned information," "simple reaction time," and most tragically, "global cognitive status" or overall mental function. In other words, the patients continued to have trouble learning and remembering new things, they were slower in their mental reaction times, and they were mentally impaired across a broad range of faculties. Probably to disguise the wide swath of devastation, the Sackeim study did not provide the percentages of patients afflicted with persistent cognitive deficits; but all of the multiple tests were highly significant (p Many patients also had persistent abnormalities on the EEGs (brain wave studies) 6 months after treatment, indicating even more gross underlying brain damage and dysfunction. The results confirm that the post-ECT patients, as I have described in numerous publications, were grossly brain injured with a generalized loss of mental functions. Some of the older forms of shock-and still the most commonly used-produced the most severe damage; but all of the treatment types caused persistent brain dysfunction. The greater the number of treatments given to patients, the greater was the loss of biographical memories. Elderly women are particularly likely to get shocked-probably because there is no one to defend them-and the study found that the elderly and females were the most susceptible to severe memory loss. DESTROYING LIVES The study does not address the actual impact of these losses on the lives of individual patients. Like most such reports, it's all a matter of statistics. In human reality the loss of autobiographical memories indicates that patients could no longer recall important life experiences, such as their wedding, family celebrations, graduations, vacation trips, and births and deaths. In my experience, it also includes the wiping out of significant professional experiences. I have evaluated dozens of patients whose professional and family lives have been wrecked, including a nurse who lost her career but who recently won a malpractice suit against the doctor who referred her for shock. Her story is told on my Web site, www.breggin.com. Even when these injured people can continue to function on a superficial social basis, they nonetheless suffer devastation of their identities due to the obliteration of key aspects of their personal lives. …