It must get really tiring to report on items like this. I fully support your position on ECT. Forced use is torture, voluntary use should be accompanied by informed consent.

Just when I think I cannot be shocked, horrified, suprised or disgusted any more by pharma/psych, I am. sheesh. this is appalling.

Good lord! Scary.

Re: "I've never heard of ECT being used on youngsters (let's say under 12) in the US much less anywhere else"

If you follow electroshock legislation seeking to ban it under any given age you'll hear about it soon enough. Shock advocates and the shock industry don't want children to lose "access" to it and lobby strenuously against any prohibitions.

One group apparently being targeted is children with autism. See

http://www.autismvox.com/ect-and-autism/

and

http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/ymehy/article/PIIS0306987704002397/abstract

Shocking kids isn't new. While visiting at Pilgrim State Psychiatric Center as a paralegal with the local P & A office I met a man in his thirties who was subjected to electroshock (and experimental hallucinogens) by Dr. Loretta Bender at Creedmoor State Hospital. He was ten years old at the time and had been admitted after becoming very distraught and depressed after President Kennedy was assassinated. I already knew about Dr. Bender from one of the founders of a family organization (pre-NAMI) centered around Creedmoor. She told me of her refusal to give Bender consent to electroshock her six year old autistic son, and referred to Bender as a "monster." And Ted Chabasinski, one of the founders of the mad civil rights movement, was electroshocked by Bender and other doctors while locked up in Bellevue at the age of six. Part of his story can be found in a 1996 Washington Post article posted here:

http://www.ect.org/shock-therapyits-back/

According to the author

"Bender, who shocked 100 children, the youngest of whom was 3, abandoned the use of ECT in the 1950s. She is best known as the co-developer of a widely used neuropsychological test that bears her name, not as a pioneer in the use of ECT on children. That work was discredited by researchers who found that the children she treated either showed no improvement or got worse."

If Bender abandoned electroshock in the 50s, it seems to have been temporary.

More on kids and shock:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=148627§ioncode=26

"In the United Kingdom, the Department of Health does not keep or make public figures relating to the number of children shocked. In the United States, it is estimated that between 500 and 3,500 are given electroshock yearly... It is a major trauma that does permanent damage to the child's developing neurological system, a form of abuse masquerading as treatment."

from: Why I believe the use of electroshock therapy on children is unconscionable by Professor Steve Baldwin

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19950106/ai_n9628551

"A specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry is calling on the Royal College of Psychiatrists to ban electric shock treatment in children under 16.
Dr Tony Baker says in tomorrow's edition of the Lancet that ECT - electro-convulsive therapy - is 'never the only clinical solution.'...
Dr Baker, who works at the Ashwood Centre, Woking, Surrey, gives examples of ECT being used on a six-year-old boy suffering from the rare condition Gilles de Tourette's syndrome, in which the patient suffers from convulsive movements and episodes of using foul language.
In another case the Mental Health Act was used to override objections by the parents of a girl who "clearly had post traumatic stress disorder after a gang rape," Dr Baker writes.
He says that about 60 cases of ECT being used on minors are recorded a year but this ignores the teenagers who are admitted to adult psychiatric units.
'Young skulls have a lower electrical resistance and for the same electric charge will be exposed to higher current than older skulls.'"

from: Children `should not face electro therapy' by Celia Hall, The Independent, 1/6/95

http://www.questia.com/library/book/electroshock-and-minors-a-fifty-year-review-by-steve-baldwin-melissa-oxlad.jsp
[some limited previewing of the contents is available]

http://www.ect.org/more-children-undergo-shock-therapy/

Yes, I agree with you completely. I just left a comment at Beyond Meds that mirrors what you have written. At thirty-five, I suffered three years of memory loss due to twenty-two shocks.

My brain was fully developed. I cannot fathom the use of Shock "Treatment" in general. I consented to it, when I was over medicated and in hospital due to suicidal depression. It took me years to rebuild my mind, but I cannot recall 2000-2003.

It is criminal to be treating children with such a barbaric approach. We are seeing a step back into the dark ages, with the medieval torture.

Wish I had the money to pay a visit to the bio-f*ck-wit.

I do not always share your opinion on ECT. It is an effective and safe treatment for severe depressed patients but the usage of ECT in children under the age of 14 is definitely not evidence based.

Even in adolescents the evidence is based on reviews of case reports.
Most guidelines are very restrictive for the use of ECT in children and adolescents as they should be, please read:http://tinyurl.com/bqbawu

My opinion on the research cognitive side effects of ECT in adolescents can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/cuhl44

Kind regards Dr Shock

One more total barbarity. Put it on the shelf with lobotomies, prisons full of people with mental illness on you know what meds/or not - placed in seclusion - a major form of torture, chemical lobotomies from the atypicals, suicides and homicides from a wide array of drugs, tasers, and so on. Do you agree that we have gone BACKWARDS from the days of bedlam?

Thanks for working for clarification of this, because that is certainly alarming that children would have ECT performed on their growing brains.

ECT is traumatic enough when you undergo it voluntarily and know exactly what you're signing up for - as an adult. Took me years to come to terms with the 4 treatments I underwent back in 2001. I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like for a kid under the age of 6. I'm sure someone can justify keeping ECT in use, but, a little over eight years after my own experience with it, I cannot view it as anything more than barbaric, archaic, and unnecessary.