I READ with interest the article written by Lucy Stephenson about the Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) treatment of patients at Bootham Park, York, (March 13).

Since its inception, ECT has been dogged by conflict between the psychiatrists who swear by it, and the multitudes of victims and families of victims whose lives have been ruined by it.

It has the marks of physical torture methods that might instead belong in the armoury of a KGB interrogator, rather than the inventory of a medical practitioner.

Psychiatrists deceptively cloak the procedure in medical legitimacy: the hospital setting, white-coated assistants, anaesthetics, muscle-paralysing drugs and sophisticated-looking equipment.

The effects of shock treatment are horrific, but the full ramifications are not explained to the patients or their families.

Worse, where objections are raised, they are overruled.

Dr John Friedberg, a neurologist who has researched the effects of ECT for more than 30 years, stated: "It is very hard to put into words just what shock treatment does to people generally. It destroys people's ambition, and their vitality."

A Royal College of Psychiatrists survey confirmed memory loss as an effect of ECT. Of the 1,344 psychiatrists surveyed, 21 per cent referred to "long-term side effects and risks of brain damage, memory loss and intellectual impairment".

In spite of its sophisticated trappings of science, the brutality of ECT verifies that psychiatry has not advanced beyond the cruelty and barbarism of its earliest treatments.

Physically intrusive, and damaging, it violates the doctor's Hippocratic oath to "do no harm". The ECT procedure is no more scientific or therapeutic than being hit over the head with a bat.

If you are still in doubt about any false benefit of ECT, try sticking your finger in the mains and see if you feel better.

David Marris,

York Road,

Haxby,

York.

Updated: 09:39 Thursday, March 16, 2006