Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know about Shock Treatment

Chapter 13: The Lie That Won’t Die

212 13 The Lie That Won’t Die They [the practitioners of shock treatment] are on a crusade to convince other psychiatrists and the public that mental illness is a biochemical disorder best treated with electroshock. . . . The only real check on this campaign to bring electroshock back is the media, because those who consider themselves victims of electroshock tend to either go into hiding, or if they do speak out, they often lack credibility due to their illness. . . . The controversy illustrates the important role of the media in exposing potentially harmful activities and forcing politicians to find solutions. —Vince Bielski of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 1990 For the most part, the general public doesn’t have the time or expertise to pore through original scientific research, or to investigate whether it has been biased by financial conflicts of interest. How, then, are we to tell good science from bad science, good advice on health matters from bad or biased advice? Whether we are deciding if we ought to avoid all fats in our diet, or if hormone replacement therapy is worth the risks, we make decisions based on what we see and hear in the media. But neither do the media look critically at what scientific research does and does not tell us. Instead, journalists rely on the pronouncements of those who hold themselves out as experts. It’s no accident that the men who get the most grant money are also the media spokesmen. Sometimes the media exposure comes first (it doesn’t matter whether the spokesperson knows anything since there’s a script), sometimes the grant money comes first. It’s often a chicken-and-egg question . But with the rise of ECT research entrepreneurship and its lucrative offshoots since the 1980s, getting one’s name and face in the media is like money in the bank. The institutions where ECT is a mainstay (or which would like to get into the business of ECT entrepreneurship) gain in prestige and funding as well from all the free PR. CH013.qxd 12/6/08 3:11 AM Page 212 The Lie That Won’t Die 213 The rise of the media psychiatrist, that hybrid of PR man and scientist, was news in the 1970s, as we have seen. But today it is a mundane fact of journalistic life that, as one commentator put it, “Public relations, whose birth early in the twentieth century rattled the world of objective journalism, has matured into a spin monster so ubiquitous that nearly every word a reporter hears from an official source has been shaped and polished to proper effect.” By limiting reporters’ access to a handful of carefully groomed, mediasavvy shock doctors, the ECT industry makes sure that media coverage is favorable. It also shapes reporters’ perceptions in not-so-subtle ways even before they are referred to the “experts.” One reporter says that when Greg Phillips of the APA’s media relations department took his phone call inquiring about ECT, Phillips immediately responded, “Is this about Scientology?” The veneer of science on ECT encourages reporters to believe that it is too technical for them to understand, and to rely on doctors to explain it, using the same script year after year. But once reporters extend trust to doctors in technical matters, they end up granting them carte blanche on the simple facts that would otherwise be the job of journalists to verify, such as the numbers of persons who receive ECT each year. This is why ECT’s fake “comeback” continues to be, as it has been for three decades, a mandatory element of any story on shock. In the PR era, reporters simply let the media psychiatrists point to their self-promotional efforts as evidence: “There are no nationwide figures of shock treatment cases over the past several years, but several factors indicate a resurgency, said C. Edward Coffey, a psychiatrist at Duke University. . . . Psychiatrists are publishing more articles about its benefits, colleges are offering more shock treatment courses for practicing psychiatrists and medical students, and medical supply companies are producing more shock treatment equipment.” In 1995, the founder of the group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which challenges media bias and censorship, wrote a story exposing bias in ECT reporting, linking the fictional comeback to media hype and concluding that “rather than raising tough questions, news media have tended to cheerlead the resurgent shock technique.” CH013.qxd 12/6/08 3:11...