Radically Genuine Podcast with Dr. Roger McFillin

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (00:02.312)
Welcome to the radically genuine podcast. I'm Dr. Roger McFillin. I bet most of you thought electroshock therapy for psychiatric conditions was barbaric. Something from the earlier 20th century that ended decades ago. Well, you'd be wrong. it's upgraded apparently it's called electro convulsive therapy or ECT. It's still widely used today with over 100,000 Americans receiving it annually.

The procedure involves passing electrical current through the brain to trigger a seizure, typically administered under general anesthesia. While psychiatric institutions promote it as a treatment for severe depression and other psychiatric conditions, the reality is far more complex. No placebo controlled trials have been conducted since The devices have never undergone proper safety testing.

And as you'll learn today, the human cost can be devastating. Today I'm joined by Sarah Price Hancock, a certified rehabilitation counselor and former professor of clinical psychiatric rehabilitation at San Diego State University. Sarah brings a unique perspective to our discussion. She's not only a researcher and an educator, but also someone who underwent 116 ECT treatments that left her with profound injuries.

including the loss of 85 to 90 % of her memories from the first 36 years of her life. Sarah's journey is remarkable. Despite developing motor neuron symptoms and using a wheelchair due to delayed electrical injury from ECT, she ended up earning her master's degree with academic accommodations and went on to teach others about psychiatric rehabilitation. She later discovered that her original psychiatric symptoms

for which she received all those shock treatments were actually caused by a fungal infection, not quote unquote mental illness. Not that atypical for psychiatry as their diagnoses often fail to reflect the medical investigation that people deserve when presenting with various symptoms. Today, Sarah is a leading advocate for ECT reform. She's the founder of an iatrogenic injury foundation and has launched a petition with over 15.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (02:27.7)
thousand signatures calling for proper safety testing and informed consent. She's also one of the co-authors of a groundbreaking international survey of over 1100 ECT recipients and their families, which is going to be the bedrock of our discussion today. Research that challenges everything that, you know, we're told about this procedure. Sarah Hedcock, welcome to the genuine conversation.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (02:54.158)
Thank you Dr. McPhilip and I am grateful to be here with you today and appreciate the kind introduction.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (03:03.402)
It's great to meet you and I want to thank you for coming on. Before we dive into your research, maybe we just started off by talking a little bit about your history, your story, and also allow us to just understand what ECT is, how it was explained to you, and why you chose to receive all those treatments.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (03:27.286)
Okay, that's a loaded question and my memory on layered questions is a little spotty, so we'll have to revisit that. But basically, I began experiencing symptoms of catatonia and the catatonia they didn't understand.

what was causing the catatonia. so I had been prior to developing catatonia, I had been put on a cocktail of medications because they had assumed that I had schizoaffective disorder bipolar type with catatonia. And

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (04:21.268)
Sarah, could you explain to my audience what catatonia is?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (04:25.486)
Certainly. So catatonia is, for someone who's had it, I can give you that perspective. From someone who has it, it's like your brain fills with sand or like you're trying to navigate life from behind a very like foot-thick plexiglass. The world around you doesn't, is there, but you're kind of aware of that it's there, but it's not.

really something that is easy to interact with. So it becomes very difficult to recognize even at one point. I remember this. The weird thing is I tend to remember the most traumatizing memories. The ones that I didn't forget are the most traumatizing and one of them is

Quite bizarre, I was sitting in my home staring at an orange and I could not figure out how to access the orange to eat it. I was just staring at this orange wishing I had the strength to figure out how to eat it. I couldn't recognize that it needed to be peeled and you know, it just, I just.

stared for hours at that orange thinking of how hungry I was, but I couldn't eat it. So, catatonia clinically is diagnosed when the person basically stops responding to the world around them. And it can cause changes in the ability to eat. And for that reason, I was referred to the shock treatment.

And I prefer to call it shock treatment because it's a radically genuine way to refer to the treatment. It's not minimalizing the amount of current that's pulsed through the delicate brain tissues and nervous system. And it's what Max Figgs called it. And he was referred to as the grandfather of ECT. I just choose to use the original name for it.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (06:38.91)
Sarah Pryor

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (06:50.794)
Okay. Yeah. We'll continue to use it for throughout the show. prior to experiencing those catatonic symptoms, were you under any psychiatric care at that time? Or did you have any mental health history?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (07:04.3)
Yes, I was under psychiatric care because I had experienced symptoms that they recognized as psychosis. I did experience psychosis. experienced. Personally, I don't believe that I think that they looked at my symptoms, they looked at how many activities I was involved in.

they didn't look at my GPA. Had they looked at my GPA, they would have known that despite taking, you know, 18 credits at Brigham Young University and being, getting straight A's at the time of the symptoms began getting worse. They would have recognized that I wasn't overwhelming myself with too many.

classes or too many activities. I used a Franklin Planner. I had a very organized type A personality where I was systematically working through my to-do list. And so I was involved in a lot of activities. And some people thought I was involved in too many. And so when they discovered that I had a family member,

that had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and I was experiencing symptoms of psychosis. They said, well, that must be what she's developed. But they didn't recognize that what triggered the psychosis was an adverse reaction to the antibiotics and steroids that I was taking at the time because at the time I was actually struggling with pneumonia. It was during the winter in Utah.

And I hadn't responded well enough to the first round of antibiotics. And so I'd been given a second round and also a steroid inhaler. And steroids and antibiotics kind of clear out the healthy gut bacteria and leave squatters' rights for the fungal yeast that's in the gut. And so then combine that with the steroids that kind of feeds the fungal problem.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (09:29.687)
So I tried to explain, if you look at my notes, my medical notes from that hospitalization, I'm telling my doctor over and over again, I didn't have any of these problems before my pneumonia. I didn't have any of these problems before my pneumonia. And they chose not to look at that. They chose not to investigate that. So that's kind of where we started. So.

Basically, that's why I had the original psychosis. I was later diagnosed, like you said, with a fungal infection. It was in my liver. Evidently, I'd had an entire childhood. I I grew up in the 70s and the 80s when antibiotics were kind of prescribed indiscriminately. And I had chronic sinus infections, chronic ear infections, chronic bronchitis.

because I had just had so many allergies. And so I would be on antibiotics six to eight times a year through childhood. And that just, I never stopped eating sugar. And so gradually the naturally occurring yeast in my stomach, just the way it was explained to me, it outgrew my stomach and moved into the next organ, which in my case, well, which in all cases is the liver.

and that it kind of took up residence there. As yeast grows, it poops and farts out alcohols as the byproducts. And so, though I've never touched alcohol, I've never drank, I've never tried illicit drugs, recreational drugs, my body was marinating basically in the 36 or 37 different alcohols that

are byproducts of the fungal infection. So it's kind of like a, I mean, it's called a hepatic encephalopathy. Normally that's diagnosed when it's a bacterial infection because it's very fast moving, but a fungal infection is a little more difficult to recognize without testing for like candida antibodies. And so they didn't recognize it. And they just assumed that I had some kind of genetic

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (11:53.761)
weakness and that's why I was experiencing these symptoms.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (11:59.552)
Did they try any courses of various psychiatric drugs once you started experiencing various symptoms?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (12:07.028)
yes. Initially, I was put on antipsychotics. I was put on anti-seizure medications or what they call refer to as mood stabilizers. And I was put on antidepressants. And also, I was put on anti-anxiety, benzos. And they'd have me take, you know, I took it all as prescribed.

but I just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And we didn't realize that, evidently I have an enzyme deficiency. And so I wasn't able to break down. I was specifically on valporic acid, I think it's called, depakote. And my body couldn't break down the depakote. And so gradually I began pooling ammonia. And so the reason I became catatonic.

was because I had such toxic levels of ammonia in my system, but at the time they didn't recognize that was the cause of my catatonia.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (13:11.787)
And what was the consequences of taking all those psychiatric drugs? What did you experience?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (13:16.814)
Well, I experienced catatonia for one, but I also, I think the medications were, I never watched violent movies, like I never even watched rated R movies at that point in my life. was, you know, in my early twenties and I really grew up in a religious culture where we choose to watch our thoughts because our thoughts determine our actions and our behaviors.

So I had been counseled as a very young child, never put a new thing into my brain that I didn't want repeating or coming back to think about. And so I just chose never to watch rated R movies or violent TV shows. I carefully guarded what I was, types of music that I was listening to. And I kind of grew up in a culture where I could become whatever I wanted if I worked hard enough.

I was blessed with parents who encouraged me to try and achieve my dreams. And so I did have adverse childhood events. My mother was extremely sick. She was a very brittle diabetic, a type one diabetic, and she was allergic to all forms of insulin until they invented Humalog. So my mom was in comas multiple times in my life, which meant that

As children, we were often cared for by my grandparents and often cared for by members of our church, our congregation, our ward. And we were also cared by sometimes the neighbors. And sometimes there was one particular neighbor who found it more fun to force himself on me. And so that happened repeatedly through childhood, starting it.

probably about five or six. So that was adverse childhood events, I think definitely played into some of the psychoses that later took into the forms of psychoses that I experienced.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (15:29.426)
Okay, so take us up to the point where your doctor is recommending ECT. I'm curious to know how it was explained to you the informed consent process, what you may have known about it prior to receiving that type of treatment.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (15:46.735)
I personally don't have any memory of that experience. I've talked to my parents a lot about it. And my parents said that at the time of the conversation, I was at the fetal position of the hospital in the corner of the room and I was not responding to anybody. And my dad explains that my doctor had said that, you know, she's bipolar and her

Her depression has gone so deep and they called it mania, but I never had the euphoria that people talk about with mania. So I was kind of confused about that, but he said that they've merged. And so what we have is just all of the feelings of the depression and all of the agitation of the mania. And my dad said that at that point I screamed, you got that right.

and then was silent for the rest of it. My parents, go ahead.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (16:48.684)
So that explanation just appears to me from a clinical perspective, from a professional perspective, it's just completely made up.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (16:58.638)
That's, I mean, I've, as I've, you know, grew in my academic pursuits, I even at one point was grading papers as a graduate research assistant for the clinical class in my program. And basically we would give these case studies and if the...

If the students, the instructions I was given were that the students could justify their diagnosis using the DSM, that the diagnosis is correct. Even there was like no one real right answer for that test. And so that was just really an eye-opening experience for me. I've come to realize I had such high regard for medicine because they had repeatedly saved my mother's life. So I really held.

doctors in very high regard because I had seen miracles happen with, I called them miracles because we were praying for them to, you with a mother that was always allergic to insulin coming out of comas one direction or the other from either too high or too low. It was a long, hard process. And I'd always, I just, I was saved as a child by a

The doctor, when I was given, when my mom gave birth, both of my lungs collapsed. And I was transferred immediately to a different hospital in an ambulance and in the process, the doctor.

Both of my lungs collapsed and the doctor was a resident and he made an insertion in my chest wall and stuck a coffee straw into my chest and reinflated my lungs. like, I mean, I grew up with these stories of doctors doing absolutely amazing things. And so my family, we had seen amazing things happen and we trusted doctors to know.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (19:09.802)
exactly what they were doing. And I think that's been to our detriment because we didn't know that so many of those things that we were told, like we were told that I would need medication for the rest of my life because it was like, you know, had a chemical imbalance like diabetes. Well, tell that to a child whose mom has type one diabetes and, you know, allergic to all medicine, all forms of insulin.

Like I was like, okay. And I looked at my doctor and I was like, so, you know, my mom has to test her blood every hour. What, what tests do we do to verify that I'm getting the right medication? Oh my goodness gracious. That my, my psychiatrist got so mad at me and I was just like, I don't understand. Like that's literally what my mom does. Like my mom was worked with the prototypes for the pump and she worked with the prototypes for some of the newer, what's it called?

blood testing machines. like I was all about, you know, making sure the dose was right because I'd watched my mom calculate that, you know, sometimes on an hourly basis.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (20:18.944)
So you were provided ECT. I'm curious to know what the patient experience is like and what were some of the short-term effects of the ECT? Was there any benefit to it? How did you eventually resolve your condition from being in a catatonic state and being diagnosed with bipolar disorder? How did you improve? Just going to take us to that process before you really started to experience some of the injuries.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (20:44.398)
Sure.

Sure, so I had ECT, I had more than 50 between 2002 and 2000.

like January of 2005. And then I had it again between 2007, summer of 2007 and summer of 2009. And in 2009 is when I quit against medical advice. And...

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (21:24.108)
The first time the reason that I was able to stop the ECT was because, no, I was not getting better. My doctor did it three times a week, three times a week, three times a week, twice a week, twice a week, once a week. she's not getting better. Okay. Three times a week, three times a week, twice a week, twice a week, once a week. So in some ways it was kind of back to back acute courses and he was calling them maintenance ECT, there's no, like the FDA has no recognized

schedule for maintenance CCT. And so, you know, it was basically back to back acute courses. Anyway, and...

what happened at the first time I was receiving ECT partway into it, I woke up in a unit in the hospital and I was like, completely clear. I realized, okay, I've got something I need to do. I need to go ask my friend to look up this article. And when I looked around, I realized I was in a geriatric ward and

It was a locked unit. I have no idea how I got out of that locked unit, but I evidently walked barefoot across the parking lot to the main hospital and walked into the medical library where my roommate worked and said, Hi, could you please look something up for me? And I had not like strung any words together for months. And my roommate was like, wait,

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (23:04.109)
Wow.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (23:07.726)
What are you doing here? How did you get here? I don't know how I got there to this day. I have no idea how I got there, but all of the alarms are going off. So she's hearing the escaped patient alarms in her office. But to her credit, she looked up the article I was looking for. And sure enough, they just published an article about a patient who'd been on Depakote who had toxic ammonia levels and had become catatonic.

And so she printed it out for me and she called security. And so I was escorted back with this paper in my hand and I just handed it to the charge nurse and said, please test me and became catatonic again.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (23:52.011)
Wow, that almost feels like it's a miracle in itself. Did you feel like there was some divine intervention there?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (23:56.675)
it

I definitely do. I definitely do. And so my nurse, to her credit, did pass that study on to the doctor. And they did test my ammonia levels and my ammonia levels were like through the ceiling. They were just so beyond high. And so they took off.

they discontinued that medication immediately. gradually I started coming out of the cattatonia. And they told my parents, look, the ECT is working. Well, it hadn't worked the first 50 times, but somehow in the last three, suddenly it started working.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (24:52.971)
Yeah, post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy, right? We see that all the time in psychiatry after this, therefore, because of this. mean, it's one of the reasons why people continue to use SSRIs. Okay, so you started to show improvement to take us from there.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (25:01.496)
Yeah.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (25:04.845)
Yeah.

Yeah, I just remember kind of, you know, the coming out of it process, they were trying to get me interested in life again. So they, had a nurse that was like trying to get me interested in like making necklaces with beads and doing some artwork. And I was eventually discharged then. But my problem was I really, I had lost my ability to read. That was something that.

Like I started reading as a three-year-old. I was reading chapter books when I went to kindergarten. And so I'd lost the ability to read, which was really life altering to me. And I had no memory of my university years or my work experience there at Brigham Young University. I'd been a interpreter for the deaf at the university level at Ricks College.

which is now known as BYU-Idaho. And then when I graduated from Ricks, I transferred to BYU-Provo. And I'd been an interpreter for devotionals and theater and classes and...

I'd also been an editor of faculty papers and worked at the humanities department. I can like recite to you my CV, but I don't really like it's not associated with memories. So I could just, I've kept a record since I was 12 in my journals. And so I've referred to them a lot just to kind of reorient myself to who I am.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (26:55.864)
Fast forward to 2007, by that time I'd cycled through 37 different combinations, 37 different cocktails of up to eight different classes of drugs. I mean, the akathisia was so bad, they'd just rip me off one cocktail one night and start me on a new cocktail the next morning. And I would tell my doctor, think I have drug withdrawals, like I feel like.

I'm some kind of addict or something like this is what people describe like this physical nervous system torture. And he's like, you know, there's no such thing. There's no such thing. And he, he wouldn't talk to me about the serious adverse effects, you know, the side effects of the medication because he was too busy. Because he was doing his rounds, you know, he'd see me for five to 10 minutes and

I just, there was this one situation where he'd ripped me off one cocktail and was starting me on a new one the next day. And I said, I want to know more about these meds. And he was like, sorry, I don't have time. I've got other patients to see. And I followed him out, like he stood up and left and I followed him out the door and I was like, then you're fired. I'm not, you can't be my doctor anymore. And.

He was just incensed. He turned around and he was like, that's crap. You can't do this to me. I've worked with you for more than a decade. I know you better than anybody else. And I was like, no, you don't. And the funny thing was he'd got, I'd pushed a button somehow in his emotional because he was screaming at me and the entire milieu.

like stood up and cheered for me. like, like it was really, I think it was quite an experience in inpatient unit. But you were asking also about the effects of the ECT when you wake up from it. Because what they do is they, they bring you into a room. They give you a

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (29:18.19)
piece of paper that's your informed consent paper. On my informed consent paper, it says that I might experience a headache, that I might, that it, you know, it'd be transient, and that I might experience memory loss of the day of treatment, but that would go away. And my doctor assured me within six months, you know, any of the memory loss that I had would come back.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (29:47.523)
But it turns out they don't really track patients. And so they just use these rules of thumb that really have no clinical basis because they've never routinely tracked patients. Speaking of which, you mentioned at the beginning that about 100,000 people in the United States get shark treatment. And that's actually an arbitrary number that was used, I believe, the first time was in the 70s.

And we really have no idea how many people get shock treatment. Nobody audits shock treatment. Normally, like you can tell, somebody's appendectomies are performed in a year, or how many births or how many anythings, right? Normally medicine takes really good notes on how many procedures are done.

But this is really a void. This is something that nobody tracks. So the estimates are worldwide are between one and two million, depending on the person. Harold Sackham said that in 2006 that it was two million individuals worldwide. He said that in a deposition. But it's...

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (31:12.58)
Wow.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (31:15.34)
Not something that we really know. Nobody knows how many people are getting it and nobody knows how many treatments each individual gets.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (31:22.108)
Can I ask you a question? You see a lot of psychiatrists who are promoting ECT as a real effective intervention for people who have treat treatment resistant conditions within the psychiatric field. What is the evidence base that they are using to make such claims? And what is your overall kind of evaluation on the quality of the science?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (31:37.612)
Right.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (31:48.463)
Well, first of all, science. You were mentioning that they have not had placebo controlled trials since the early 80s. And it's important to a caveat of that is that the modern devices that are currently used were actually introduced after

those devices were, the older devices were being tested in their clinical trials. So we don't have any randomized controlled trials with the modern devices. And the modern devices in some ways are actually stronger than the original devices. For example, the older research, they have like 120 milliamps cited in the literature, 100, 120 milliamps.

But the modern devices have, depending on the device, there's two that are the most used in the United States and worldwide. is, Mechta makes, as a manufacturer of ECT devices, their device puts out 800 milliamps. And the Thymotron device is made by Sematics. And their device generates 900 milliamps. So that's almost an amp.

of current. And the most recent research says that these are fixed currents between 800 or 900 milliamps, and I quote, without any clinical or scientific rationale. So they really don't have any clinical or scientific rationale for these specific doses. Now, each of these machines together, in the United States, the commercially available, they can

to generate more than 1,000 unique doses. But the FDA has said that there is insufficient evidence for special controls. So that's for using people with major depressive disorder or catatonia. That's why they required special controls to be submitted for class II devices.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (34:15.246)
there's insufficient evidence for the pre-market approval to establish safe dosing limits. They said in 2018 in their final ruling that there is insufficient evidence. You've done enough research. This device was grandfathered in the late 70s. so this is really something that

you've been researching since then, that you have enough information out there. We just don't know, you know, we don't have any indication of what is safe and effective. And so for that reason, the FDA said, if you do not submit for class one or class three use, which would be anything other, any psychiatric disorder other than major depressive disorder or catatonia. So we're talking, you know, like what I had, schizoaffective.

the diagnosis that was given to me or, I mean, now they're using it off label on people for all kinds of different things like Down syndrome regression, autism, Parkinsonism, progressive seizure disorders. I mean, they're using it off label for a lot of things, but there's no safety or efficacy data for this. So there is more than a thousand ECT doses. There's five different

dosing methods. And this is essentially, this is unmonitored human experimentation. And the FDA said that if you do not submit the pre-market approval, know, safe dosing limits by March 26th of 2019, then the device will be deemed adulterated for anything other than class, any class three use.

And then it said, if you do not submit the special controls by June, don't remember the exact day, but June of 2019, the device could be considered adulterated. And when a device is adulterated in the final ruling, it said that it could be subject to seizure. Like it could be that they can go in and require them to stop ECT. And that's really what they need to do, because this is

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (36:39.03)
a form of unmonitored human experimentation, not just in the United States, it's worldwide.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (36:42.669)
Why haven't they? Why? Yeah. Why haven't they done that?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (36:47.15)
That is really the biggest question. I mean, if I could ask your listeners to do one thing, it would be to contact your Congress people, contact your senators and say, you know what, there was a final ruling in 2018 on this device. Court records indicate that nothing was submitted. And worse, the manufacturers in court deposition and in court...

Transcripts have said that it's not their business. It's not their business to do safety studies.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (37:23.858)
I didn't know any of that. Like the device that was used on me, the Thiametron device, it was literally only tested six times on two Dalmatian dogs. The device has more than 1,000 possible doses. And then the Becht device has, you know, it's 1,000.

So really there's 2,000 possible doses on devices that are available internationally. you know, the United States does have some limits.

But anyway, it's like, can you imagine if you had an array or a table of, you know, 2000 different syringes and the doctors who have no subspecialty training in biophysics, no subspecialty training in the histopathology of electrical injury, no subspecialty training in neuropathology of this treatment, they could just, you know,

choose the dials and flip the switch. I mean, this is why there are, is such a huge spectrum of outcomes because no two people really get ECT under the same circumstances. No two doctors really give it the same.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (38:47.492)
Yeah, to me, it's a really strong reflection of the psychiatric establishment's perspective on those who are suffering. They really are guinea pigs and the lack of empathy to make sure that your interventions are so sound methodologically that they're safe and they really do have profound effects on quality of life. Since that doesn't exist in the psychiatric field,

It's very difficult for me to not see it through the lens of a profession that just lacks a moral authority.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (39:26.604)
Yeah, I agree. I think there are well-intentioned people who have been misguided by people who might not have the best of intentions. And I think that it's just become very dangerous because, mean, here we have so many humans who have gone to medical school, they've put themselves in debt, they get to the part where they have to do their

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (39:40.814)
Yeah.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (39:55.929)
know, their rotations and they get put in front of a patient that is going to be given to shock treatment. And, you know, this, this resident has no idea, you know, what, how to configure a dose. So they're literally just going on the medical traditions of their, their attending. So they're there next to them. And you know, the attending says, well, this is the way I like to do it. You know, it's kind of an art. This is the way I do it.

And I mean, it's literally medical tradition. It's medical tradition not founded in clinical science. Like for example, Richard Abrams in his court testimony, when he was asked about, you know, how did they determine that a seizure of 30 seconds was clinically, would it make, it would improve clinical outcomes? Why did you set it at 30 seconds?

He kind of talked around it for a bit. The lawyer came back. He's like, why did you set it at, know, why is the rule of thumb? The seizure has to last 30 seconds. And Richard Abrams literally says, plucked it out of the air, I suppose.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (41:16.248)
That's my life.

For our audience who doesn't know, just lost connection for a little bit. And then to get back on, there was a bit of an echo. Can you explain to the audience what happened to you from that echo? And then that's a good starting off point for the consequences of all the ECT that you received.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (00:26.142)
I'm you might have noticed that my speech broke down. It was the difficulty of the coordination of my speech. And my doctors have linked that as a

direct consequence of the shock treatment. My neurologists looking at it physiologically noticed that they put the bilateral ECT, they put the electrodes directly on the trigeminal nerves.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (01:19.51)
The nervous system functions on about two to four milliamps of current, and then they flooded it with 900 milliamps for nine seconds. The trigeminal nerve and the other cranial nerves, the electrical field can cover the entire face. And with repeated, they call it

massive irritation of the trigeminal region. Chronic massive irritation of that region has changed how my nerves, my cranial nerves work. it's the sensory input. There's a nerve that's in your ear that's a break off of the trigeminal nerve that dampens.

Sound can help you ignore sound. That nerve is injured. And so I've developed something that's called a hyperacusis of my brain. The sound, when I hear sound, it doesn't just go away, it keeps going. Kind of like a violin string keeps vibrating. And my problem is since these nerves are so

injured, are flooded with input. I have angiopathy in my brainstem and especially in the central pontine area. But also my brainstem has angiopathy, which is like vascular consequences of repeatedly spiking the blood perfusion three to four times normal with each shock.

treatment, can spike your heart rate as high as 200. So it's caused from the electricity, not from the...

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (03:27.23)
not from the seizure and they can't really mitigate that without risking you know stopping your heart and the heart will stop in a lot of cases it's a common they said in their article Sartorius said that Bradycardia which is the acute slowing of the heart and asastole I don't know if I'm saying that right I'm not medically trained but

Acestole is a complete absence of electrical, electricity in the heart. The seizure is so violent. It consumes 200 % glucose at 200 % and oxygen at 200%. And then you have this vascular, blast injury, internal blast injury, essentially. So yeah.

Dr. Omalu, who is the neuropathologist of that first identified the chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the NFL players. I was in a meeting with him, but the Department of Rehabilitation, it was the Traumatic Brain Injury Advisory Board. And they were discussing the importance of perhaps creating a registry for people living with traumatic brain injury. And they were talking about, know, recruiting people.

encouraging, like, for example, emergency room doctors to add people to this list in California. And I piped up and raised my hand. said, but what about the people who have repetitive traumatic brain injuries that aren't seen in the ER? he, at the time, I didn't know who he was or, you know, I had no idea who he was. And I said,

What does you know what about them and he's like, well, could you give me an example? It was this man with this very thick African accent At the time, you know, I had no idea who he was and I said well, know and I gave him the example of the NFL players not knowing that he was the one who first identified it all of those, you know concussions had caused these repetitive traumatic brain injury and

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (05:53.647)
And I said, and for example, you I live with the consequences of repetitive traumatic brain injury, I would imagine, because I've had electroconvulsive therapy. And he just stopped the meeting right there. And then he was like, well, first of all, like he just said it so matter of factly. the electroconvulsive therapy, it's very easy to identify any brain under a microscope.

where the individual has had electroconvulsive therapy and everyone who's had an electroconvulsive therapy, they need to be seen through two lenses. They need to be seen through the lens of repetitive traumatic brain injury. They need to be seen through the lens of repetitive electrical trauma. And he was the second person who'd said that to me. The first person was a trauma nurse in Oregon, Deborah, who also had ECT.

She said that I needed to start looking at my injury through the scope of the electrical injury. And Dr. Amalu said, you know, the natural laws governing electricity's contact with the human body are not meant for benevolent intent. And I was like, yeah, you know, there's no rubber bumpers to prevent the electricity from going into the brainstem.

It activates the vagus nerve. So it goes down and triggers the, they call it the trigeminal cardiac reflex. All of the nerves that are involved in the trigeminal cardiac reflex have now been changed and altered because of the chronic ECT. So as I age, you know, when you get these blast injuries, it creates microvascular ruptures.

And so one of the ways they can identify electrical injury, like if I had been a electrician, they could do an MRI, like they call it a 3T MRI MP rage or a 3T MRI SWI, which is a weighted imaging. Then they just change the settings and they look for iron deposition.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (08:16.85)
Well, the problem with iron deposition in your tissues is the oxidative stress of aging, you know, that tissue is not supposed to have iron in it and that iron will rust. So basically as you age, these delayed electrical injuries will develop. And so I began experiencing delayed electrical injury probably about three years after.

ECT. Well, I guess the first time that I started experiencing consequences of electrical injury was I had a after I'd quit ECT against medical advice, I like a couple months later, I had a

dental procedure where they used a sodium blocker on me. And I was okay during the anesthesia until they sat me up. And then once they sat me up, they said, my goodness, she's having a seizure. And I'm thinking, but is it a seizure? Cause I can understand what's going on, but my body was violently shaking.

So later discovered that it was like a tetany type seizure because my body's ability to use its electrolytes have just been permanently altered. So when they get out of balance, they have to go through like a process of re-normalizing. So first it was, I had like a tetany type seizure and then I had a hemiplegic migraine, which they thought, my goodness, she had a seizure and then she's stroking out.

But I was alert during the seizure. So we realized finally it was a tetanus type seizure. But the calcium is trying to come back into equilibrium that I have the effects of the hemiplegic migraine. I've just developed these. They're called acquired channelopathies where it's basically your body's ability to regulate your electrolytes is breaking down. And it causes things like dystonia,

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (10:27.57)
know, severe muscle contractions, severe spasms, it causes problems with periodic paralysis, causes problems with seizures. So the type of seizure that I just experienced just now, which is why I'm so tired, was an audiogenic reflexive seizure because of the echo, trying to process the echo and then coordinate the motor movement.

afterwards is challenging. So I can no longer listen to a lot of music, have a hard time listening to TV or podcasts in general. I can only listen to them both at low and then when I get tired, I just have to turn them off or I risk having seizures.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (11:16.227)
Well, this is absolutely tragic. And I'm just so grateful for you to be here because this is a stark warning for those who might be receiving this recommendation in the future. I want to get to the study in which you are a co-author. If you can share a little bit about the survey, the international ECT survey findings, because this is very important because I tend to look at some of these survey findings as our opportunity.

to get real world data from those outside of clinical trials. I think it's an important piece of science. Can you tell us about this survey, how did it come about? What made this different from previous research? And what do we learn from it?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (11:59.409)
Sure, just a second, need to make it a little bit easier to breathe.

So the survey came about because there were three of us, myself, Lisa Morrison and Sue Cudliffe.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (12:21.522)
who have had shock treatment.

We were noticing that there were a lot of symptoms outside of the memory loss. And while the memory loss is tragic and profound in some cases, like mine and others, the stories that we gathered in our survey, for example, were just heartbreaking to read.

women forgetting giving birth to their children, forgetting getting married, forgetting their loved ones.

after they'd passed forgetting important events, formal events, obviously memory loss is tragic and actually one of the most obvious symptoms. That and cardiovascular events, 15 to 30, one in 15 to one in 30 people experience major adverse cardiac events during ECT.

according to the latest paper by John Reed. So, you know, those are the obvious things, but there are less obvious things that are more recognized when you begin looking at ECT as a brain injury. For example, by losing the ability to read, I'd lost the coordination of my eyes, lost the ability to track across the words across the page.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (13:59.566)
recognize which line I was on, and remember which line I was on to read the next page, or written to the next line. Balance, mean, and depth perception. After ECT, I mean, I was always, I injured my shoulders because I actually was always walking into door jams. I didn't even see that it was there, and I was just slamming my shoulder constantly into door jams.

and my balance was off. And one of the things they do with ECT to make sure you have that 30-second seizure is after you've had a while, you your brain doesn't want to seize. And so it starts creating, it starts not seizing, given all this electricity. So they filled my body with caffeine. They gave me intravenous caffeine so that I would still have a seizure for 30 seconds.

I wasn't consented to caffeine. I could have told them that caffeine makes me like the Incredible Hulk. I learned that as a 14 year old. I stopped drinking sodas with caffeine when I was 14 because I just wouldn't sleep for two or three days after drinking caffeine.

So I'd wake up from these treatments, like this enraged, incredible hulk. Like, I mean, I've worked at the mental health field. I've worked with people who have addictions and I would liken how I'd wake up to someone like in a meth trip. It was just so much energy, like lifting chairs and throwing them on the floors and just like doing whatever I could push ups.

know, jumping jacks, whatever I could to get all of this energy out of my system because they'd filled me with caffeine without my knowledge or consent. And

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (15:51.258)
So can I ask you some specific questions about the survey?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (15:55.132)
Yeah, sorry, I'm getting distracted. So the survey, going back to your previous question, do you want me to answer the previous question or would you like to re-ask it?

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (15:58.316)
Okay, I understand.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (16:07.728)
Please, yeah, go right ahead. can answer.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (16:10.339)
Sorry, I got distracted. There's a group online on Facebook. It's an international support group of people who have had electroconvulsive therapy. It's a survivors group. And we started a poll in there to see if other people were having symptoms in addition to the acknowledged memory loss or sometimes not acknowledged memory loss.

And we started getting all kinds of people reporting all kinds of symptoms, dystonia, gastroparesis, balance problems, coordination problems, ataxia. We even have some members who have early diagnosis, Alzheimer's in their 30s. We have people who've broken their teeth.

We have people who've developed lipomas along their spinal cord, along their spine. Lipomas, you know, what one woman calls it her shark fin. She's got a large, large fat deposit down her spine. That's really because the electricity goes down the spine. There's no bumper like stopping it in the brain. It just continues. It's called the fuse electrical injury.

And so I took all of these results. printed out the.

printed out the survey and I took it to Dr. John Reed and I said, you know, I really appreciate all of the work you've done on ECT for decades and raising awareness of the memory loss of the issues. I really think we need to look at more than just the memory loss. And he was looking at the numbers of people reporting that they'd lost their ability to read, they lost their ability to drive, they

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (18:14.043)
lost their ability to orient themselves and their whole day lost their job. And he was like, you know what, there is something here. So we used that poll, that group poll kind of as the basis for our survey. And then we took that survey, we created it together. It was myself and Sue Cudliffe and Lisa Morrison. And then there's Dr. John Reed, there's

Dr. Lucy Johnstone and Dr. Chris Harrop. And we created survey questions. And then we took those survey questions and we took them to Mind Charity in the United Kingdom, which is like the equivalent of America's NAMI. And they looked at the questions, they gave us some suggestions.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (19:11.099)
We revised it, showed it to them and they said, that looks really important. then John took it to the University of East London. The University of East London's IRB approved it. And we began dispersing it on social media. The caveat was that it could not be dispersed by medical professionals. It could only be really dispersed by peers or peer run organizations.

And so we had the survey open from January of 2024 to September of 2024. And we had more than a thousand respondents. So it's the largest survey ever conducted on the ECT experience. And more than 800 of those people surveyed or people who'd had ECT.

and almost 300 of them by the time we took out duplicates or took out, you know, if someone.

who's answering it more than once from the same IP address. We took out all of the duplicates. Qualtrics allows you to identify those kinds of things, or if they're like straight laced answers, if everything's severe or perfect, you can take out the straight laced answer ones. And then we began analyzing the data from there. And it was a very intense survey. There was 80 questions.

We had people in the group saying that they actually couldn't participate because they didn't have anyone to help them navigate the survey. It was overwhelming. It was long for a lot of people, mean, 80 questions, right?

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (21:06.352)
So I want to just go over some of the results and get your thoughts on them. The survey, one of the things we want to actually evaluate is this is improved quality of life, for example. So if you're administered ECT, is your life better than previously? The quality of life findings are striking actually. 62 % reported they got worse, with 49 % saying much worse or very much worse.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (21:09.629)
Yeah

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (21:34.788)
ECT is also often promoted as life-saving for suicidal patients, yet 19 % reported feeling more suicidal after ECT. So the question is, how do we reconcile with some of the claims that are made about what ECT does? And are we experiencing groups of people who say they are responders? And then your thoughts on kind of the dialectical...

kind of extremes that maybe exist with this type of intervention.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (22:08.913)
Of course. Well, I mean, I have a good friend. have two, I know personally, know two people who really feel that ECT saved their lives. And who am I to say that it didn't? I mean, with more than 2000 possible doses and five different dosing strategies, I mean, maybe they're, I mean, like for example, on the Thymotron, the smallest dose,

is just a fraction of a second and you only get pulsed to 900 milliamps just a hundred times. And then the dose that was used on me, I got pulsed the 900 milliamps was like more than a thousand times in eight seconds. So, you know, there's a vast dichotomy of outcomes in part because there's zero dosing consensus standards.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (23:07.121)
Do you think it's possible that this could be an effective intervention if there was better science around it?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (23:12.829)
I think that's part of the reason why our recommendations were to immediately suspend it. We need to immediately suspend it so that they can actually do the clinical trials. And I would recommend starting with animal studies because spiking the blood perfusion up to three to four times, depending on the study, for eight seconds, microvascular.

consequences that psychiatry just really hasn't taken seriously or even examined. So I personally, think that, I mean, the sham, so the sham ECT is where they would give them the anesthesia, but not the electricity. And then the ECT, you know, during those trials that they had in days, you know, back in the eighties.

the 70s and 60s, it said that it was no better than placebo. I think that, I mean...

I think that for far too long, psychiatrists who have no training in brain injury have confused the quote mood improvement with the euphoria that can come from a brain injury. Like you think of the football players that get knocked out on the field and then, you know, when they wake up, they kind of shake themselves off. They pound their chest, they raise their hands over their head and they're like, yeah, put me back in coach.

Now we know that that's not wise. They shouldn't be put back in. They need to go home. They need to rest. Maybe even take a day, a game or two off, like two or three weeks, depending on the protocols. But give that brain time to rest. And here we have patients that are getting this treatment in America three times a week. And it's a blast injury. So any time you give yourself a blast injury,

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (25:17.935)
you're going to have consequences, physiological consequences. I mean, have all of the NFL players, you know, had visible problems with CTE? We haven't seen every single football player have that problem. But it's the same with the ECT recipients. You know, do all ECT recipients have this kind of effect? I know people who do, I know people who have it worse.

But I know people who haven't developed these kinds of symptoms. So it's just an unknown because they have, your psychiatrist says that, go ahead.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (25:55.155)
Yeah, do. Just because of time, I want to kind of continue to move forward. I have a question about the international perspective on this because sometimes we're in a bubble here in the United States. Is it true that ECT was banned in Italy?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (25:58.29)
Of course.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (26:07.195)
Right.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (26:11.951)
I've heard rumour that it was. I personally, I think at one time it was banned, but I think now it's used on a very limited basis.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (26:23.282)
Okay.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (26:25.873)
There are countries that still use it without the anesthesia. For example, there are places in India that don't use the anesthesia. There are places where the anesthesia is difficult to come by and so they choose, you know, don't use the anesthesia. So there's patients that are getting it without anesthesia. We had people responding from more than 40 countries and, you know, some people would say, well,

what happens in a different country really doesn't matter because we do it our way in America. But the reality is they use American machines in the other countries. And the reality is there's no dosing consensus standards worldwide. They do not know how to give ECT with the maximum clinical efficacy and the minimal cognitive impact.

Literally, that was said by Declan McLaughlin, who's actually a Mechta device rep, said that. It published.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (27:33.043)
So let me ask you about the financial incentives. announced a 72 % increase in ECT reimbursement for 2025. Geez, how does this kind of impact?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (27:38.851)
gosh.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (27:47.069)
Yeah.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (27:52.019)
the likelihood of reform here. You've described ECT as the golden goose for psychiatric institutions because of the economics. Like psychiatrists could do a patient every 15 to 20 minutes with this assembly line approach with over 500 possible dose configurations, no consensus on standards. Like it's unbelievable. Your thoughts on these financial incentives.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (28:05.607)
Yeah.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (28:15.485)
I just think it's very risky when, mean, like, if you look at fiscal year 25 for the Center for Medicaid, Medi-Cal, or not Medi-Cal, but Medicare, Medicaid, for fiscal year 25, there was like an overall reduction of 0.3 % reimbursements across the board, except for ECT. ECT had a 72 % increase.

If that doesn't increase the risk of overuse, I don't know what would. I learned of an eight-year-old who doesn't even have a psychiatric diagnosis who is being given shock treatment at Vanderbilt. I'm just, I mean, the doctors, think because the FDA did not act on their final ruling, I think that's kind of emboldened some doctors to use it more often.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (29:01.01)
job, peace.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (29:15.055)
I mean, for example, they were even saying the article that I wrote with the World Health Organization of the United Nations Special Rapporteur, excuse me, Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. We were responding because some of the psychiatrists in America were getting upset about the joint report saying that giving ECT without informed consent is essentially torture and that using it on children.

should be outlawed, that policy should be made to use, outlaw its use on children. So the psychiatrists were sort of taking exception to that, but they are not acknowledging that they have no dosing consensus standards. They have no standard practices governing this treatment. And so they are essentially all of them, unless they have an investigational device exemption on record with the FDA,

Every single clinical setting, community setting is essentially performing this as an unmonitored human experiment on people who are not providing informed consent. mean, that was outlawed after the Nuremberg trials. You cannot perform unmonitored human experimentation on humans without telling them.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (30:37.555)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (30:41.627)
I mean, the ethics involved is just.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (30:45.947)
Unfortunately, I feel like this that's common in psychiatric practice. You know, just reflecting on what you said before, because psychiatric drugs are what is provided most frequently. you know, we're up, we're getting close to like near 20 % of people on SSRIs. And I just got off a podcast that we recently posted, you know, just talking about SSRIs as a mitochondrial poison, what the impact is when you

are experimenting with the serotonergic system in an experimental way and the range of consequences. And sometimes the range of consequences are things like emotional numbing or blunting a detachment. And then you can then misrepresent that as quote unquote working. But that's not the human experience is not to feel less. That's not progress in how we look at or treat mental health. In fact, it's a huge step backwards to get people to view their internal experiences as

something that needs to be numbed or blunted, but you can certainly create an outcome measure to say it works. And this is where people do not get informed consent. And that's when you use things like the word antidepressant, for example, or the word mood stabilizing, it is a mischaracterization of what is actually happening, which is deception. yeah, let's...

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (32:07.129)
It's true. It's true. And then you have studied the effects of the SSRIs. You have studied the effects of the Benzos and the antipsychotics. Now look at it from an electrical injury perspective. When you rapidly pulse positive and negative current on a cell, it opens up these cells.

allows the medication to be delivered at a cellular level. So not only are you delivering it, you're breaking the brain barrier and allowing whatever is in the system, all of the medications, the histamine, the anesthesia, you're allowing that directly into the brain, but you're also allowing any antibodies the person might have, any histamine they might have, any...

infections they might have, you're allowing that right into their brain and right into their cells. Like you're literally changing the function of these individuals and their bodies. So people are developing, like we've got so many people who've developed mass cell activation syndrome. They're just allergic to so many things. They have these massive inflammatory responses. You take all of those

serious adverse effects that you know about these medications, you take someone like me who was on six to eight medications when they were given shock treatment. That means all of those medications were delivered at a cellular level.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (33:41.406)
Yeah. One final, one final question for you, Sarah. So with everything that you've experienced and how you've become an expert on this intervention, if you were to provide informed consent. So let's imagine that there's somebody who is awaiting ECT for some identified psychiatric condition and you had to inform them of the potential harms as well as any potential benefits. How would you communicate it?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (33:41.529)
It's a...

Yeah.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (34:10.788)
I would let them know that the devices were never tested on humans. I would let them know that there are no safe dosing limits established, that all of the good studies they've heard are all of the people who say that they were helped by it, that those doctors, there's no way to replicate those results because the dosing is not replicated because it doesn't have a, there's no protocols for dosing. I would explain that.

Doctors who are giving the shock treatment have no formal subspecialty training in the neuropathology of the treatment itself or of the different doses. And I would explain that the doctors giving the treatment have no histopathology specialty training in electrical injury. And doctors in general do not have

subspecialty training in electrical injury. So this is literally a treatment where if they get injured, they have zero capacity for follow-up. Because, for example, now my body now reacts to medication that was previously safe, like, for example, the lidocaine with the dental procedure. that, I mean,

The reason I started looking into the rehabilitation aspect was because there was a woman in Ireland in 2008 published a story recommending rehabilitation, brain injury rehabilitation for ECT recipients. And that's because when she was doing her doctoral thesis, she was studying CBT. She was studying two different types of CBT. And there was a subgroup in both types that just wasn't responding at all. And she was like, what do these people have in common?

one thing they all had in common was that they'd had shock treatment. So you're giving someone a repetitive traumatic brain injury, they have to be able to say, is this going to improve my quality of life? And will this interfere with therapy? Will this interfere with my ability to live my life after HCT and stop looking at things so myopically? Acknowledge that

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (36:11.857)
Mm.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (36:38.536)
There's a lot of things about this treatment that we do not know, do not understand. And it is really arrogant to say that this treatment is safe and effective and to use deceiving terms like it is just a small current. mean, there's multiple university hospitals that are saying that it's a small current. It's not a small current for the body.

for the human body. It's five times more current than's used in an electric fence to turn a cow around. It's like 200 times or more than what's used in a taser. I mean, it's just, it's astronomical. Like the people that are overseeing it at the FDA and the medical devices, I don't even know if they have anyone there.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (37:19.315)
Mm.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (37:29.383)
Not sure.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (37:37.458)
who specializes in biophysics, excuse me, to understand the physiology of pulsing the body with this much electricity. So finding rehabilitation, go ahead.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (37:51.701)
Yeah, the only word that comes to mind for me is the word barbaric. Barbaric, experimental, lack of informed consent, violation of law and ethics. And that's the important kind of takeaway from today. Well, you know, I've taken a lot of your time. And so one of the things I wanted to do is make sure I turn the audience to the show notes where we'll include the survey, the paper.

and your socials and anything else for people who are interested in this issue. certainly I think people who've been in the mental health field have real legitimate questions about what SECT is, because it has certainly pushed on us as something that is safe and effective for people who are in chronic conditions. And I think what we're learning from today couldn't be further from the truth.

up to us to make sure that people are well educated on science. You science is there for a search of truth. It is to protect public welfare. And when something is pushed on our population without that scientific foundation to support its efficacy and its safety, then we clearly communicate what it is. It's vast experiment on human beings, on people who are suffering with, unfortunately,

traumatic consequences. Sarah, any final words or statements before we conclude?

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (39:29.532)
I think if anyone's considering ECT, I think the one question they should ask their doctor is,

how will you determine which hurts to use when you configure the dial? Because the doctors have no formal subspecialty training in any of that. And so when the doctor says, then they'll be able to recognize that they're really, know, what we're seeing here is true. That's exactly.

We're not seeing anything different than what has already been stated by the FDA that there is no evidence of safety and efficacy. That's why they required it. And just, I invite people to contact their Congress people, their senators, the mental health committees in both of those organizations so that we can really investigate why the FDA hasn't acted on their own rulings. And really, we really need to develop.

rehabilitation interventions for people in my circumstance who have been injured by the treatment, who are living with manufacturer-identified serious adverse events. you know, we have been abandoned if that isn't the epitome of unethical medicine, abandoning patients injured by treatment without any formal rehabilitation intervention.

I mean, something just for those who have been injured, something that's really helped me is the neuro optometric rehabilitation with a vision therapist that helped me regain the ability to read, process what I'm getting comprehensive assessments. They take like eight to 10 hours for neuropsych testing, getting an MRI that specifically looks for

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (41:31.006)
Atrophy two years after an ECT has completed and also looking for iron deposition. Those are things that doctors can order and refer their patients for getting referred for speech therapy assessments and physical therapy, balance and coordination, getting the motor coordination tested, getting

You know, lot of people lose their words, speech therapy, or they slur their words as they grow tired, giving them the access to accommodations. Like I use a speech device, it's right here. I use the speech generating device when my body gets too tired to continue the motor. mean, we honestly, one of the things we really need to do is understand its impact on the brainstem and respiratory function. So I've searched for

literally years looking for help for the respiratory dysfunction that came from the damage to my brainstem. There's just really not enough understanding of brainstem function and how little injury can cause.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (42:47.476)
Yeah, I certainly hope that this podcast episode prevents people from going down, you know, this path. And so Sarah, I want to really, you know, thank you for your willingness to come on all the work that you're, you're doing. it's really needed in our field. And, I really do believe that this was a radically genuine conversation. thank you.

Sarah Price Hancock, MS, CRC (43:10.08)
Thank you very much for having me.