Ireland has enacted a ban on the use of electroshock treatment, also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), on minors under its new Mental Health Law passed in May, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) announced. The law now protects individuals younger than 18 from a procedure that delivers up to 460 volts of electricity through the brain, which critics say can cause severe memory loss, cognitive impairment, and brain damage.
Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR International, praised Irish officials for recognizing the need to prohibit ECT on minors. "However, like thousands who called for ECT to be banned in the U.S. under the FDA's Final Rule in 2018, the ban should be extended to all ages. CCHR is committed to achieving this," Eastgate said.
The Human Rights Institute in Ireland called the adoption of the Mental Health Act "one of the country's significant developments in the advancement of human rights and in the reconsideration of the relationship between health, human dignity, and the public responsibilities of the state." The Irish Mental Health Commission noted that "the most significant right potentially affected by this legislation is the right to liberty and personal security."
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared ECT devices for patients aged 13 and older for three limited conditions, but the devices are broadly used off-label—a practice CCHR wants stopped. The newly formed Stop ECT Coalition, comprising health and human rights organizations representing hundreds of thousands of individuals, is urging a review of how ECT devices remain on the market. The coalition emphasizes that ECT devices were "grandfathered" into FDA regulation in 1976 as a Class III high-risk device, bypassing modern standards requiring premarket approval with clinical trials proving safety and efficacy. In 2018, the FDA reclassified ECT devices as moderate risk (Class II) without such trials. The coalition states: "This incorrect classification allowed ECT devices to be used on children as young as five, pregnant women, seniors, veterans, and other vulnerable persons…Involuntary application—still occurring in some U.S. facilities—has been condemned by the United Nations and World Health Organization as a human-rights abuse."
Dr. John Read, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of East London, who has extensively reviewed ECT studies, says: "Several leading proponents [of ECT] argued that ECT works because it reduces the intelligence or level of intellectual functioning of people." He and colleagues have published a review of over a hundred studies demonstrating that "the effects on the brain [of] ECT is very similar to the effects of what's called a closed-brain injury…there's changes in the brain that are documented after ECT, very similar to traumatic brain injury."
Robert Rubinstein, a former psychiatry professor at the University of California in San Francisco, compared ECT to "kicking a Swiss watch." Psychiatrist Dr. Niall McLaren is unequivocal: "No psychiatrist needs to use ECT."
A mental health strategy plan drafted by the World Health Organization's Department of Mental Health and Substance Use warned of ECT's health risks, including brain damage, cardiovascular complications, memory impairment, and even death. The plan states that ECT should be banned for children and non-consenting use may constitute torture.
CCHR, established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and professor of psychiatry Dr. Thomas Szasz, has helped obtain hundreds of laws worldwide that increase informed consent rights and prohibit deep sleep treatment, a combination of ECT and a psychotropic drug-induced coma. The group previously helped secure bans on ECT for minors under 12 in California in 1976 and under 16 in Texas in 1993, as well as a ban on those aged 14 and younger in Western Australia in 2014.
