ECT is feared by psychiatric patients for several reasons. Firstly there is the universally held fear of being rendered unconscious, of being defenceless and not knowing what is happening to you or around you. Also, the idea of having electric shocks applied to the brain, being ‘zapped’ as one anaesthetist put it is terrifying. Those who have previously had the experience of ECT will have even more to worry about. The awakening phase after ECT was described by neurologist Alfred Galling as “A temporary annihilation of the sense of familiarity after electroshock (that) provokes basic anxiety and results in a strong, progressively increasing fear of the treatment”. 

As early as 1941 Giovanni Flesher said of ECT patients “the extraordinary state in which people wake up after electroshock does not escape them, and gives them the sensation of having undergone some grave and dangerous trauma”. Professor Ugo Cerletti described this rising fear  as a course of ECT progresses as ‘tardive anxiety’ he said, “The patient is not able to explain but it disturbs him at times to the point of refusing to continue the treatment”. Only those who have actually had ECT will fully understand the ‘annihilation of familiarity’ described by these proponents of ECT. To suddenly wake to a sense of your own existence and without anything to mitigate that feeling or attach it to, is one of the most terrifying things that can happen to anyone. Even if this sensation passes in ten minutes and one progressively becomes ‘oneself’ again, those few minutes of pure unmitigated existence are terrifying and disturbing. As Cerletti puts it, “the patient is not able to explain” because this is an experience that few people have actually had. A single such experience is deeply traumatising but inflicting that sensation on helpless patients 30 or 40 times in a period of a few weeks is incredibly cruel and accounts for what Narcosis patients now understand as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

Several Narcosis patients have spoken of a sense of shame or humiliation at having allowed themselves to be reduced by drugs to a state of helplessness and of having no sense of what had happened to them. The loss of dignity, self control and the fear that one may have said or done things in unguarded moments is still real for many of them. No wonder so many Narcosis patients dread hospital appointments and have a well founded distrust of medical staff.