ECT was given in the Narcosis Room

All patients in the Narcosis Room were given electroconvulsive treatment three times each week. 

This means that patients who underwent a full three months in Narcosis were given up to 36 treatments at a time when five-six ECTs would have been a normal number of treatments. Some patients were given ECT on the main ward before being admitted to Narcosis so these unfortunate women will have received many more ECTs. For his 2006 book ‘Brainwash’ writer Dominic Streatfeild interviewed an anaesthetist who had treated Narcosis patients. 

The anaesthetist recalls the Narcosis Room which had been nicknamed ‘The Black Hole of Calcutta’ as “very scary”.

“You’d end up waking them, talk to them perfectly – they were not ill-treated in a kind of Bedlam fashion – put the needle in the vein, as you always did, to give them the anaesthetic. Give them the ECT. Then you’d have to wake them up because you couldn’t leave a patient anaesthetised…it was just horrible to go into this room of sleepy people, wake them up, put them back to sleep again, zap their brains, wake them up again, then put them back to sleep”. He recalls what was happening in the Narcosis Room as ‘spooky’ and ‘odd’. Not spooky or odd enough however, to make him wonder what was going on in Narcosis or what it was like for the patients whose brains he was zapping. Contrary to what this anaesthetist seems to think patients were being “ill-treated in a kind of Bedlam fashion” because the Narcosis Room itself was a new kind of Bedlam.