Dr. John Read, British psychologist wrote an article published in Psychology Today entitled "80 Years on, Do We Know if Electroconvulsive Therapy Works?
New review finds no evidence ECT works, but much evidence of severe memory loss."

Part of the article is below

"On June 3, I published, with colleagues, the latest of my six reviews of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) research, in the U.S. journal Ethical Human Psychology & Psychiatry.1 Presumably because it concluded that ECT should be immediately suspended pending higher quality research, the paper received significant coverage from the BBC and other media outlets in Europe.

"My first contact with ECT was in 1973, on a Bronx psychiatric ward. I was a rather naïve, 21-year-old, nursing aide. I loved this job but I wasn’t sure why, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons, five or six older women would always appear, on a line of chairs in the corridor. Most sat with a passive air of indifference. Usually, however, one or two trembled with fear. Occasionally one would leave the line, either shouting or tiptoeing so as not to be noticed. They were dragged back to the line.

"When I discovered they were waiting for ‘electroshock’ I was fascinated. I volunteered for the job of sitting with them as they came round from the general anesthetic, after their shocks and convulsions. They would ask me ‘Where am I?’ 'Who am I?’ ‘Why is my head pounding?’ ‘What have they done to me?’  One old lady asked me, in tears, ‘But why would they do such a thing to me?'

 "Then came the day I was allowed in to watch, along with some medical students. The psychiatrist asked 'Would anyone like to press the button?' All five stepped eagerly forward. As the old woman’s body vibrated, toes twitching, I left. I found myself in the car park, being sick. I knew nothing of the research about this treatment. I just had, quite literally, a gut reaction that something was horribly wrong.

"My next encounter was in my first job as a Clinical Psychologist in the UK in the 1980s. At a staff meeting I waited to see if anyone would raise the issue of the man who had died on the ECT table the day before. Nobody did. So I did. The psychiatrist said 'That is none of your business and I am personally insulted by your insinuation that we killed him’. When I refused to be quiet I was physically removed form the room. Knowing that his notes read ‘ECT contraindicated – serious heart condition’ the Social Worker and I returned in the evening and photocopied that page. As we anticipated, the page soon disappeared from the man's chart. I tried, for two years to get the hospital, the Health Authority, the Government and professional bodies, to take an interest in that page and the case. I failed. But I did not forget. 

"So, as an academic, many years later, including 20 working as mental health professional and manager of mental health services, I published my first review of the ECT research literature, with esteemed British Clinical Psychologist, Professor Richard Bentall.2 We were astonished to find that there had only ever been 11 placebo controlled studies.  Placebo for ECT is called ‘sham-ECT’, in which the general anesthetic is administered but the electricity is not, so the convulsion does not occur.

 
"We were also amazed that the latest of the 11 had taken place in 1985. About half of these very old, poor quality, small-scale studies found a temporary lift in mood in roughly a third of patients. The other studies found no difference between ECT and sham-ECT at all. None of them found any difference between the two groups beyond the time of the last ECT in the series (usually about 10). We also summarized the research showing that ECT causes cognitive dysfunction, primarily retrograde amnesia (loss of memory for past life events), which is permanent in between 12% and 55%, depending partly on whether you ask the psychiatrist or the patients. This memory loss is particularly common in women and older people, two groups which, paradoxically, are given ECT more often than other people. 

"Some ECT proponents try to explain away the lack of any RCTs (randomized controlled trials) for 35 years (57 years in the USA) by claiming it would be unethical to withhold a treatment that they ‘know’ works, from suicidal patients. Such a statement not only positions the speaker outside the domain of evidence-based medicine, it ignores the fact that not a single study supports this oft made claim, that ECT saves lives and prevents suicides.2  

"Another response to the lack of RCTs is that although they are indeed the gold standard for establishing efficacy there are lots of other types of studies that suggest it works, including comparisons of ECT with antidepressants. Another of our reviews3 looked at all such studies in a seven year period from 2009 and found no robust evidence that ECT works, largely (but not exclusively) because almost all the studies failed to provide any follow up data.

 
"Another response to our reviews is ‘Your work must be biased because five meta-analyses of the ECT placebo studies say it works.' And that brings us to the review I published last month, with Professor Irving Kirsch, of Harvard Medical School. This time we not only evaluated the 11 studies, in more detail than ever before – using a 24 point Quality scale, we also conducted the first ever analysis of the meta-analyses themselves.

• The article in its entirety can be found in at this link