1 January 2008 Update: New York State Continues Cover-up On Forced Electroshock

Update 1 January 2008:

New York State OMH Releases Limited Data in Response to FOIL Request

by Darby Penney

One October 2, 2007, I used the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) to request information from the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH) about their activities involving forced electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) since 2000. They initially refused to provide any data about the number of ECT petitions they bring annually and how many court actions result in involuntary shock.

I appealed, and on November 24, 2007 received a packet of information that included five tables showing data from the years 1998 to 2006. The charts covering 1998 to 2002 were labeled “Table 5: ECT Court Orders: Capacity Ordered ECT for OMH Inpatients by Facility and Year,” but those for 2003 to 2006 had no titles and clearly did not represent the same data as the labeled ones. There is, in fact, no way to tell for sure what these tables mean. My further appeal for accurately marked tables was denied on December 14, 2007. I also asked for data on how many court petitions were brought and how many were decided in favor of the hospital, but OMH claims it doesn’t collect this information.

Some interesting patterns about forced ECT can be seen in the 1998 to 2002 data. Of the 16 adult civil state hospitals in NY during 1998 and 1999, 11 had no cases of forced ECT. (It should be noted some of these hospitals don’t do any ECT onsite. This doesn’t mean that their inmates do not receive shock, but rather that they are sent to community hospitals to be shocked.) In 1998, there were a total of 23 acknowledged cases of court-ordered ECT statewide, of which 17 occurred at one facility, Pilgrim. Fourteen of the state’s 27 incidents of involuntary ECT in 1999 also happened at Pilgrim, which force-shocked an average of 11.6 people annually from 1998-2002, nearly four times the number of the next most shock-happy facility, Creedmoor. The only year that Pilgrim did not have 10 or more instances of forced shock was in 2002, the year after the facility had two high-profile cases in which activists raised enough public outcry that the hospital staff backed down and freed the two people it was trying to shock.

One can only speculate about why these two places had so many more incidents of involuntary ECT than the other facilities. They are two of the larger state hospitals in New York, but some other large facilities had no cases at all. I worked at OMH as director of recipient affairs during most of that time period, and I think there’s another explanation: the personal ideology of senior administrators and medical staff at the two facilities. One only has to read Linda Andre’s insightful reporting on a 2001 forced shock hearing at Pilgrim  -- click here to read the report on ECT.org: http://www.ect.org/news/catch22.html -- to see how ideology trumped fact in the doctors’ testimony. Whatever the reasons, it’s clear that inmates at Pilgrim and Creedmoor were more likely to have court-ordered ECT than people held in other state hospitals from 1998-2002. Since OMH provided no data for 2003 to 2006, it’s hard to say if that is still the case. But the risk for forced ECT should not depend on which hospital someone is held in.

Despite my FOIL request and two subsequent appeals, I have no more information today about OMH’s current activities around forced shock than I did when I started working on this project more than three months ago. We know from two instances that received attention in 2007 that OMH still pursues court-ordered ECT, but the agency has successfully stonewalled attempts to get what should be public information on how frequently it uses tax-payers’ dollars to force this brain-damaging “treatment” on people.