AI voiceover by Hudson at Evernote.
I’m happy to announce that after 2+ years of working on it, my opinion article calling for more research into treatments that could be potential alternatives to “electroconvulsive therapy” (ECT) has finally been published! Now published online first in The International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine.
It was especially difficult for me, not being a medical professional, and living with multiple significant chronic health issues, including a neurological disorder causing a 24/7 pressure headache with brain fog even worse than what I got from ECT. I had also reached out to some like-minded professionals and activists to ask for help writing the article, but none wanted to support what I was proposing.
So I had to do it all by myself. Except that I found there were acceptable ways to use Generative AI to help me write the article, which made it a lot easier and faster to find additional references and reword my ideas. I got a lot of help writing from Claude (Anthropic) and Grok (xAI), which I noted in the article’s Acknowledgments section. I have been told that this article will be counterbalanced by an opposing, AI-assisted article by a psychiatrist who is an expert on ECT.
I had submitted earlier versions of my article to 5 prior journals. Two from critical psychiatry and Mad Studies rejected it, calling it unsuitable. One of those journals did send it for peer review, but the reviewers opined that any future research subjecting people to ECT would be pointless or unethical, since ECT only causes harm without any convincing evidence of therapeutic effects. (My opinion is more nuanced than theirs.) The other three journals were high-ranking mainstream psychiatry journals, who predictably rejected my article by saying it didn’t meet their standards of publication or it wasn’t important enough for them to publish compared with other submissions.
My hope for this article is that it will spark further dialogue that will advance the state of mental healthcare for people with severe conditions who often are given little say by doctors and other clinicians who rush to force invasive treatments (such as ECT) on them. This happens partly because of a lack of education about the limitations of psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, about adverse effects, and about potential alternative interventions. I expect (and hope) my article will rile up people on different sides of the debates about ECT, so that the ideas I raised bring about more discussions that will advance the quality of care for people like me.
I have been actively posting and reposting critical psychiatry content online for about ten years, and I’m directly connected to at least several hundred people in these spaces, and indirectly connected to thousands. But I’m not employed, I’m very introverted, I have been in continuous pain for several years, and I’m not a vocal, well-known personality or prolific writer like some people I’m connected to. I often feel ignored by the bigger voices. Now it’s nice to have my ideas out there in another professional, peer-reviewed publication, citing several of the louder voices so they can no longer dismiss my ideas.
In addition to the professionals who answered my research questions or provided reference articles that I couldn’t access on my own, and the journal’s management, staff, and reviewers, I am especially thankful to the journal’s Editor-in-Chief Liliya Ziganshina for accepting my article for peer review and publication.
Article reference
Dubey, C. J. (2025). Patient viewpoint: The case for exploring non-seizure alternatives to ECT. The International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, 09246479251377340. https://doi.org/10.1177/09246479251377340
