Eoghan Harris (Independent)

I regret to have to rain on the parade of my liberal friends. To be in favour of ECT is like being for the devil or tsunamis, but nevertheless the truth is the truth. I was the first person to make a programme on mental health in Ireland that reached a mass audience and caused changes in public attitudes. To do that I was given resources by RTE which had never been given before. I did months of research and interviewed pretty much every psychiatrist in Ireland and in Britain. I interviewed people such as Spike Milligan, particularly on the question of ECT.

Of three things I discovered, the first was that the politics of psychiatry is simply that, politics. There are a series of political fashions in psychiatry that come and go. Members will recall the notion a few years ago that we return all the mental patients to the community, with the result that people could be found urinating in the National Gallery downtown because there was no one to take them in. The notion of the hospital as a sanctuary was repudiated.

Second, I discovered that most of the notions held by the liberal left on the matter of psychiatry came from a film, "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", a real fantasy of the 1960s which seemed to believe there was no such objective condition as chemically caused mental illness. A political row has been going on ever since between the so-called medical and psychological models, whereas in fact so little is known about mental health that the best which may be done most of the time is to be empirical, to determine what works and what does not. In that regard it is quite ridiculous to say that the doctors do not really know how ECT works.