The Grassroots Campaign To Save a Man From Court-Ordered Shock Therapy
Last May, at the start of a court hearing conducted over Zoom, David Russell brought what he felt was a pressing matter to the judge’s attention. “I had two friends that were going to testify on my behalf, Vassil Vutov and John Mayo, and I don’t see them,” the 44-year-old computer programmer pointed out. “In addition, I was aware that a bunch of other people planned to show their support, joining this hearing as observers.”
Russell wasn’t in court because of a crime he had committed; he was there to defend his right to refuse an invasive medical treatment. Due to his alleged “medication non-compliance and psychosis,” clinicians from Rochester, Minnesota’s renowned Mayo Clinic were seeking a court order to administer electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) over Russell’s objection.
If Russell lost in court, the clinicians would be granted permission to administer up to 30 rounds of ECT over a six-month span. Assuming they followed standard protocol, a team of hospital staffers would start each session by sedating Russell with an anesthetic, attaching electrodes to his head, and applying approximately 120 volts of electricity for between one to six seconds, long enough to produce a brain seizure lasting around one minute.
Serious Risks, Few Precautions
ECT is often given to consenting adults battling severe depression who have exhausted more conventional treatments like antidepressant medication and talk therapy. Sometimes, though, doctors seek court orders to perform ECT on unwilling patients. In states like Minnesota, the procedure can be court-ordered even if patients don’t pose a danger to themselves or others. Instead, after weighing “the risks of adverse side effects compared with potential benefits to the patient,” a doctor merely needs to convince a judge that “the treatment will produce the desired effects.”
Those “adverse side effects” doctors must weigh aren’t minor and most notably include severe memory loss, a fact the Mayo Clinic acknowledges on its website. Somatics, one of the two ECT device makers in the U.S., likewise discloses in its user manual that the procedure has been linked to a long list of “serious adverse events,” including but not limited to “cognition and memory impairment,” “brain injury,” and a litany of cardiac complications. “The long-term safety and effectiveness of ECT treatment,” the device maker warns, “has not been demonstrated.” (After Russell complained in court about the possibility of “cognitive impairment, permanent brain damage [and] memory loss,” a Mayo Clinic doctor inauspiciously replied that “we would not be expecting there to be brain damage in a way that one would not remember past events.”)
Later on during his ECT hearing, Russell reminded the Minnesota District Court judge that his witnesses were not on the Zoom call:
I have two friends that said they would attend…Vassil Vutov, who would testify I’m not a threat to myself or others, I get verbally upset and angry but never am I violent, and further, that he is adamantly against electroconvulsive therapy; as well as another friend, John Mayo, both of whom I’ve known for over 20 years [and] are vehemently opposed to forced electroconvulsive therapy. I don’t know where they are. I could call one of them because I have their number. The other one would require a computer to get in touch with.
What Russell didn’t know was that Mayo, whom I spoke to in November, had logged onto the Zoom call in order to testify, as had his other supporters who sought to observe the hearing. The judge simply refused to let them into the virtual courtroom, or to allow Russell to call Vutov—the witness who wasn’t there—because, she said, Russell’s court-appointed attorney never “made specific requests of [their] identities.” (Ironically, had Russell been charged with a crime, the Sixth Amendment would have guaranteed him the right to call witnesses on his own and to invite supporters into the courtroom.)
About 90 minutes after the hearing began, the judge issued her ruling: The Mayo Clinic was permitted to shock Russell up to 30 times over the following 6 months. “A reasonable person would authorize the treatment,” the judge proclaimed, adding that Russell “doesn’t under
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