Sounds almost medieval, doesn’t it?
Imagine enduring 16 of these “treatments” about twice a week, taken into a small room filled with medical equipment, lifted onto a gurney, anesthetized into helpless unconsciousness, and receiving large doses of electricity pumped through your head against your will, just like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Sounds nightmarish, like torture.
That’s because it is.
“It felt like being raped.”
Imagine that, as these treatments went on, you began to suffer from amnesia, your concentration scrambled and your comprehension slowly getting worse. Each session, you would lose a little more of your mind.
Imagine the horror.
But Chris Dubey, 42, doesn’t have to imagine it. He lived it.
It began when Dubey tried to kill himself by leaping some 60 feet off a bridge, breaking both feet and legs and fracturing his skull. The attempt followed Dubey’s withdrawal from the antidepressant Paxil, which carries FDA warnings about increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior, especially during dosage changes.
“I now firmly believe that my abrupt withdrawal from generic Paxil, without knowing the risks of SSRI withdrawal, was the most significant causative factor of my suicide attempts,” Dubey told Freedom Magazine.
But once rescued, he was diagnosed with “treatment-resistant depression.”
He told Freedom that psychiatrists “said ECT [electroconvulsive therapy] was my last resort.… It seemed risky and I didn’t want to do it, but they became threatening. My first psychiatrist told me if I refused to have ECT and consent to it, they could get a court order and force me to have it.
“I kept refusing.”
But that’s exactly what happened. Probate Judge Robert Killian Jr. authorized that a psychiatric hospital deliver involuntary ECT to Dubey.
In the state of Connecticut, a probate judge can do that. In fact, Killian says he has presided over roughly 9,500 such mental health commitment cases.
“The hospital meeting room hearing was a joke, really,” Dubey told Freedom. “In less than an hour, they said I was so mentally ill that I couldn’t make my own decisions. The judge just said he was authorizing it and that was the end of the hearing.”
“I was treated like a totally crazy person that nobody should take seriously except when I was telling them what they wanted to hear,” Dubey said. “It felt like being raped.”
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights has called for an end to ECT, and both the World Health Organization and the United Nations Human Rights Office have called for an outright ban on electroshock for children.
Despite that, in Connecticut, involuntary ECT is on a growth trend. There were 123 petitions filed in 2018, but that figure grew to 193 in 2024.
At Connecticut Valley Hospital and Whiting Forensic Hospital, two state institutions that deliver ECT, the number of new applications grew from four in 2021 to 12 in 2024, reaching 30 in 2025, according to Kathy Flaherty, executive director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project. That’s a 650 percent increase in just four years.
“I think there are times where the conservator gets a recommendation from the doctor and they just say okay, and they don’t really do everything they’re supposed to do,” she said. “When it comes to involuntary ECT, nobody actually gives informed consent.”
According to Jim Flannery, a mental health advocate, “There are instances where people are saying, ‘No, I do not want this,’ but they’re deemed to not be in their right mind.”
In 2025, Connecticut Senator Cathy Osten proposed a bill that would prohibit ECT without written informed consent from patients—but the bill went nowhere.
“It’s very hard to get a bill passed,” Dubey told Freedom, “because there are people from the other side who fight it.”
Dubey told Freedom that he tried several ways to get the treatments to stop. He pretended to be much improved and told the doctors how good he felt, but they ignored him. He screamed when being taken for ECT, but that, likewise, did no good. Knowing he wasn’t supposed to eat before the anesthesia at the start of the treatments, he actually ate a napkin. They delivered ECT anyway, and he threw up when the procedure was done.
Twenty years later, he is still crippled by the torture he endured. It is virtually impossible for Dubey to hold a job or have a relationship. He lives on Social Security disability benefits and other government assistance.
“Being forced to have ECT was the most traumatic experience of my life,” he told Freedom. “But I later learned that, unfortunately, my experience is far from isolated.”
The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 100,000 people a year in the US receive ECT.
Today, Dubey, whose testimony is featured in CCHR’s Therapy or Torture: The Truth About Electroshock documentary, has become a dedicated activist and peer-support advocate who provides guidance to others and shares his personal experience to promote reform.
“I don’t believe it should ever be forced on anybody,” he said. “In the mental health system and from its aftereffects, I have endured suffering that is beyond my ability to fully describe.
“My life was ruined.”
