Ernest Hemingway, the FBI and ECT

Ernest Hemingway killed himself, after a course of ECT (electro convulsive therapy). He was given ECT because he got into the hands of psychiatry and they thought he was paranoid because he was saying the FBI was surveilling him. It turns out the FBI was, indeed surveilling him.

Given I see how often psychiatry and medicine gaslight all of us who’ve been injured by psych drugs and disbelieve pretty much anything we might say about our experience, this story is poignant.

I like to make it clear that in cases such as these, psychiatry is guilty of murder. Hemingway died at the hands of psychiatry, as many people I know have. Unfortunately some people will only pay attention when a story like this is told. It’s then a tiny chip in the fabric of delusion that our society operates under.

Written by Bruce E. Levine: This excerpt is from Medical Nemesis Revisited: Physician-Caused Anger, Despair and Death

The Case of Ernest Hemingway

In the last years of his life, Ernest Hemingway became extremely depressed and ultimately committed suicide in 1961. The origins of his depression are uncertain—one of many possible causes may have been ongoing severe pain from the physical damage caused by multiple injuries. What is certain is that not only did doctors not help his depression, but, by Hemingway’s own words, doctors made him more hopeless.

Hemingway’s doctors leaped to diagnostic conclusions of paranoia about what we now have evidence were Hemingway’s very valid fears. And these diagnostic conclusions resulted in his depression being viewed as psychotic depression, which led to multiple electroshock treatments (ECT) that resulted in Hemingway feeling even more depressed, hopeless and suicidal.

By 1960, Hemingway was depressed and sounded deeply paranoid to those around him. His friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner recounts how Hemingway and another friend (Duke) met Hotchner’s train in Shoshone, Idaho, for the drive to Ketchum, Idaho. When they did not stop at the bar opposite the station as they usually did because Ernest was anxious to get on the road, Hotchner asked Hemingway, why the hurry? Hemingway replied, “The feds . . . It’s the worst hell. The goddamnedest hell. They’ve bugged everything. That’s why we’re using Duke’s car. Mine’s bugged. Everything’s bugged. Can’t use the phone. Mail intercepted.”

But was Hemingway actually experiencing delusions? Later, Hotchner discovered the FBI had in fact placed Hemingway under surveillance, and Hotchner believes that it is likely that Hemingway’s phone was tapped. Hotchner wrote:

Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the FBI released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all. In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the FBI, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the FBI file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.

Hotchner feels guilty for misjudging Hemingway’s fears, but it was psychiatrists’ arrogant certainty that Hemingway was paranoid and thus psychotically depressed which resulted in treatments that, by Hemingway’s own words, made him more hopeless and suicidal. According to another Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway was treated with electroshock (ECT) as many as 15 times in December 1960, then in January 1961, he was “released in ruins.” Hotchner reports in Papa Hemingway that Hemingway’s loss of memory caused by the ECT made him even more depressed and hopeless, as Hemingway stated, “Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business?” In July 1961, soon after Hemingway had been given still another series of shock treatments, shortly before his 62^nd birthday, he committed suicide.

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Here is another article about this story: The Declassified FBI Files on Ernest Hemingway

Here are articles that deal with ECT here on Beyond Meds

More by Bruce E. Levine on Beyond Meds

• Scientology vs. Critical Psychiatry
• Liberation Psychology for the U.S. – are we too demoralized to protest?
• Eli Lilly and the Case for a Corporate Death Penalty
• Revolutionary Road, A Beautiful Mind and Truthfulness
• Comment by Bruce Levine in response to Depression’s Evolutionary Roots
• Suicide in the military, increasing antidepressant use and can we trust NIMH Studies?
• Postpartum Depression: Cultural Disorder?
• Psychologists Profit on Unending U.S. Wars by Teaching Positive Thinking to Soldiers
• Activism necessary if we want the truth about psychiatric medications be heard