{"id":825760,"date":"2026-11-06T06:40:13","date_gmt":"2026-11-06T06:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/825760\/"},"modified":"2026-11-06T06:40:13","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T06:40:13","slug":"did-lou-reed-really-receive-electroshock-therapy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/825760\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Lou Reed really receive electroshock therapy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lou<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n

November 5th, 2026 \u00b7 8:45pm GMT <\/p>\n

\u201cDoctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head,\u201d Sylvia Plath<\/a> wrote in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published three weeks before her death, at just 30, in 1963. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite. I shut my eyes. There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath. Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost a decade later, somewhere around the time of The Velvet Underground\u2019s demise, Lou Reed mentioned in an interview that he was a fan of Plath\u2019s poetry, and had recently read some of her prose, specifically \u201ca scary novel called The Bell Jar<\/a>\u201d, which hadn\u2019t been published in the US until 1971. <\/p>\n

To be fair, thousands of people who read this book about a teenager\u2019s struggles with clinical depression, and the techniques employed to try and \u201ccure\u201d her, would probably call it scary, as well. In Reed\u2019s case, though, the topic was much more personal and uniquely aligned with many of his own experiences as a teen in Long Island, New York. Because he was, to put it lightly, not always the easiest cat to interview, very few journalists dared to tread too close to the bone when it came to personal questions about details from his youth. <\/p>\n

On occasion, though, he did discuss the difficulties he faced growing up in the late 1950s, including a difficult relationship with his father<\/a>, depression, and confusion over his own sexuality. Reed also acknowledged that, when he was 17, his parents sent him to get electroshock therapy, supposedly as a means of dealing with the latter two issues. <\/p>\n

Electroshock, or Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), has always been controversial, and while the methods around the treatment dramatically evolved after the \u201850s, when Reed and Plath went through it, its effects are still debated. Lou Reed\u2019s memories of his experience, which were published in the 1996 oral history of punk Please Kill Me, sound just as scary as those described in The Bell Jar.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey put the thing down your throat so you don\u2019t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s what was recommended in Rockland County then to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable. I wrote \u2018Kill Your Sons\u2019 on [the 1974 solo LP] Sally Can\u2019t Dance about that.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"Lou<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ Arista Records \/ Mick Rock<\/p>\n

According to Peter Doggett\u2019s biography Lou Reed: Growing Up In Public, the musician wrote \u2018Kill Your Sons\u2019 in the early 1960s, even before The Velvet Underground had formed, but he didn\u2019t come around to putting the song on tape until a decade later, when he was starting to become more comfortable in his own skin. The lyrics of the song are brutal and not particularly veiled, leading many fans to wonder if Reed\u2019s descriptions of electroshock therapy, like those of Plath<\/a>, were based on personal experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne, two, three, four \/ All your two-bit psychiatrists \/ Are giving you electric shock \/ They said they\u2019d let you live at home with mom and dad \/ Instead of mental hospitals \/ Every time you tried to read a book \/ You couldn\u2019t get to page 17 \/ \u2018Cause you couldn\u2019t read, you couldn\u2019t even read\u201d: The narrative behind Reed\u2019s electroshock treatments, which was perpetuated in many biographies over the decades, was that his parents had pushed for the treatments primarily over concerns about his sexuality, hoping to \u2018set him straight\u2019, in essence.<\/p>\n

After Reed\u2019s death in 2013, however, his sister Merrill Reed Weiner, a professional psychotherapist, published an essay on Medium<\/a>, in which she offered her own memories of her brother\u2019s treatment, and what had motivated her parents to try it. \u201cPanic attacks and social phobias beset him,\u201d she wrote. \u201cHe possessed a fragile temperament\u2026 Families at a loss for how to deal with their loved ones\u2019 genetically based mental illness were treated as perpetrators by the psychiatric establishment. They were blamed for poor parenting, left feeling hopeless and guilty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiner claimed that, after he suffered a nervous breakdown, medical professionals essentially shamed his parents and recommended ECT as a means of undoing damage caused by behaviours of the past, such as failing to pick up Lou enough when he was still a baby. \u201cEach of us suffered the loss of our dear sweet Lou in our own private hell, unhelped and undercut by the medical profession,\u201c Weiner wrote.<\/p>\n

Importantly, she rather aggressively denied the notion that her brother had undergone ECT to treat homosexuality. \u201cMy parents were many things, but homophobic they were not,\u201d she said. Unfortunately, neither Lou Reed nor his parents were around at that point to either confirm or refute this. It should probably be noted that Reed doesn\u2019t cast his sister Merrill in the best light in the lyrics of \u2018Kill Your Sons\u2019<\/a> either:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd sister, she got married on the island \/ And her husband takes the train \/ He\u2019s big and he\u2019s fat \/ And he doesn\u2019t even have a brain\u201d.<\/p>\n

Would Lou have trusted his younger sister to have a full sense of his relationship with their parents or the reasoning behind his treatment? It\u2019s hard to know. But there\u2019s no doubt that, regardless of the motivations behind the electroshock sessions, they had a dark and profound effect on the rest of his life, locking in a sense that something wasn\u2019t right about him, that something needed fixing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still November 5th, 2026 \u00b7 8:45pm GMT \u201cDoctor Gordon was fitting two metal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":825761,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[149189,223998,102,33325,1906,6623,183001,18194,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-825760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-art-rock","tag-experimental-rock","tag-health","tag-lou-reed","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-punk-rock","tag-sylvia-plath","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=825760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/825761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=825760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=825760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=825760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}