We’re a little late inducting Dev, so let’s call him the 2007 Honoree, because the 2008 Honoree is right behind him in line, to be announced soon!

Psychiatrist Davangere Devanand of Columbia University is dis-honored for his two faces: shock doctor and author of “The Memory Program,” a book on how to maintain and improve memory!

Devanand’s book “The Memory Program” is clean. Clean as a drug dealer who tossed his stash minutes before being cuffed by the police. Clean as a whistle. You can look everywhere. You can comb every page. You can check the index under “e”, under “s”, under “a” for amnesia. You won’t find a single mention of electroshock, ECT, electroconvulsive therapy, or shock treatment in this book about memory problems—causes and prevention. Nor will you find any mention of Dr. Devangere Devanand’s other day job, the one he held long before he decided he was a “memory expert” and “writer”: shock doctor at the country’s most infamous shock mill, the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

A book on common memory problems that avoids mentioning shock treatment is like, I don’t know, a book on weight loss that avoids mentioning calories. That is, it’s more than an omission. It’s a spectacular feat of deception. It’s a new low when you thought the gang up at PI couldn’t go any lower.

Course, “Dev”, who’s worked with the Sackeim team for over a decade, has (at least as far as anyone has uncovered so far) passed on the gravy train of shock machine company and magnet machine megabucks, so who can blame him for trying to get a little extra on the side any way he can? Especially with a low-budget book like this, easily thrown together, seemingly irresistible to the masses who wouldn’t dream of entering a psych ward?

And it’s not easy being Dev. Consider what it takes. In the morning go in a door marked “Memory Disorders Clinic”, where you’re the big cheese. You listen sympathetically to people who are distressed by mild to moderate, generalized and often extremely normal memory problems. You know, like the middle aged man who’s concerned when he can’t remember where he put his glasses, or takes longer than he thinks proper to recall a name. No matter how small the concern, you listen very seriously. You acknowledge the problem. You say you will help. You wouldn’t dream of saying to one of these clients, “Nothing is wrong with you; what you say is happening, cannot be; it’s just your subjective opinion, not reality.” You test. You prescribe. You try to heal.

In the afternoon you’re a “researcher” on one of Sackeim’s many federally-funded experimental ECT projects. You go in a door saying “ECT Clinic, Department of Biological Psychiatry”. Your work routinely permanently robs patients of years of their memory—two, five, ten, fifteen years. As well, your guinea pigs permanently lose those memory abilities the slight impairment of which so alarms those morning patients of yours, those free to leave the clinic at any time. You know this because your test results (the ones you don’t publish or even show to NIMH, your funding source) show it. You know it because your patients say it. But in the afternoon, you pretend these massive memory deficits, the ones like losing an arm compared to your other patients who break a fingernail, don’t exist. You tell these patients and their families that they’re crazy, they’re imagining things. You don’t even mention permanent memory losses when you write up your results for the fancy journals, the ones which made you such a big shot.

HELP for these patients? How about a book for us? Even ACKNOWLEDGMENT of their losses? Heaven forbid. Hey, you’re in a bind; ECT’s the cash cow of psychiatry, of PI. There simply can’t be any bad effects on memory.

A patient who enters door #1 with a fifteen year amnesia and the kind of memory and cognitive disability you see every day in the ECT clinic would be scanned with every kind of fancy machine you’ve got up there, would be given neuropsychological testing, and offered cognitive rehabilitation for life. A patient with the same symptoms inside Door #2 would be told “Nothing’s wrong with you, and if you think there is, you’re just crazy.”.

But there’s a sense in which your billing yourself as a “memory expert” (and getting a contract from a gullible publisher) is just part of the everyday duties of a shock doctor/apologist. (As the guy who was granted first authorship on that infamous article which claimed 1000 shocks don’t cause any memory loss, you’ve earned your stripes.)

You’ve got to be able to define and control memory loss: who has it, when it will be acknowledged, when it won’t. That is just part of being a shock doctor at the level to which you have aspired, and achieved: i.e. at the apologist level.

It’s a tough line, but you’re a professional, trained by the best. You have to acknowledge that memory is a human being’s highest and most precious treasure—-while at the same time defining some people as less-than-human beings whose memories you may pillage for profit. You’ve got to disallow the stories told by shock patients as “anecdotes”—while publishing your own stories as scientific fact.

We used to just have bank robbery, now we have Enron. We used to just have shock doctors pushing buttons, now we have them writing books about how to improve memory.