Shock treatment was an apt description for what Friedman had prescribed. Pinochet had deliberately sent his country into a deep recession, based on the untested theory that the sudden contraction would jolt the economy into health. In its logic, it was strikingly similar to that of the psychiatrists who started mass-prescribing ECT in the 1940s and 1950s, convinced that deliberately induced grand mal seizures would magically reboot their patients’ brains.
