The Chronicle of Higher Education – September 18, 2011
by By John Horgan

American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, is perpetrating what may be the biggest case of iatrogenesis—harmful medical treatment—in history.Dave Plunkert for The Chronicle Review

Three years ago, I was reminded in dramatic fashion of the chasm between psychiatry and more-effective branches of medicine. My 14-year-old son, Mac, while playing lacrosse, emerged from a collision with his right arm askew. I drove him to a local hospital, where an orthopedic surgeon on duty immediately diagnosed the injury: dislocated elbow. He gave Mac an oral and local anesthetic and put him in a portable X-ray machine that showed Mac’s elbow joint on a screen, in real time. Watching the screen, the doctor quickly snapped Mac’s elbow back into place.

Overcome with gratitude to the doctor, I was leading my groggy son out of the hospital when my cellphone rang. An old friend, whom I’ll call Phil, was on the line. He was in the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital, to which his 16-year-old son had been committed. The boy, who was taking antidepressants for depression, had threatened to commit suicide, not for the first time. Thedoctors were recommending electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT.

Knowing that I had written about shock therapy and other psychiatric treatments, Phil asked my opinion. The fact that Phil had called me, a mere journalist, for advice in such a dire situation spoke volumes about the troubles of modern psychiatry.

I first took a close look at treatments for mental illness 15 years ago while researching an article for Scientific American. At the time, sales of a new class of antidepressants, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI’s, were booming. The first SSRI, Prozac, had quickly become the most widely prescribed drug in the world. Many psychiatrists, notably Peter D. Kramer, author of the best seller Listening to Prozac, touted SSRI’s as a revolutionary advance in the treatment of mental illness. Prozac, Kramer said in a phrase that I hope now haunts him, could make patients “better than well.”

Clinical trials told a different story. SSRI’s are no more effective than two older classes of antidepressants, tricyclics and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. What was even more surprising to me—given the rave reviews Prozac had received from Kramer and others—was that antidepressants as a whole were not more effective than so-called talking cures, whether cognitive behavioral therapy or even old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalysis. According to some investigators, treatments for depression and other common ailments work—if they do work—by harnessing the placebo effect, the tendency of a patient’s expectation of improvement to become self-fulfilling. I titled my article “Why Freud Isn’t Dead.” Far from defending psychoanalysis, my point was that psychiatry has made disturbingly little progress since the heyday of Freudian theory.

In retrospect, my critique of modern psychiatry was probably too mild. According to Anatomy of an Epidemic (Crown Publishers, 2010), by the journalist Robert Whitaker, psychiatry has not only failed to progress but may now be harming many of those it purports to help. Anatomy of an Epidemic has been ignored by most major media. I learned about it only after Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and now a lecturer on public health at Harvard, reviewed the book in The New York Review of Books in June. If Whitaker is right, American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, is perpetrating what may be the biggest case of iatrogenesis—harmful medical treatment—in history.

As recently as the 1950s, Whitaker contends, the four major mental disorders—depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia—often manifested as episodic and “self limiting”; that is, most people simply got better over time. Severe, chronic mental illness was viewed as relatively rare. But over the past few decades the proportion of Americans diagnosed with mental illness has skyrocketed. Since 1987, the percentage of the population receiving federal disability payments for mental illness has more than doubled; among children under the age of 18, the percentage has grown by a factor of 35.

Between 1985 and 2008, sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics multiplied almost fiftyfold, to $24.2-billion.

This epidemic has coincided, paradoxically, with a surge in prescriptions for psychiatric drugs. Between 1985 and 2008, sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics multiplied almost fiftyfold, to $24.2-billion. Prescriptions for bipolar disorder and anxiety have also swelled. One in eight Americans, including children and even toddlers, is now taking a psychotropic medication. Whitaker acknowledges that antidepressants and other psychiatric medications often provide short-term relief, which explains why so many physicians and patients believe so fervently in the drugs’ benefits. But over time, Whitaker argues, drugs make many patients sicker than they would have been if they had never been medicated.

Whitaker compiles anecdotal and clinical evidence that when patients stop taking SSRI’s, they often experience depression more severe than what drove them to seek treatment. A multination report by the World Health Organization in 1998 associated long-term antidepressant usage with a higher rather than a lower risk of long-term depression. SSRI’s cause a wide range of side effects, including insomnia, sexual dysfunction, apathy, suicidal impulses, and mania—which may then lead patients to be diagnosed with and treated for bipolar disorder.

Indeed, Whitaker suspects that antidepressants—as well as Ritalin and other stimulants prescribed for attention-deficit disorder—have catalyzed the recent spike in bipolar disorder. Though bipolar disorder was relatively rare just a half-century ago, reported rates of it have increased more than a hundredfold, to one in 40 adults. Side effects attributed to lithium and other common medications for bipolar disorder include deficits in memory, learning ability, and fine-motor skills. Similarly, benzodiazepines such as Valium and Xanax, which are prescribed for anxiety, are addictive; withdrawal from these sedatives can cause effects ranging from insomnia to seizures, as well as panic attacks.

Whitaker’s analysis of treatments for schizophrenia is especially disturbing. Antipsychotics, from Thorazine to successors like Zyprexa, cause weight gain, physical tremors (called tardive dyskinesia) and, according to some studies, cognitive decline and brain shrinkage. Before the introduction of Thorazine in the 1950s, Whitaker asserts, almost two-thirds of the patients hospitalized for an initial episode of schizophrenia were released within a year, and most of this group did not require subsequent hospitalization.

Over the past half-century, the rate of schizophrenia-related disability has grown by a factor of four, and schizophrenia has come to be seen as a largely chronic, degenerative disease. A decades-long study by the World Health Organization found that schizophrenic patients fared better in poor nations, such as Nigeria and India, where antipsychotics are sparingly prescribed, than in wealthier regions such as the United States and Europe.

A long-term study by Martin Harrow, a psychologist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, found an inverse correlation between medication for schizophrenia and positive, long-term outcomes. Beginning in the 1970s, Harrow tracked a group of 64 newly diagnosed schizophrenics. Forty percent of the nonmedicated patients recovered—meaning that they could become self-supporting—versus 5 percent of those who were medicated. Harrow theorized that those who were heavily medicated were sicker to begin with, but Whitaker suggests that the medications may be making some patients sicker.

Several possible objections to Whitaker’s case against psychiatry come to mind. First of all, as Harrow speculates, over time heavily medicated patients may not fare as well as less-medicated patients because the former truly are sicker. Also, the recent surge in mental disability may stem, at least in part, from a decrease in the stigma associated with mental illness, spurring more people to seek and obtain treatment and government assistance. In her review, Marcia Angell called Whitaker’s book “suggestive, if not conclusive,” which seems right to me. At the very least, Whitaker’s claims warrant further investigation.

Between 1985 and 2008, sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics multiplied almost fiftyfold, to $24.2-billion.

Although Whitaker doesn’t address electroconvulsive therapy, its persistence strikes me as yet another symptom of the weakness of modern psychiatry. It fell out of favor in the 1970s, in part because of its negative portrayal in the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and yet about 100,000 Americans a year still receive ECT. Studies suggest that the therapy can provide temporary relief from acute depression, but virtually everyone who receives electroconvulsive therapy relapses within a year without further treatment. Proponents claim that ECT has few significant side effects, but this year an FDA panel ruled that ECT should remain classified as a “high-risk” procedure because it can cause persistent memory loss and other side effects. If SSRI’s and other psychiatric medications were truly effective, ECT would long ago have been tossed into the dustbin of failed psychiatric treatments.

So what happened to Phil’s son? When Phil called me, I told him that if my son were suicidally depressed, I’d resist giving him shock treatment unless doctors convinced me there was absolutely no alternative. Phil decided against ECT, and his son, after being released from the hospital, gradually stopped taking antidepressants too. He still struggles with depression, and he smokes more marijuana than Phil would like. But he is healthy enough to be starting college this fall.

http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Psychiatric-Medications/128976/

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Note from CCHR: The fact that there is a proposed ban on electroshocking children is good news.  The fact that children are being electroshocked is abhorrent.   The truth is, that more than 1 million people are electroshocked every year, including  the elderly, pregnant women and children.   Even toddlers.     The practice needs to be banned across the boards.  Period.  Read this for the actual facts about ECT by  psychologist John Breeding, “Think They Don’t Electroshock People Anymore? Think Again, Even Toddlers and Pregnant Women are Being Shocked” http://qr.net/eplm

The Age, Australia – July 30, 2011

by Jill Stark

Electric shock therapy machines. Photo: Brendan Read

ELECTRIC shock therapy on young children will be banned and psychiatrists could be jailed for carrying out the controversial treatment on teenagers and adults without strict legal checks, under proposed legislation.

Under a review of Victoria’s Mental Health Act, new legislation has been drafted that would outlaw electroconvulsive therapy, also known as ECT, for children aged 12 and under.

Doctors would still be able to use it on 13 to 17-year-olds without their parents’ consent if they can convince a mental health tribunal that all other treatment options have been exhausted.

The same rules will apply to adults, with the final decision on whether to use shock therapy taken out of psychiatrists’ hands and given to the tribunal. Doctors who breach the laws will face up to a year in jail.

The treatment, immortalised in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, induces seizures by delivering an electrical current to the brain.

Proponents say the movie unfairly stigmatised the procedure, and the use of anaesthetic and advances in technology have made it safer. But its use on children, whose brains are still developing, remains contentious.

ECT is usually used to treat patients with severe depression or extreme mania whose conditions have not improved with other treatments. While it is still unclear how the treatment works, it is thought the shock-induced seizures affect chemicals in the brain that influence mood.

In submissions to the mental health review, legal groups including Youthlaw and the Law Institute of Victoria, along with Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary, the Mental Health Council of Australia and the national depression group beyondblue, have welcomed the changes, saying they provide greater protection for vulnerable patients. Others want the legislation to go further, with a complete ban for anyone under 18.

However, psychiatrists say the new laws are too punitive and could lead to increased suicides as severely depressed people are denied ”life-saving” treatment.

Last year The Sunday Age revealed there had been a 10 per cent rise in the number of patients receiving shock therapy since the previous year.

Almost 20,000 sessions were carried out on 1791 patients in Victorian hospitals in the 2009-10 financial year, including 46 sessions on seven children under 17 and a further 163 on an undisclosed number of 18 to 19-year-olds.

In submissions, the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and the Victorian branch of the Australian Nursing Federation called for the draft bill to be amended to allow shock therapy on children.

Doctors from the University of Melbourne department of psychiatry mounted the most strident objections to the changes, arguing they imply doctors are ”evil and want to harm their patients”.

One of the doctors, David Castle, who is also chair of psychiatry at St Vincent’s Hospital, told The Sunday Age that while shock therapy on children was extremely rare, it was a valuable treatment option.

”Anything that categorically bans it could be enormously damaging because some youngsters do get very severe depression and ECT is an extremely effective and very safe treatment. The new law means it’s going to be very difficult to give it to a patient, especially in an emergency when people are in a totally dire situation where they’re not eating or drinking or intensely suicidal,” he said.

Under the draft laws, doctors would be limited to a maximum of 12 sessions of electric shock therapy per patient and would have to seek permission from a mental health tribunal.

Youthlaw’s submission expressed concern about the effects of shock therapy on the developing brain and called for a ban on the treatment for patients up to the age of 25.

A spokeswoman for Mental Health Minister Mary Wooldridge said the reforms were complex and the state government was reviewing feedback.

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The Age – July 1, 2011

by Kate Hagen

Photo: Tamara Voninski

MORE than 200 psychiatric patients died in ”unexpected, unnatural or violent” circumstances last year, a report by Victoria’s chief psychiatrist reveals.

Six patients died by committing suicide in hospital but most of the 237 deaths occurred in the community.

Chief psychiatrist Ruth Vine could not provide a breakdown of the number of deaths that occurred inside hospitals but said it was ”very small, and when it does occur it is followed by a very thorough review”.

Dr Vine said deaths in the community could include those due to car accidents or house fires, but it was the role of the coroner to determine their cause.

The Age reported in February that a coroner was investigating the deaths of two psychiatric patients thought to have suffocated while being restrained in separate incidents at Frankston and Dandenong hospitals in 2007.

Dr Vine said she was ”of course” concerned about the suicides of psychiatric patients but believed they were impossible to completely prevent.

”If you compare a mental health inpatient unit with a coronary care unit, in terms of the severity of mental illness we’re treating it is equally severe,” she said.

”It is impossible to prevent completely because suicide is a choice and to completely prevent suicide would be to impose an incredible level of restriction on care that would be anti-therapeutic.”

Dr Vine’s annual report for 2009-10 shows that 14 per cent of inpatients were secluded, or confined in a room locked from the outside, in what guidelines say should be used only when a patient poses an immediate risk to himself or others.

A total of 1828 patients were secluded and there were 6059 episodes of seclusion, up slightly from the previous year. More than 1100 were for longer than 12 hours.

A total of 1750 patients received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), including 83 children, the youngest of whom was 13.

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Note from CCHR:  More than 1 million people are electroshocked every year, including children, the elderly and pregnant women.   This is simply a brutal, invasive and damaging ‘treatment’ where up to 450 volts of electricity are sent through the skull.  Psychiatrists admit they don’t know how electroshock ‘works’ and the reason behind this is simple:  it doesn’t work.  Not unless you consider cognitive impairment, brain seizures, permament memory loss and death ‘workable.’ Now in Australia, the use of electroshock for the young is on the rise.   Mentioned in this article are the atrocities that were committed in Chelmsford psychiatric hospital where patients were put into drugged induced coma’s and electroshocked, killing dozens.  That lethal and inhumane practice was exposed and then banned due  to the efforts of CCHR.   No organization has done more to expose the deadly practice of electroshock, or helped enact more international laws restricting or prohibiting its use, than CCHR.    To get the facts about electroshock ‘treatment’ read this article by psychologist John Breeding, “Think They Don’t Electroshock People Anymore? Think Again” http://qr.net/edoh

Sydney Morning Herald – June 26, 2011

by Natalie O’Brien

Revelations about the practises at Chelmsford and the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest led to a major drop in treatments.

ELECTRIC shock treatments for mental health patients have increased by almost 30 per cent in the past five years in NSW, particularly among young women, Medicare figures show.Female patients – all aged under 24 – received almost 600 procedures last year, more than twice the rate of young women in Victoria.

The trend has sparked concern among some psychiatrists about the ”start of a slippery slope”.

An investigation by The Sun-Herald into the resurgence of the treatment, also known as electro-convulsive therapy, or ECT, reveals that the number of voluntary sessions received by young women rose from 184 in 2000 to 575 last year.

The figures do not specify how many women were involved in the procedures, as one patient can often undergo more than one session.

Electric shock treatment still carries the stigma from its brutal portrayal in the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and from the Sydney experience of the horrific practices at the Chelmsford Hospital in the 1960s and ’70s, where dozens of patients died after being given deep sleep therapy and ECT. But doctors say they are working with new treatments and patients no longer suffer a physical convulsion.

The Medicare figures show that last year, NSW men aged under 24 were given the therapy at three times the rate of men in that age group in Victoria.

Across Australia, 24,714 ECT sessions were administered to patients of all ages. In NSW, 5733 treatments were carried out – slightly fewer than in Victoria.

A former president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, Dr Jonathan Phillips, who works as a private clinician, said he was worried by the number of sessions younger people had undertaken.

”In a way it is very easy to order ECT treatment,” he said. ”I would not like to think that it is being used just because it’s easy.”

He was especially surprised by the rate of young women receiving the treatment and said he would find it hard to explain.

”I don’t know why there is a such a difference in statistics. I do hope it is not the start of the slippery slope. Are we going back to an era where we resort to ECT rather than talking to people and using the art of psychiatry?

Read the rest of the article here -  http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/electric-shock-therapy-on-the-rise-for-young-20110625-1gklc.html#ixzz1QIdHnpE0

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Natural News – June 8, 2011

by Monica G. Young

While sipping drinks from coconut shells, psychiatrists from around the world recently met in Honolulu to discuss more ways to capitalize on human behavior and promote drug dependency. The occasion was the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), held in a Hawaiian convention center lined with mental disorder displays and pharmaceutical booths.

“Hot” topics (potential markets for social control and drug pushing) included:

1) Mental health issues during a woman’s reproductive cycle, such as “treating” pregnant women for bipolar – a disorder said to cause unusual shifts in mood and energy levels. In speaking to Medscape News, an APA committee co-chair, Dr. Don Hilty, called this “a really nice-growing area.”

Yet most every woman experiences mood and energy shifts during pregnancy. Despite this, it is not uncommon for pregnant women to be diagnosed as bipolar and prescribed antipsychotics, some of the most powerful drugs on the market. Even the FDA website alerts doctors to “be aware of the effects of antipsychotic medications on newborns when the medications are used during pregnancy.” The site warns of abnormal muscle movements and withdrawal symptoms, and the FDA’s adverse effects reporting program (Medwatch) includes cerebral hemorrhage, heart malformations and death as documented reactions in newborns. Similarly, studies show birth defects and other serious risks for infants whose mothers took antidepressants while pregnant.

2) Childhood disorders were a particularly popular issue at the convention. But they didn’t stop there – prenatal and newborn genetic screening for mental illness has taken on new emphasis in the psychiatric world. “It’s also trying to understand how genetics predict what medications can be used,” stated APA’s Dr. Hilty.

Having already labeled millions of kids “abnormal” and drenched their brains in toxic substances – a multi-billion dollar business – apparently they aren’t satisfied. They aim to brand children as mental patients and destine them for drug-dependency before they’re even born.

The conference even touched upon electroconvulsive shock therapy (ECT) for children – sending electric volts through their heads. That will teach ‘em to shut up and sit still! It will also cause permanent brain damage.

3) ADHD is usually promoted as a childhood disorder but a team of psychiatrists proposed a new definition to make it easier to diagnose (and drug) older teens and adults. They claim people who tend to miss work deadlines and interrupt others deserve this label.

This would surely lead to millions more on daily meds. Who doesn’t know co-workers who miss deadlines or even friends who interrupt you? Not emphasized however is that, per a study published in The Clinical Neuropsychologist, one in four adults seeking an ADHD diagnosis fake it to obtain stimulant drugs.

4) Capitalizing on America’s service men and women was another hot one: diagnosing and drugging the military for post-traumatic distress disorder, depression and anxiety.

Did they mention that 18 U.S. veterans commit suicide daily, largely due to psychiatric drugs? Not likely. As reported by Neev M. Arnell in NaturalNews, “the increasingly high number of deaths among both veterans and active duty soldiers-including suicides, accidental overdose, and lethal drug interactions-have now been linked to the exponential increase in the prescribing of drugs for post traumatic stress disorder, depression and other psychological illnesses.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/032598_v…)

5) Anticipating the “silver tsunami” as the Baby Boomer generation moves into the over-65 bracket, psychiatrists stressed the need for more psychiatric services for the elderly.

Not stressed, if mentioned at all, is the rampant over-use of psychiatric drugs in nursing homes. Elderly patients’ reactions to physical ailments are often squelched with mind-altering drugs. And a recently released government audit shows nearly one in seven elderly nursing home residents are given antipsychotics – nearly all of them dementia patients for whom the drugs can be lethal. Many lawsuits and settlements have revealed that drug companies have falsely promoted these drugs to doctors and nursing homes for years.

6) While not on the “hot” list, another issue that bit was bedbugs. A New York psychiatrist and his colleagues presented a detailed study showing bedbugs can trigger anxiety.

What a remarkable – and potentially profitable – discovery! Gee, with the rise in bedbug infestation in New York City, maybe Bedbug Anxiety should be included in the next edition of the DSM (psychiatry’s diagnostic and billing bible).

Father of psychiatry – the bloodletter

The American Psychiatric Association calls itself “the voice and conscience of modern psychiatry.”

Adorning the convention hall was the APA logo which enshrines Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) as the father of psychiatry. A very influential doctor, teacher and statesman of his time, Rush propagated his theory that Blacks suffered from an inherited disease called “Negritude.” The only evidence of a cure, he said, was the skin turning white. He warned, “whites should not intermarry with them, for this would tend to infect posterity with the ‘disorder.’” Whites, seeking not to be “infected,” used this fabled disease to justify segregation.

Rush was also a chief proponent of bloodletting as a cure-all for mental and physical illnesses. Widespread in America in those days, he made lots of money at it. One of Rush’s students applied his teachings to a patient who complained of a sore throat: nine pints of blood were removed from the man’s body in twenty-four hours and he died. That patient was George Washington, the first President of the United States.

Sources for this article include:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle…

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle…

http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/…

http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/…

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/h…

http://www.jstor.org/pss/985399

http://www.websters-online-dictiona…

http://www.cchr.org/cchr-reports/cr…

About the author:
Monica G. Young is a human rights investigator and educational writer with a purpose to expose the truth about the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries and safeguard human liberty. She encourages non-drug alternative approaches based on healthy lifestyles and human decency. She supports the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and like-minded groups.

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Rabble.ca
By John Bonnar
May 9, 2011

When Dorothy Washburn Dundas was 19 years old she became sad, felt lonely and attempted suicide by swallowing a half a bottle of aspirin. Her parents took her to the Massachusetts General Hospital where Dundas began what she called her “three-year hellish odyssey as a prisoner of the mental-health system.”

She was transferred to Balpate Hospital, a drug treatment centre in Georgetown, MA, diagnosed with schizophrenia and, in spite of her opposition, given 50 shock treatments. Fourty insulin and ten superimposed electric shocks.

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Click here to see more photos from the rally and march

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In 1961, during the early morning hours, three other teenaged girls and Dundas began their insulin injections. On ten of those mornings a man wearing a dark suit and carrying a small suitcase set up his electroshock machine behind their heads. One by one, the girls were forced on to their backs.

“Bare, open and vulnerable,” said Dundas in a statement read by a spokesperson from the Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault (CAPA) at Saturday’s fifth annual rally at Queen’s Park to raise awareness about the medical risks and sexist facts surrounding electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

Dundas was second in line to receive ECT. She would often sneak a look to see what the doctors were doing to Susan, the first girl to receive the treatment. When Susan would shake violently, she could no longer watch and had to turn away.

Waiting for her turn, Dundas would shiver in fear beneath the bed sheets. “I can still feel the sticky, cold jelly they put on my temples,” she said. Her arms and legs were held down and just before the doctor pushed the shock button he would ask, “Is everybody ready?”

“Each time I expected I would die,” she said.

Later, she’d wake up with a violent headache and nausea. Her mind was blurred and she permanently lost eight months of memory immediately preceding the shock treatments. But she was lucky.

On one of those cold winter mornings, her 17-year-old friend Susan never woke up after an ECT treatment. “When she died, she became a part of me,” said Dundas.

Dr. Bonnie Burstow, a researcher, therapist and Chair of the Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault, said, “We demonstrate against ECT because it is an atrocity…on or around Mother’s Day because this is a deeply and profoundly sexist treatment. Two to three times as many women as men are shocked, even though women incur more damage from ECT than men do.”

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a procedure in which electric currents are passed through the brain, deliberately triggering a brief seizure to cause changes in brain chemistry that can immediately reverse symptoms of certain mental illnesses.

According to the Mayo Clinic, side effects can include confusion, memory loss, nausea, vomiting, headache, jaw pain, muscle ache or muscle spasms.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) estimates that in 2007, the procedure was used more than 15,000 times in this country. It’s endorsed by the Canadian Psychiatric Association that stated it is a safe and effective treatment for major depression and other severe mood disorders.

But Simon Adam, a nurse, educator and scientist, said he’s seen the effects of ECT on his patients and believes the procedure is dangerous and doesn’t help them at all.

A year ago, NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo introduced a private member’s bill to defund ECT in Ontario. CAPA and DiNovo would have preferred an outright ban, but DiNovo was forced to compromise after she received complaint letters from the psychiatric community and heard from patients who claimed they’d been helped by ECT.

“We know the same thing happened over lobotomies,” she said.

“We certainly know as women that the roots of gynecology were roots of abuse against women’s bodies. We know that the time will come for this as well.”

Every year, both new and familiar faces show up at the annual Mother’s Day weekend rally and march to abolish ECT.

“We will come again and again and again until we get rid of this,” said Burstow.

“We’re going to win this fight because that’s an atrocity, because we are the people and because unlike psychiatry which manufactures lies by the second, we stand in truth.”

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by Don Weitz, Psychiatric Survivor & 24-year activist in the psychiatric liberation movement

1. Because psychiatrists frequently cause harm, permanent disabilities, death – death of the body-mind-spirit.

2. Because psychiatrists frequently violate the Hippocratic Oath which orders all physicians “First Do No Harm.”

3. Because psychiatrists patronize and dis-empower people, especially their patients.

4. Because psychiatry is not a medical science.

5. Because psychiatry is quackery, a pseudo-science which lacks independent diagnostic tests, testable hypotheses, and cures for “schizophrenia” and all other types of alleged “mental illness” or “mental disorder”.

6. Because psychiatrists can not accurately and reliably predict dangerousness, violence, or any other type of human behaviour, yet make such claims as “expert witnesses”, and with the media promote the “dangerous mental patient” myth/stereotype.

7. Because psychiatrists have caused a worldwide epidemic of brain damage by promoting and prescribing brain-disabling treatments such as the neuroleptics, antidepressants, electroconvulsive brainwashing (electroshock), and psychosurgery (lobotomy).

8. Because psychiatrists manufacture hundreds of “mental disorders” classified in its bible called “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (a modern witch-hunting manual); such “mental disorders” and “symptoms” are in fact negative, class-and-culturally-biased moral judgments for dissident ways of coping with personal problems and alternative ways of perceiving, interpreting or being in the world.

9. Because psychiatrists, blinded by their medical model bias, fraudulently pathologize and label people’s serious life or existential crises as “symptoms” of “mental illness” or “mental disorder” such as “schizophrenia”, “bipolar affective disorder”, and “personality disorder”.

10. Because psychiatrists compound this fraud by falsely claiming, without scientific proof, that these “mental disorders” are caused by a “biochemical imbalance” in the brain, genetic factors or “genetic predispositions”, despite the fact that there are no genetic factors in “mental illness”.

11. Because psychiatrists frequently misinform their patients, families and the public by claiming that brain-disabling procedures such as the neurotoxins (e.g., “antipsychotic medication” and “antidepressants”), electroconvulsive brainwashing (electroconvulsive therapy/”ECT”), psychosurgery (lobotomy) and other behaviour modification-mind control procedures are “safe, effective and lifesaving”.  The exact opposite is tragically true.

12. Because psychiatrists routinely deceive or lie to patients, prisoners, their families, and the public.

13. Because psychiatrists routinely and willfully violate the medical-ethical principle of “informed consent” by misinforming or not informing their patients about the numerous toxic, disabling and frequently permanent effects of the neuroleptics such as memory loss, tardive dyskinesia, tardive psychosis, parkinsonism, dementia (all signs of brain damage), and death.

14. Because psychiatrists routinely threaten, intimidate or coerce many patients – particularly women, children, the elderly, and prisoners – into consenting to health-threatening/brain-damaging “treatment” such as the antidepressants, neuroleptics, electroconvulsive brainwashing, and hi-risk experiments.

15. Because psychiatrists frequently fail to fully inform psychiatric inmates and prisoners about existing safe and humane, non-medical alternatives in the community such as survivor-controlled crisis centres, drop-ins, self-help or advocacy groups, diet, massage, wholistic medicine, affordable supportive housing, and jobs.

16. Because psychiatrists are sexist in frequently stereotyping women in crisis as “hysterical” or “over-emotional”, blaming women whenever they voice real complaints and assertively express their feelings and emotions, prescribing massive doses of tranquilizers and antidepressants to disproportionately large numbers of women, and in sexually assaulting women in their offices and institutions.

17. Because psychiatrists, particularly white male psychiatrists, are homophobic – the American Psychiatric Association (APA) once labelled homosexuality as a “mental illness” or “mental disorder” – and have used forced electroshock on lesbians, trying to coerce them into adopting a heterosexual life style.

18. Because psychiatrists are ageist in prescribing tranquilizers, antidepressants (“medication”) and electroconvulsive brainwashing for disproportionately large numbers of elderly people – a form of elder abuse.

19. Because psychiatrists are racist in disproportionately incarcerating and drugging people of African descent, aboriginal people, other people of colour and labelling them “psychotic” or “schizophrenic”.

20. Because psychiatrists routinely violate people’s civil rights, human rights and constitutional rights such as imprisoning innocent people without court trial or public hearing (“involuntary commitment”), and subjecting them to cruel and unusual punishments or tortures such as forced drugging, electroconvulsive brainwashing, psychosurgery, solitary confinement, “chemical restraints”, and 4-point or 5-point restraints.

21. Because psychiatrists masterminded the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people including disabled children, the elderly and psychiatric patients during The Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and “selected” hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners for death (“T-4 euthanasia” program) – historical facts still missing in psychiatric textbooks and histories.

22. Because psychiatrists have willingly participated in and administered mind-control experiments in the United States and Canada since the early 1950s – its chief targets have been poor patients, women, dissidents and prisoners.

23. Because psychiatry, particularly institutional-biological psychiatry, is based on the 3 Fs: Fear, Fraud, and Force.

24. Because psychiatry is a form of social control or punishment – not treatment.

25. Because psychiatry, particularly institutional-biological psychiatry, is fascist – a direct threat to democracy, human rights and life.

A note from the author: This statement is a slightly revised version of the original written in spring 1998.  Feel free to add and publish your own reasons.  I am a psychiatric survivor and antipsychiatry activist who has been involved in the psychiatric survivor liberation movement for 24 years.  I am also co-editor of “Shrink Resistant: The Struggle Against Psychiatry in Canada” (1988), host-producer of the antipsychiatry program “Shrinkrap” on CKLN radio (88.1 FM) in Toronto, member of People Against Coercive Treatment (P.A.C.T.), and member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP).

PLEASE SNOWBALL, COPY AND PUBLISH THIS STATEMENT INCLUDING THE NOTE. NO COPYRIGHT OR PERMISSION REQUIRED.

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January 31, 2011

by CCHR International— The Neurological Devices Advisory Panel of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.), recommended Friday that devices used to deliver shock treatment, also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) remain in the most high-risk category (Class III), reserved for the most dangerous medical devices and not be downgraded to a lower risk category.  In so doing, it recommended that the companies which manufacture ECT devices be required to prove that ECT is both effective and safe in order to remain in use.

ECT has long been known to cause serious harm to patients, including extremely severe and permanent memory loss, inability to learn and remember new events, depression, suicide, cardiovascular complications, prolonged and dangerous seizures and even death.

Patients who have undergone ECT felt vindicated by the decision, saying the ECT device is dangerous and causes irreparable harm.  The chairman of the advisory panel, Dr. Thomas G. Brott, a Professor of Neurosciences, at the Mayo Clinic expressed concern about 100,000 people being given ECT each year in the U.S., yet psychiatrists had not bothered to conduct MRI scans before and after the procedure to monitor potential brain damage.

Ms. Jan Eastgate, President of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a psychiatric watchdog, spoke at the Hearing and was critical of the ECT device manufacturers, Mecta and Somatics, Inc. for their failure to conduct safety studies and submit a Pre-Marketing Application (PMA), while making more than $30 million from sales of the machine over the past 3 decades.  She said psychiatrists claiming that a PMA would be “too expensive” had put profit above patient safety— With ECT costing between $1,000 and $2,500 a treatment, psychiatrists had made more than $28 billion during the same period.

The hearings were prompted by a GAO investigation in January 2009 resulting in a report stating the FDA must examine all devices which had remained for a substantial time in Class III without critical evaluation of safety and effectiveness. The GAO said the FDA should take steps to ensure that high-risk device types are approved through the most stringent review process reserved for new machines coming on to the market which may be potentially dangerous.

The FDA Office of Medical Device Evaluation thereafter called for hearings before a panel of experts to advise the FDA whether shock devices could be downgraded to Class II – and therefore require little review – or remain in the highest risk category with a mandated approval process with stringent clinical trials. The FDA Advisory Panel agreed that this device was sufficiently dangerous to require that it remain in Class III.  It is up to the FDA whether to act on the recommendations of the panel.

Ms. Eastgate said the decision is the first step towards getting needed greater protections for patients but said there were still considerable concerns about the F.D.A.’s handling of the safety and efficacy issues concerning ECT.  She said there are potential conflicts of interest with psychiatrists helping write the F.D.A.’s Executive Summary on ECT and advising the agency about the procedure.

Watch video: Electroshock—It’s Not Treament, It’s Torture

here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDR3cD8_kck

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The Huffington Post – January 26, 2011

by Dr. Peter Breggin

Peter R. Breggin, MD is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York, and the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than twenty books. His first medical book was about ECT: Electroshock: Its Brain-Disabling Effects (1979).

Duff Wilson provided a service by presenting both sides of the controversy when he wrote his report “F.D.A. Is Studying the Risk of Electroshock Devices” in the January 24, 2011 New York Times. The FDA is proposing to move ECT from the high risk category to the medium risk category to avoid the necessity of any testing for safety or efficacy. As a result, ECT would be grandfathered into continued use without ever being tested. This would place ECT in the same category as syringes which no longer need proof of safety or efficacy. The FDA hearings will be held January 27-28, 2011, and I hope some of my more courageous colleagues will attend and testify against approving ECT without testing.

Mr. Wilson quotes me correctly in the article: “It’s a big money-maker,” he [Breggin] said. “I would say if anything it’s been on the increase because there’s a market that’s been exploited, that is the elderly depressed women on Medicare. The reason for that is they’re covered, and there’s no one to protect them. What commonly stops shock treatment is a family member saying ‘over my dead body.’ ”

However, Mr. Wilson misunderstood what I meant to say when, without quoting me, he wrote in the original published edition that Breggin “says he is the only American psychiatrist he knows who opposes the treatment.” He and I have chatted since the publication of his article in the NYT and he has generously edited the current on-line copy of the article and posted a correction indicating that I actually said that I am the only psychiatrist I know of who publicly opposes the treatment. I don’t know anyone else who has taken a very visible public stand–publishing anti-ECT views in the scientific literature, and presenting them in the media and the courts. Similarly, I am the only psychiatrist to have testified in a successful ECT malpractice suit.

The same was true when I conducted my successful campaign to stop the resurgence of lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery in the 1970s. At that time, most psychiatrists probably opposed lobotomy, but I was the first and still only one to oppose it publically in the scientific literature, the media, and the courts, as well as in Congressional testimony. The success of my campaign required putting outside pressure on facilities, psychiatrists and neurosurgeons who were involved in this barbaric “treatment” and cutting off federal funding for some of their projects. I’m also the only psychiatrist to testify in a successful psychosurgery malpractice trial. My reform efforts against ECT and lobotomy are described Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry (2008, p. 230-232), ECT is especially harmful to the more fragile brains of the elderly.

ECT causes closed head injury by means of electrically-induced seizures. There can be no doubt that the treatment causes trauma to the brain. The patient is comatose for several minutes in the recovery room and after a few treatments becomes confused and disoriented. A recent study confirms long-term memory loss and other cognitive deficits, which by definition is dementia. As I review in Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry (2008, pp. 237-241), large animal studies have shown brain cell death using ECT dosages less than those routinely inflicted today. My website has a very extensive ECT bibliography that can be downloaded for free. It includes a variety of the original large animal ECT research projects.

After John Read and Richard Bentall published their recent scientific review, Professor Bentall declared, “The very short- term benefit gained by a small minority cannot justify the risks to which all ECT recipients are exposed. The use of ECT therefore represents a failure to introduce the ideals of evidence-based medicine into psychiatry. It seems there is resistance to the research data in the ECT community, and perhaps in psychiatry in general.”

In a sane society, ECT would be abandoned as a treatment. In an insane society, a government agency would approve it without requiring testing for safety and efficacy. That may be about to happen.

Peter R. Breggin, MD is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York, and the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than twenty books. His first medical book was about ECT: Electroshock: Its Brain-Disabling Effects (Springer Publishing Company, New York, 1979). His most recent medical book dealing with ECT is Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex, Second Edition (2008). Dr. Breggin’s professional website is www.breggin.com.

You can meet and hear presentations by Dr. Breggin and some of his closest colleagues at the annual Empathic Therapy Conference to be held April 8-10, 2011 in Syracuse, New York. Click here to learn more about the conference and to register. Professionals and non-professionals alike are welcome.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/not-the-only-psychiatrist_b_813863.html

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The Huffington Post—December 28 , 2010

by Dr. Peter Breggin

For decades the FDA has allowed electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to be used without requiring any proof of safety or efficacy. The machines and the treatment has been “grandfathered” into use rather than tested. A few years ago the FDA proposed to test the treatment but heavy pressure from the American Psychiatric Association caused the agency to reverse itself. ECT remains untested and widely used. Imagine that — the American Psychiatric Association doesn’t want an obviously dangerous treatment to be tested at all.  It just wants psychiatrists left alone to inflict it upon hapless patients.

Now the FDA is reconsidering whether to officially approve ECT without testing and it seems inclined to do so. Given the strength and influence of the American Psychiatric Association, we can anticipate results that will whitewash the dangers and allow the continued use of ECT unhampered by scientific testing. The hearings are scheduled for January 27 and 28, 2011. Anyone can attend and I encourage all interested citizens to get involved by contacting the FDA and asking for time to make a brief presentation.

I have written to the FDA explaining that the treatment has so little efficacy and is so obviously damaging — it routinely produces an acute state of delirium and confusion with severe memory loss — that it should be banned. That document has now been published in two scientific journals. It supplements my chapter on ECT in Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatric: Drugs, ECT and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex, Second Edition (2008).

As I noted in my scientific article and my 2008 book, and in a previous blog, Sackeim and colleagues from the heart of the psychiatric establishment once again confirmed that ECT routinely produces long-term dementia in the form of multiple memory loss in combination with other persistent cognitive deficits. Now a new scientific analysis has confirmed all the bad news about ECT.

The recent review of the scientific literature by John Read (New Zealand) and Richard Bentall (Great Britain) found that ECT treatments show only the most minimal evidence for improvement during the treatment and no evidence for improvement afterward. As my own research confirms, they found no evidence that ECT reduces the suicide rate.

Read and Bentall summarized “strong evidence” for “persistent and, for some, permanent brain dysfunction.” They concluded that “the cost-benefit analysis for ECT is so poor that its use cannot be scientifically justified.” They further stated, “The continued use of ECT therefore represents a failure to introduce the ideals of evidence-based medicine into psychiatry.”

The sad truth is that psychiatry has always promoted brain-damaging treatments, including lobotomy, electroshock and toxic chemical substances. In the 1970s I conducted an intensive international campaign to stop the resurgence of lobotomy and others forms of psychosurgery, and if my campaign had not been successful, lobotomy would have once again become widely accepted within contemporary psychiatry. Using media citations and other sources, that campaign and its success is documented in The Conscience of Psychiatry: The Reform Work of Peter R. Breggin, MD.

Because ECT advocates have successfully lobbied against the states collecting data on ECT use, we can only speculate about the numbers of patients subjected to this treatment. Probably it is at least in the range of 150,000 to 200,000 per year. Most large cities have several facilities doing ECT including private psychiatric hospitals and university hospitals and general hospitals with psychiatric wards.

Elderly women on Medicare are the most frequent victims of this anachronistic abuse, but anyone who gets depressed and overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness can become vulnerable. It’s not your mental condition as much as your doctor’s moral condition that determines whether you get pushed into taking ECT. Recently I’ve encountered three relatively young physicians whose professional lives were ruined by ECT-induced mental dysfunction.

It’s time for public outrage and it’s time for the FDA to close the door on this abusive “treatment.”

Peter R. Breggin, M.D. is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York, and the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than twenty books. His two most recent books are Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime and Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex. Dr. Breggin and his wife Ginger have founded a new organization, The Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, Education and Living (empathictherapy.org). It will hold an international conference in Syracuse, New York, April 8-10, 2011. It’s time to sign up!

The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour appears weekly on the Progressive Radio Network where it is archived for convenient listening. Dr. Breggin’s professional website is www.breggin.com.

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