Rense.com
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
August 25, 2010

Tens of millions of innocent, unsuspecting Americans, who are mired deeply in the mental “health” system, have actually been made crazy by the use of or the withdrawal from commonly-prescribed, brain-altering, brain-disabling, indeed brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have been, for many decades, cavalierly handed out like candy ­ often in untested and therefore unapproved combinations of drugs – to trusting and unaware patients by equally unaware but well-intentioned physicians who have been under the mesmerizing influence of slick and obscenely profitable psychopharmaceutical drug companies aka, BigPharma.

That is the conclusion of two books by investigative journalist and health science writer Robert Whitaker. His first book, entitled Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill noted that there has been a 600% increase (since Thorazine was introduced in the US in the mid-1950s) in the total and permanent disabilities of millions of psychiatric drug-takers. This uniquely First World mental ill health epidemic has resulted in the life-long taxpayer-supported disabilities of rapidly increasing numbers of psychiatric patients who are now unable to be happy, productive, taxpaying members of society. Whitaker has done a powerful, albeit unwelcome job of presenting previously hidden, but very convincing evidence to support his thesis, that it is the drugs and not the diagnosis that is causing the epidemic of mental illness disability. Many open-minded physicians and many aware psychiatric patients are now motivated to be wary of any and all synthetic chemicals that can cross the blood/brain barrier because all of them are capable of altering the brain in ways totally unknown to medical science, especially when the patients are taking the drugs long-term..

In Whitaker’s second book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, he goes much further in advancing this sobering reality. He documents the history of the powerful forces behind the relatively new field of psychopharmacology and its major shaper and beneficiary, BigPharma. Psychiatric drugs, whose developers, marketers and salespersons are all in the employ of the giant drug companies, are far more dangerous than the drug and psychiatric industries are willing to admit: These drugs, it turns our, are fully capable of disabling ­ often permanently – body, brain and spirit.

More evidence to support Whitaker’s well-documented claims are laid out in two important new books written by psychiatrist and scholar Grace Jackson. Jackson did a beautiful job of researching and documenting, from the voluminous basic neuroscience research (which is uniformly ignored by the clinical sciences) the unintended and often disastrous consequences of the chronic ingestion of any of the five major classes of psychiatric drugs. Her second and most powerful book: Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any of the five classes of drugs that are commonly used in psychiatric patients (antidepressants, antipsychotics, psychostimulants, tranquilizers and anti-seizure/”mood-stabilizer” drugs) have shown microscopic, macroscopic, biochemical, clinical and/or radiological evidence of brain shrinkage and other signs of brain damage, which can result in clinically-diagnosable, permanent dementia, premature death and a variety of other related brain disorders that can mimic mental illnesses. Jackson’s first book, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent was an equally sobering book warning about the many hidden dangers of psychiatric drugs.

This sad truth is that the seemingly knee-jerk prescribing (without very much information being given to patients about the long list of serious long-term adverse effects) of potent and often addicting/dependency-inducing psychiatric drugs has become the standard of care in American psychiatry since the introduction of the so-called anti-schizophrenic “miracle” drug Thorazine in the mid-1950s. (Thorazine was the offending drug that all of Jack Nicholson’s fellow patients were coerced into taking at “medication time” in the Academy Award-winning movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.) Thorazine and all the other “me-too” early antipsychotic drugs are now universally known to have been an iatrogenic (= doctor or other treatment-caused) disaster because of their serious long-term, initially unsuspected, brain-damaging effects that resulted in a number of incurable neurological disorders such as tardive dyskinesia and Parkinson’s disease.

Thorazine and all the other knock-off drugs like Prolixin, Mellaril, Navane. etc, are synthetic “tricyclic” chemical compounds similar in molecular structure to the tricyclic “antidepressants” like imipramine and the similarly toxic, obesity-inducing, diabetogenic, “atypical” anti-schizophrenic drugs like Clozaril, Zyprexa and Seroquel.

Thorazine, incidentally, was originally developed in Europe as an industrial dye. That doesn’t sound so good although it may not be so unusual in the closely related fields of psychopharmcology and the chemical industry, especially when one considers that Depakote, a popular drug marketed initially as an anti-epilepsy drug but now is being heavily used as a so-called “mood stabilizer”. Depakote, known to be a hepatotoxin and renal toxin, was originally developed as an industrial solvent capable of dissolving fat – including, presumably, the fatty tissue in human livers and brains.

Some sympathy and understanding needs to be generated for the various victims of BigPharma’s compulsive drive to expand market share and “shareholder value” (share price, dividends and the next quarter’s financial report) by whatever means necessary. Both the prescribers and the swallowers of BigPharma’s drugs have succumbed to BigPharma’s cunning marketing campaigns, the prescribers having been seduced by attractive drug company representatives and their “pens, pizzas and post-it note” freebies in the office, and the patients being brain-washed by the inane and unbelievable (if one has intact critical thinking skills) commercials on TV that quickly gloss over the lethal adverse effects in the fine print while urging the watcher to “ask your doctor” about the latest unaffordable wannabe blockbuster drug..

For a quick overview of these issues, I recommend that everybody with an open mind read a long essay written by Whitaker that persuasively identifies the source of America’s epidemic of mental illness disability (a phenomenon that doesn’t exist in Third World nations because costly psych drugs are not prescribed so cavalierly as in the US).

Whitaker and Jackson (among a number of other ground-breaking and whistle-blowing authors who have been essentially black-listed by the mainstream media and mainstream medical journals) have proven to most critically-thinking scientists, alternative practitioners and assorted “psychiatric survivors” that it is the drugs – and not the so-called “disorders” – that are causing our nation’s epidemic of mental illness disability. The Whitaker essay, plus other pertinent information about his books can be accessed at www.madinamerica.com A recent interview on Wisconsin Public Radio can be accessed at www.wpr.org (at their radio archives link) and a long interview with Dr.Joseph Mercola can be heard at: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/05/08/robert-whitaker-interview.aspx

After reading and studying all these inconvenient truths, mental health practitioners must consider the medicolegal implications for them, especially if the information is ignored or if the information is dismissed out of hand by practitioners who might be tempted to not take the time to study this new information. Those people who are hearing about this for the first time need to pass the word on to others, especially their prescribing healthcare practitioners who should be equally concerned. This is important because the opinion leaders in the highly influential (for good or ill) psychiatric and medical industries have been marketed into submission without hearing the all the facts (which may have been intentionally hidden from them. If that is the case, they cannot be automatically blamed for proceeding in a practice that some day might represent malpractice. It shouldn’t have to be pointed out that is the solemn duty of ethical practitioners who are in positions of authority to fully examine potential malpractice issues and then warn others, especially their patients, of the dangers.

Sadly, it must be admitted that most of the over-worked, double-booked care-givers in medical clinics have not yet heard the news that most if not all of the brain-altering synthetic chemicals known as psychotropic drugs (which are treated as hazardous waste unless they are packaged in a swallowable capsule!) have been marketed as safe and effective – but only for short-term use. The captains of the drug industry know that the psychotropic drugs that they present for the FDA-approval have only been tested in animal trials for days and in clinical trials for 6 weeks. They also know ­ indeed they hope – that patients will be taking their drugs for years (despite no long-term trials proving safety and efficacy) as the only “treatment” for mental ill health. They know that their brain-altering drugs are also dependency-inducing (aka addicting, causing withdrawal symptoms when stopped), neurotoxic and increasingly ineffective (a la “Prozac Poop-out”) as time goes by.

The truth is that the people diagnosed as “mentally ill” for life are often simply those unfortunates who find themselves in acute or chronic states of crisis or “overwhelm” due to any number of preventable, curable and treatable (without the use of drugs) bad luck accidents such as poverty, abuse, violence, torture, homelessness, discrimination, underemployment, brain malnutrition, addictions/withdrawal, brain damage from electroshock “therapy” and/or exposure to neurotoxic chemicals in their food, air, water or prescription bottles.

Those labeled as the “mentally ill” are just like us “normals” who have not yet decompensated because of some yet-to-happen, crisis-inducing, overwhelming (however temporary) life situation. And thus we have not yet been given a billable code number (accompanied by the seemingly obligatory – and unaffordable – drug prescription or two signifying we are now chronically mentally ill. Unlabeled, we are likely to remain off prescription drugs but with a label and in “the system”, it is hard to “just say no to drugs.”

The victims of hopelessness-generating situations like simple bad luck, bad circumstances, bad company, bad choices, bad government, big business, and a competitive society that generates a few winners but mostly losers. America tolerates, indeed celebrates, punitive and thus fear-inducing social systems resembling in many ways the infamous police state realities of 20th century European totalitarianism, where people who were different or just dissidents were thought to be abnormal and therefore “disappeared” into insane asylums, jails or concentration camps without just cause or competent legal defense. And many of them were and are drugged with disabling psychoactive chemicals against their will.

The truth is that most, if not all, of BigPharma’s psychotropic drugs are lethal at some dosage level (the LD50, the lethal dose that kills 50% of lab animals, is calculated before efficacy testing is done), and therefore the drugs must be regarded as dangerous. The chronic use of these drugs is a major cause of cognitive disorders, brain damage, loss of creativity, loss of spirituality, loss of empathy, loss of energy, loss of strength, fatigue and tiredness, permanent disability and a multitude of metabolic adverse effects that can readily sicken the body, brain and soul by causing insomnia or somnolence, increased depression or anxiety, delusions, psychoses, paranoia, mania, etc. So before filling the prescription, it is advisable to read the product insert labeling under WARNINGS, PRECAUTIONS, ADVERSE EFFECTS, CONTRAINDICATIONS, TOXICOLOGY, OVERDOSAGE and the ever-present BLACK BOX WARNINGS ABOUT SUICIDALITY.

Long-term, high dosage or combination psychotropic drug usage could be regarded as a chemically traumatic brain injury (TBI) or, as drugs like Thorazine were known in the 1950s and 60s, a “chemical lobotomy”. That is a useful way to conceptualize this serious issue, because such chemically brain-altered patients are often indistinguishable from those who have suffered a physically traumatic brain injuries or been subjected to ice-pick lobotomies which were popular in the 1940s and 50s – before the drugs came on the market.

America has a mental ill health epidemic on its hands that is grossly misunderstood because it is worsening, not by the supposed disease progression, but because of the neurotoxic, non-curative drugs that are somehow regarded as first-line “treatment.”
Read the rest of this article here: http://www.rense.com/general91/edi.htm

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Baby Care
June 14, 2010

Sue Clark-Wittenberg, director of the Wittenberg Center to End Electroshock in Ottawa, Canada is an electroshock survivor who is appealing to Amnesty International to deem electroshock (ECT) as torture. Sue is a torture victim of electroshock.

Dr. Peter R. Breggin, a psychiatrist from NY State wrote an article recently re ECT called “Disturbing News for Patients and Shock Doctors Alike” which proves ECT always causes brain damage 100% of the time. See the article in full at this URL: www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/

In America, electroshock is not deemed as torture by Amnesty International. ECT is being given more and more especially to women with post partum depression and to women over 60 years of age. Many people all over the world are working to ban electroshock universally. Yearly stats for ECT given:

Ontario, Canada – 14000 ECTs given
USA – 100000 Americans get ECT
UK – 50000 ECT given
Worldwide – 1 to 2 million people get ECT

Read entire article:  http://babies.secretbest.com/19814/electroshock-is-torture/

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The Epoch Times
By Gao Zitan
May 30, 2010

Although Beijing has always denied charges of psychiatric abuse of dissidents, the National Conference of Ankang Asylums held by the Ministry of Public Security in Wuhan, Hubei Province, on May 26 and 27 has inadvertently admitted these charges.

Ankang Asylums are special psychiatric hospitals administered by the police. According to a document issued by the Ministry of Public Security on January 29, 1988, Ankang hospitals serve two functions: to maintain social order and to provide medical treatment. The document also points out that Ankang hospitals, as a special means of maintaining societal control, are an integral part of the public security services.

As of now, there are 22 Ankang hospitals in China, and the ministry has asked that at least one Ankang asylum be set up in each province, according to a report in state-run China Daily on May 29.

The recently-held National Conference pointed out that Ankang hospitals should play a more important role in social surveillance and control, and that they should work closely with public security bureaus, police stations, and criminal investigation units. It also stressed that Ankang hospitals should not admit anyone who is not mentally ill “without the approval of public security bureaus.”

People from mainland China read it as an indirect admission that Ankang hospitals can detain perfectly sane people as long as it is approved by the police. They comment that, in the past, police have incarcerated mentally healthy petitioners into psychiatric hospitals without a word. Now they send out a warning.

Persecution under cover

Zhang Ningzan, a renowned human rights lawyer told The Epoch Times that persecution, especially of political dissidents and petitioners under the guise of psychiatric treatment, occurs more often nowadays.

News broke on April 25 that a peasant named Xu Lindong from Henan Province was locked up in a mental hospital for six and a half years for supporting his neighbor Zhang Guizhi in a land dispute between Zhang and the township government. He was shackled 48 times and given electric shocks 54 times during his incarceration.

Ding Hongyun, deputy head of the Psychiatric Hospital of Luohe in Henan Province explained that Xu was incarcerated because of his insistence on visiting Beijing to lodge complaints against the local government, thereby disrupting social order, according to a China Youth Daily report.

Yangcheng Evening News reported on April 9 that Peng Baoquan and Deng Fuhua, two residents of Shiyan, a city in Hubei Province, were detained in a mental hospital because they took pictures of a protest.

According to Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, on April 22, 2009, Pan Xiang, a citizen of Baoying County, Jiangsu Province, was kidnapped by local police and detained in a Yangzhou psychiatric hospital for nearly two months. Pan had asked the authorities to provide him with a letter allegedly written by Wen Jiabao in response to an earlier letter sent by Pan. He was forced to take medication, and as a result of an allergic reaction, developed edema in his legs.

Read entire article:  http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/36505/

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The Raw Story
By Diana Sweet
May 5, 2010

Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI)  has filed a report and urgent appeal with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture alleging that the Judge Rotenberg Center for the disabled, located in Massachusetts, violates the UN Convention against Torture.

The rights group submitted their report this week, titled “Torture not Treatment: Electric Shock and Long-Term Restraint in the United States on Children and Adults with Disabilities at the Judge Rotenberg Center,” after an in-depth investigation revealed use of restraint boards, isolation, food deprivation and electric shocks in efforts to control the behaviors of its disabled and emotionally troubled students.

Findings in the MDRI report include the center’s practice of subjecting children to electric shocks on the legs, arms, soles of feet and torso — in many cases for years — as well as some for more than a decade. Electronic shocks are administered by remote-controlled packs attached to a child’s back called a Graduated Electronic Decelerators (GEI).

The disabilities group notes that stun guns typically deliver three to four milliamps per shock. GEI packs, meanwhile, shock students with 45 milliamps — more than ten times the amperage of a typical stun gun.

A former employee of  the center told an investigator, “When you start working there, they show you this video which says the shock is ‘like a bee sting’ and that it does not really hurt the kids. One kid, you could smell the flesh burning, he had so many shocks. These kids are under constant fear, 24/7. They sleep with them on, eat with them on. It made me sick and I could not sleep. I prayed to God someone would help these kids.”

Noting that it believes United States law fails to provide needed protections to children and adults with disabilities, MDRI calls for the immediate end to the use of electric shock and long-term restraints as a form of behavior modification or treatment and  a ban on the infliction of severe pain for so-called therapeutic purposes.

“Torture as treatment should be banned and prosecuted under criminal law,” the report states.

Read entire article:  http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0504/rights-group-files-urgent-appeal-alleging-torture-school-disabled/

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Canada Free Press
March 31, 2010

During the thirteen session of the UN Human Rights Council, the Falun Gong Human Rights Working Group, together with the Conscience Foundation, submitted a report on the Chinese government’s psychiatric torture of Falun Gong practitioners to various human rights mechanisms of the United Nations and to members of UN Human Rights Council.

China’s use of nerve-damaging chemicals to destroy Falun Gong practitioners’ capacity to hold thoughts and conscience has drawn the international community’s attention. As a result, organizations, agencies and individuals have made many helpful suggestions on how to stop such criminal acts. Based on the feedback we have received, FLGHRWG is launching a global initiative to work with world governments, agencies, and organizations to end the Chinese government’s mind-killing practices, and make those hospitals and individuals involved in psychiatric torture accountable for their crimes.

The global initiative includes the following actions:

• Submit the report to governments, Interpol, medical associations, psychiatric associations and human rights organizations.
• Submit the names of those doctors who have participated in the psychiatric torture of Falun Gong practitioners to governments and Interpol. These individuals should be arrested and prosecuted according to Article 5 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
• Provide governments with the names of the presidents of those hospitals that have taken part in the psychiatric torture of Falun Gong practitioners. These individuals should be denied visas for international travel.
• Provide governments, Physicians’ Associations, and Psychiatrists’ Associations with the list of hospitals that have taken part in the psychiatric torture of Falun Gong practitioners. These hospitals should be banned from international academic exchanges, collaboration, or medical training.
• Provide a list of hospitals and individuals to medical associations, psychiatrists associations, and medical journals of various countries. These institutions and individuals should be banned from publishing research articles.
• Request that the international community closely monitor and control psychiatric drug exports to China.

Read entire article:  http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/21523

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Irish Times
By Carl O’Brien
March 16, 2010

A CONSULTANT psychiatrist employed by the HSE has warned that psychiatrists have “too much power” and that rules on the use of electro-shock therapy need to be changed to protect patients.

Dr Pat Bracken, clinical director for the West Cork mental health service, was speaking at a private briefing for members of the Oireachtas on whether changes are needed to laws governing use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). These rules state that ECT can be used where a patient is “unable or unwilling” to give consent once it has been approved by two consultant psychiatrists.

Dr Bracken said this law meant there was no legal comeback for a patient who felt they had been harmed.

“In any other branch of medicine it would be unconscionable to allow a procedure to go ahead, except in the most dire emergency, without procuring consent, if not from the patient then from a next-of-kin,” he said.

He said ECT was the “most invasive procedure” currently used by psychiatrists and that research showed that at least a third of recipients had suffered substantial memory loss after treatment.

Read entire article:  http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/health/2010/0316/1224266346885.html

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By Dr. John Breeding, author of The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses

Ask the average person about the use of electroshock treatment in today’s society and 9 out of 10 will respond, “They still shock people?”

They do. It’s estimated that more than 100,000 Americans are electroshocked each year; half are 60 and older, and two-thirds are women. In Australia, it was recently revealed that psychiatrists had electroshocked 55 toddlers age four and younger. In the UK, three year olds have been brutalized with it. And one of the country’s leading mental health “patients’ rights” groups—the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI)—recently endorsed the use of electroshock on pregnant women. One would wonder why a patients’ rights group would endorse such an obviously harmful procedure if not for the fact that the group has recently been exposed as a major front for the psycho/pharmaceutical industry.

The FDA reports pregnant women miscarrying following ECT, while studies show that in addition to the risk of death, the fetus can suffer malnutrition, dehydration and violent injury. Electroshocking children, pregnant women and the unborn is tantamount to torture and should not only be banned but those administering it prosecuted.

Given the factual truths of sending up to 360 volts of electricity searing through the brain – the obvious question is why the “treatment” has not gone by the wayside like its psychiatric sister treatments during the 1940s and 1950s, insulin coma shock and lobotomy.

Electroshock was indeed challenged, and its low point pretty much coincided with the release in 1975 of the Academy Award-winning film version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the feisty Randle Patrick McMurphy. The horrible scene of his undergoing “unmodified” shock treatment, i.e., without anesthetic and muscle-paralyzing drugs, along with his reduction to a vegetative state was seared in the public’s mind. This, together with public exposure of the shameful state of psychiatric institutions, certainly gave electroshock treatment a bad name—so much so that the treatment was renamed Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). The bad publicity caused its use in public institutions to fall sharply, and its overall use was also considerably diminished. It would be naïve, however, to think that this curtailment was strictly due to increased public awareness about the brutalities of the procedure. The advent of neuroleptics (nerve-seizing drugs) was perhaps the major factor in this development. The indiscriminate use of these drugs replaced the indiscriminate use of ECT as the primary means of subduing and pacifying inmates who resisted incarceration and wouldn’t cooperate.

In the last two decades, however, electroshock has made a comeback.

Most electroshock is insurance-covered. ECT specialists on average have incomes twice that of other psychiatrists. The cost for inpatient ECT ranges from $50,000 to $75,000 per series (usually 8 to 12 individual sessions). Electroshock is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry—yet its damaging effects are well known to those who endorse it.

Max Fink, a professor of psychiatry and the “Grandfather of American ECT” believed the “therapeutic” effect from ECT is produced by brain dysfunction and damage. “Effects on memory, common in ECT, come in two flavors,” wrote Fink in Psychiatric Times in 2006. “Delirium is common with each seizure and is well documented by immediate measurable changes in brain chemistry and physiology” and “the second complaint is of a persistent loss of personal memories…They do not recall the names of their children, family holidays, or personal events….Their complaints cast a public shadow on ECT practice.”

The Procedure

Electroshock is a psychiatric procedure that involves the production of a grand mal convulsion, similar to an epileptic seizure, by passing from 70 to upwards of 600 volts of electric current through the brain for one-half second to four seconds. Before application, ECT subjects are typically given anesthetic, tranquilizing and muscle-paralyzing drugs to reduce fear, pain, and the risk (from violent muscle spasms) of fractured bones (particularly of the spine, a common occurrence in the early history of ECT before the introduction, in the mid-1950s, of the muscle-paralyzing drug succinylcholine [Anectine]). The ECT-induced convulsion usually lasts from thirty to sixty seconds and may immediately produce disorienting, painful, and even life-threatening complications, such as apnea (temporary suspension of breathing) and cardiac arrest. The convulsion is followed by a period of unconsciousness of several minutes’ duration. Electroshock is usually administered in hospitals because they are equipped to handle emergency situations that often develop during or soon after an ECT session.

Brain Damage

The brain naturally operates in millivolts of electricity, and ECT administers on average between 150 and 400 volts of electricity to the brain, a force sufficient to induce a grand mal seizure, rupture the protective blood-brain barrier and incite glutamate toxicity (glutamate is a powerful neurotransmitter released by nerve cells in the brain and is responsible for sending signals between nerve cells. In glutamate toxicity there is too much glutamate that leads to over-excitation of the receiving nerve cell, which can cause cell damage and/or death). It is prima-facie, common sense obvious fact that ECT causes brain damage. After all, the rest of medicine, as well as the building trades, do their best to prevent people from being hurt or killed by electrical shock. People with epilepsy are given anticonvulsant drugs to prevent seizures because they are known to damage the brain. The Electroshock Quotationary, a collection of quotations, excerpts, and essays about the history and nature of electroshock, by shock survivor Leonard Roy Frank, includes the testimony of Peter Sterling, a University of Pennsylvania neuroscience professor, describing the nature of ECT-caused brain damage, dated May 31, 2001, to the New York Assembly Standing Committee on Mental Health at a public hearing on ECT.

Sterling affirms the obvious: that massive amounts of electricity directly into the brain cause profound damage.

Lack of Efficacy

Not only does electroshock directly violate the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, the practice has never been proven effective. There are no lasting beneficial effects of electroshock; sham-electroshock (anesthesia but no electroshock) has the same short-term outcomes as electroshock (Ross, 2006). Even leading shock researcher and advocate Harold Sackeim now provides a proof. In an article from 2001, he and his colleagues conclude, “Our study indicates that without active treatment, virtually all remitted patients relapse within 6 months of stopping ECT.” (Italics mine)

The FDA

The battle against electroshock has been ongoing since its advent. The two recent chronicles by electroshock survivor activist leaders, Leonard Roy Frank (The Electroshock Quotationary) and Linda Andre (Doctors of Deception), tell the story best. Just now, the fight has centered on the FDA review of the “efficacy and safety” of ECT machines.

Many activists, including myself, have submitted testimony urging the FDA NOT to reclassify these devices from Class III (high risk) to Class II (low risk). I have worked with scores of electroshock survivors, and I can tell you the damage is consistent and terrible. I can also tell you as a psychologist that there are methods so much gentler, safer and more effective to help people with depression.

A Repackaged Product

The reason for electroshock’s endurance and resurgence is best described by Linda Andre, shock survivor and leader of the Committee for Truth in Psychiatry, in her masterful new work, Doctors of Deception: What They Don’t Want You to Know About Shock Treatment—it is simply the triumph of public relations over science. A concerted PR campaign has allowed electroshock to continue despite clear scientific evidence of its dismal and tragic record on safety and efficacy.

The industry repackaged the product to keep it selling. They touted a “newer and safer ECT,” bragging about improved equipment and the introduction of anesthesia and muscle paralysants, which actually came on the market in the 1950s. While the muscle paralysants greatly reduced the risk of broken bones from unrestrained convulsions, there was no lessening of permanent damage to the brain caused by the electroshocks. The drugs made the procedure appear much more benign because they suppressed the body’s natural, violent reaction to a grand mal convulsion. However, as Doug Cameron (1994) and other researchers have shown, the new machines, because they are more powerful than ever are capable of releasing greater amounts of electricity into the brain thus causing more damage than the older devices.

With the newer technique modifications there is also an added risk. The drugs used to prevent bone complications raise the seizure threshold so that more electrical current is required to induce the convulsion, which in turn increases brain damage. Moreover, whereas ECT specialists formerly tried to induce seizures with minimal current, they commonly use suprathreshold amounts in the belief that they are more effective. Again, the more current, the more brain damage. Proponents, and the public, have missed the point that the supposed “effectiveness” of ECT is in direct ratio to the amount of brain damage it causes.

In addition to the propaganda effect and the financial incentives, there is a less well-considered reason for ECT’s popularity among psychiatrists. Although electroshock is often described as psychiatry’s “treatment of last resort,” it is actually psychiatry’s “treatment of next resort.” Next resort after psychiatric drugs, which are the main “treatment”—a treatment whose lack of effectiveness and lack of safety are well documented. Like ECT, these drugs can damage and disable the brain. Like ECT, they can cause a fully justified resentment that goes with the experience of having been betrayed by one’s supposed helpers.

Activist and electroshock survivor Leonard Roy Frank’s recent letter to the FDA in regards to their review of ECT devices is one of the best. I end this blog article with his conclusion:

As a destroyer of memories and thoughts, electroshock is a direct, violent assault on these hallmarks of American liberty: freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from assault, and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Tens of thousands of people every year in the United States are deceived or coerced into undergoing electroshock. The FDA should do everything in its power to discourage the use of electroshock by:

• keeping ECT’s Class III, high-risk rating;
• insisting that electroshock psychiatrists, manufacturers of ECT devices, and executives and administrators in hospitals where ECT is administered, substantiate with scientific proof their claims that the procedure is “safe and effective”;
• and calling upon the Congress and the Department of Justice to investigate the fraudulent and coercive use of this cruel and inhuman procedure.

Despite the evidence of grievous harm and failure to help, electroshock’s proponents rave on; as an example, an electroshock psychiatrist told Washington Post reporter Sandra Boodman in 1996, that, “ECT is one of God’s gifts to mankind. There is nothing like it, nothing equal to it in efficacy or safety in all of psychiatry.”

Given that ECT causes brain damage, memory loss, and other serious cognitive impairment, electroshock serves to cover up and impede any potential malpractice or personal injury litigation. It generally takes years for a shock survivor to recover enough to figure out what has happened to them, and most states have a statute of limitations (usually one or two years) on medical malpractice and personal injury suits. As a result, electroshock survivors are effectively prevented from pursuing litigation against those who harmed them, making electroshock psychiatrists almost malpractice-proof.

John Breeding, Ph.D. has been a counseling psychologist in Austin, Texas for 25 years.
He is an outspoken critic of electroshock treatment and has testified against its use before legislative bodies on numerous occasions. Dr. Breeding is also the director of Texans For Safe Education, a citizens group dedicated to challenging the ever-increasing role of psychiatric drugs in schools. He is the author of numerous articles and four books including: The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses and True Nature and Great Misunderstandings.

For more information on the damage caused by ECT, visit www.endofshock.com

References

Ayd Jr., F.T. (November-December 1963). “Guest editorial: Ugo Cerletti, M.D. (1877-1963),” Psychosomatics, Vol. 4, pp. A-6 – A-7.

Boodman, S.G. (September 24, 1996). “Shock therapy: It’s back,” Washington Post (Health Section), pp. 14-20.

Frank, Leonard Roy, The Electroshock Quotationary, June 2006, www.endofshock.com/102C_ECT.PDF.

Andre, Linda, Doctors of Deception, www.doctorsofdeception.com.

Kalinowsky, L.B. (1988). Quoted in R. Abrams, “Interview with Lothar Kalinowsky, M.D.,” Convulsive Therapy, Vol. 4.

Ross, C.A. (Spring 2006). “The sham ECT literature: Implications for consent to ECT,” Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. 8.

Sackeim, H.A. et al. (March 14, 2001). “Continuation pharmacotherapy in the prevention of relapse following electroconvulsive therapy,” Journal of the American Medical Association.

Sackeim, H.A. (2001). “Memory loss: From polarization to reconciliation,” Journal of ECT, vol. 17, no. 3, p. 229. Sackeim, H.A., Prudic, J. et al. (January 2007). “The cognitive effects of electroconvulsive therapy in community settings,” Neuropsychopharmacology, Vol. 32, pp. 244-254.

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Donal Thornton
IrishCentral.com
December 28, 2009

Irish state health inspectors have warned that many of Ireland’s psychiatric wards may be closed as they are “unfit for human habitation.” Irish health inspectors have uncovered evidence of bad management and untrained medical staff administering electric shock therapy to patients in psychiatric wards around the country.

The results of the inspectors findings were revealed in a report by the Inspectorate of Mental Health Services. The Irish state caters for over 2,700 patients in its 63 psychiatric institutions.

Practically all of the bad reports were confined to Victorian era health wards that the authorities have been waiting to close for the last 20 years.

Inspectors reported seeing patients wandering “aimlessly” around St. Brendan’s psychiatric ward in Dublin and were concerned that patients were been accommodated in “unsuitable” conditions.

Read entire article: http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Irish-psychiatric-wards-unfit-for-human-habitation-80198882.html

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The Irish Times
Letters
December 8, 2009

Madam, – On the subject of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) without consent (Home News, December 7th), it is important we listen to people such as Mary Maddock who are speaking after having had ECT, and personally suffered its effects.

Professionals who advocate it don’t have to undergo it.  Instead, they note that after  the shock is administered to patients, there is sometimes a lightening of mood – euphoria (which is the natural reaction to shock), but very soon this subsides, and the patient returns to depression again, this time with an impaired brain.

It may be that ECT is a drastic remedy, but the cure may be worse than the disease. Trust and confidence are slow to repair, and the loss to memory, especially the time leading up to the treatment – makes the patient very vulnerable. The fact that vessels and connections are ruptured, and cannot be repaired,  as it is a closed head wound – all make this treatment undesirable. In some cases the result is more incapacity.

Read entire letter: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2009/1208/1224260292813.html

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Psychiatric Drug Facts
Dr. Peter Breggin

By far the most up-to-date information of the dangers associated with ECT can be found in a chapter in Dr. Breggin’s book, Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex, Second Edition (2008). Dr. Breggin brings together and evaluates dozens of articles demonstrating permanent brain damage from ECT including irreversible severe memory loss and wide spread cognitive disabilities. Many patients lose their ability to practice their professions or to conduct their lives in a normal fashion. Dr. Breggin was the medical expert in the first and only electroshock malpractice suit won by the injured patient. He was also the expert in a recent malpractice suit against an ECT doctor that resulted in a settlement of more than $1 million.

In 2007 a long-term follow-up study of ECT patients conducted by a team of shock-advocates lead by Harold Sackeim confirmed Dr. Breggin’s observations that the “treatment” is devastating to the mental functions, frequently causing dementia with permanent disruption of memory and a variety of other cognitive functions.

The acronym ECT stands for “Electro Convulsive Therapy” (also called EST, for Electro Shock Therapy) a psychiatric treatment in which electricity is applied to the head and passed through the brain to produce a grand mal or major convulsion. The seizure brought about by the electric stimulus closely resembles, but is more rigorous or strenuous than that found in idiopathic epilepsy or in epilepsy following a wide variety of insults to the brain.

Read entire article: http://breggin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=40&Itemid=52

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