CCHR International » torture

In Australia – Electric shock therapy on the rise for young

admin — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 15:12:11 +0000

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

To get the FACTS about electroshock, watch this video:

Electroshock — It’s Not Treatment, It’s Torture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDR3cD8_kck&feature=channel_video_title

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Psychiatric Torture in China: One Child Policy Victim “Treated” with Electroshock, Injections

admin — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 18:34:30 +0000

NewsBlaze, November 3, 2010

by Reggie Littlejohn

Gu Xianghong languishes in an “Ankang,” a special Chinese psychiatric hospital run by police, Radio Free Asia reports. In a video quoted by RFA, Gu says, “They put electrodes on my temples and they were burned black. They handcuffed me and chained my feet . . . My [entire family] and home have been ruined by the village government.” They also subjected her to injections against her will. According to the report, Gu has been jailed nine times in the Ankang since 1992.

Leaders of a Hubei-based human rights group, Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, videotaped Gu from inside the Ankang and smuggled the video to Radio Free Asia. The Rights group is mounting a campaign called “Mental Hospitals SOS,” to call attention to official psychiatric abuse in China.

Why has Gu repeatedly been jailed and tortured in an Ankang? She sued the local government over “family planning issues.”

This is another example of the fact that the coercive enforcement of China’s One Child Policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth. This violence takes the form of forced abortion, forced sterilization, infanticide, gendercide, sexual slavery and female suicide. Now add to this grim list: psychiatric torture for those who dare to challenge family planning abuses.

Gu is not the first person the Chinese Communist Party has jailed to silence them on family planning abuses. Blind activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Chen Guangcheng exposed the fact that there were 130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations in Linyi County, Shandong Province, in 2005. For this, he served a four year, three month jail sentence, during which time he was severely beaten and denied medical treatment. He now remains under house arrest. To read a dozen expert reports documenting atrocities committed in the name of the One Child Policy, submitted in connection with the Congressional hearing on the One Child Policy of November 10, 2009, click here: http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=congressional

According to reports by Human Rights Watch and others, in China, psychiatric abuse is shockingly common against dissidents, who are jailed and silenced under the guise of psychiatric treatment. In one well-known case, Wang Wanxing was held in an Ankang for 13 years, for staging a brief, one-man pro-democracy protest on Tiananmen Square on the third anniversary of the massacre there. He was released unexpectedly in 2005 and sent to Germany, where he was evaluated by a team of psychiatric experts, who found no mental disorder. Wang told Human Rights Watch about the conditions he had endured. He stated, for example, that he had been forced to watch staff members administer “electric acupuncture treatments” in which the current used was excruciating. One inmate died of a heart attack during such a “treatment.”

According to a recent Epoch Times article, the Falun Gong Human Rights Working Group submitted a report to the United Nations, setting forth 1088 cases of psychiatric torture used against Falun Gong practitioners.

Meanwhile, like countless others deemed to be destabilizing influences by the Chinese Communist Party, Gu remains imprisoned in a psychiatric torture chamber. The brave Chinese human rights defenders who brought her case to the world are themselves victimized by local officials, who chased them as they escaped the Ankang with Gu’s videotape.

Gu should be released, immediately, along with all others trapped in Ankangs all over China, not because they have mental health issues, but simply to silence or break them. Psychiatric abuse of One Child Policy victims, and of all others that the Chinese Communist Party views as a political threat, must stop.

Read the rest of the article here:

Read CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights, here http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/declaration-of-human-rights/

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Chinese dissidents forcibly interned in psychiatric hospitals

admin — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 14:35:49 +0000

AsiaNews.it October 30, 2010

Report reveals scandalous cases of dissidents subjected to years forced of hospitalization, systemic shock treatments and chains. Human Rights Watch: this is what the Chinese Communist Party has done since it took power. Nobel Liu Xiaobo: dozens of his friends are under arrest, forbidden to go to claim his prize.

Hong Kong (AsiaNews / Agencies) – A “campaign” to denounce the numerous abuses against those who protest or present petitions in China and because of this have been detained in psychiatric hospitals, beaten, subjected to electric shocks and sedatives. The activist Liu Feiyue explains that the campaign “SOS Mental Hospitals” wants to make public the many victims of this “system”.

Xiao Yong, an activist of the Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, speaking to Radio Free Asia about Gu Xianghong, who protested the abuses imposed by family planning authorities, the office in charge of enforcing the general prohibition on having more than one child.

“Since 1992 – explains Xiao – [Gu] has attempted to protest the abuse through official channels”, in short by presenting petitions higher authorities for justice.

As a result, Gu has on many occasion been interned in Hospital No. 5 of Xiangtan (Hunan).

Xiao and another activist Zheng Chuangtian filmed a video of Gu, who speaking with some difficulty, denounces being subjected to electric shocks and repeated injections against her will and that he has been interned in the hospital 9 times.

“My entire family was ruined by the village authorities- she says – because I have made petitions … I have been interned here for revenge and forced to undergo injections.” “They won’t let me go … I can not get clear answers from them.” “They have applied electrodes to my temples and turned them on” – she says – “They have covered my head and chained my feet.”

Xiao and Zheng managed to enter the Hospital No. 5 in secret, by outwitting surveillance, then they were caught and locked up for a while.

Gu’s mother, Xu Meijiao, is held by the authorities.

Xuetao Huang, a human rights lawyer, wrote in a report released Oct. 10 that many psychiatric hospitals accept patients without mental illness, at the request of public authorities, because they are well paid.

“The level of implied consent [in these practices] in the psychiatric profession – Huang reports – is growing at a terrifying rate.”

The hope is that these complaints will bring some results: the authorities have given great prominence in recent months to punishments imposed on 5 Henan officials for having sent Xu Lindong, a petitioner, to Luohe City Mental Hospital, on false documents. Xu (pictured) remained interned for 6 ½ years, was locked up 50 times, tortured with electric batons 55 times.

In a 2002 report, “Dangerous Minds”, Human Rights Watch complained that the Chinese Communist Party has always considered “political dissidents, believers, the authors of protests and other dissidents” a major social threat”. These people are often “forcibly interned in psychiatric institutions of various kinds.”

But experts note that coercive methods are still applied by the authorities, even at high levels. They observe that after the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the democratic dissident Liu Xiaobo, the authorities have dozens of dissidents and activists put under close surveillance or house arrest, they have cut their phone lines or follow them everywhere and many have been ordered to leave Beijing and return to their city of origin. His wife, Liu Xia is under house arrest and her connection to Twitter cut off, after she posted an open letter on the Internet to 143 Chinese celebrities and activists asking them to go in her place to Oslo to receive the award for her husband, sentenced to 11 years in prison for crimes of opinion.

The Christian writer Yu Jie has been under house arrest for 12 days. The South China Morning Post said authorities “are afraid” that Liu’s friends “will go to the ceremony to receive the award”.

Note: CCHR is the only organization to have drafted a Declaration of Mental Health Rights that must be universally adopted. There are virtually no rights granted to anyone psychiatry deems mentally ill, and given that psychiatric diagnoses are strictly a matter of opinion, given that there is no medical test to “prove” who is mentally ill, it is imperative that a set of guidelines for patient’s rights be adopted that address the issue of human rights in the field of mental health. Read the Declaration here: http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/declaration-of-human-rights/

Read the article from AsiaNews.it here: http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Chinese-dissidents-forcibly-interned-in-psychiatric-hospitals-19865.html

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UN Calls Electroshock Treatment of Kids at Massachusetts School “Torture”

cchrint — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:52:26 +0000

ABC News Nightline
By Katie Hinman and Kimberly Brown
June 30, 2010

It may look like any leafy New England campus, but inside one Massachusetts school for special needs children, the method of teaching at work is anything but ordinary.

The Boston-area’s Judge Rotenberg Center educates and treats enrollees ages 3 to adult, all of whom are struggling with severe emotional, behavior, and psychiatric problems, including autism-like disorders. And for about half of the 250 students here, undesirable behavior means getting hooked up to a special machine and administered an electric shock.

The skin shock treatment, used only after both a court and the student’s parents have approved, has drawn criticism for years. But after the release of a recent study by Mental Disability Rights International, Rotenberg has come under the scrutiny of no less than the United Nations, which is calling the school’s practices “torture.”

“To be frank, I was shocked when I was reading the report,” said Manfred Nowak, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture. “What I did, on the 11th of May, was to send an urgent appeal to the U.S. government asking them to investigate.”

Read entire article: http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/shock-therapy-massachussetts-school/story?id=11047334

RELATED ARTICLE: 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.
http://babies.secretbest.com/19814/electroshock-is-torture/

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Electroshock Survivor & Human Rights Activist Calls on Amnesty International to Deem Electroshock (ECT) as Torture

cchrint — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:45:36 +0000

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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US school for disabled forces students to wear packs that deliver massive electric shocks

cchrint — Wed, 05 May 2010 22:05:00 +0000

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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Chinese political dissident tortured in psychiatric ward with 54 electroshock treatments spurs nationwide protests

cchrint — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:50:23 +0000

Spero News
By Asia News
April 30, 2010

Four officials of the district government of Luohe (Henan) were removed for having interned a petitioner in a psychiatric hospital for over 6 years. Protests are growing in the country over local authorities systematic abuse of protesters.

Xu Lindong, the author of a petitioner from Daliu city has been interned in two psychiatric hospitals since October 2003. Xu began presenting petitions in 1997, both to local and central authorities. In 2003, dissatisfied with the response of local authorities, he decided to go to Beijing to petition. In response, local authorities had him forcibly repatriated, first sent him Zhumadian psychiatric hospital and later Luohe Psychiatric hospital, where was diagnosed with obsessive-ompulsive disorder and was subjected to 54 electroshock treatments.

Shi Hongtai and Yang Yaoqin, then secretary and deputy secretary of the Communist Party of Daliu, later promoted to higher positions, have been charged with his internment. It appears that they used false documents to have Xu interned.

The news has caused widespread protests and a campaign of online subscriptions, denouncing “the growing trend of regional authorities to restrict the freedom of citizens through similar measures [internment in psychiatric hospitals].”

Now the lawyer Boyang Chang, co-organizer of the signature campaign and family lawyer for Xu, has announced legal action against the Communist officials and hospital responsible for the illegal internment and is demanding compensation.

Read entire article: http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idCategory=33&idsub=128&id=31951&t=China%3A+++Interned+in+psychiatric+hospital+for+6+%BD+years+for+presenting+petitions

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The Huffington Post — MKULTRA: the Perversion of Ethics

cchrint — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:18:15 +0000

Huffington Post
By Michael Kaplan
April 13, 2010

When you are going mad, you first notice new, shocking things about the world; you had not previously realized that the pigeon on the windowsill is always the same pigeon, nor that the rhythm of its coos is the rhythm of human speech. Only later does the fear begin, as you sense that even the most intimate and familiar parts of life are infested and undermined by secret forces. In the last phase, everything makes sense again. Your world is not that of other people, but you know what you have to do – whatever the consequences.

This, essentially, was what happened to parts of the US intelligence establishment in the years between 1945 and 1964. America had come late to covert war; victory had arrived before the fledgling OSS had progressed much further than learning how easy it is to be fooled by a clever enemy, when its largest network in Nazi Germany was shown to be irredeemably compromised. The discovery soon after the war that Soviet agents and sympathizers had been working in positions of importance in the US government added the push of fear to the sense of disorientation. When, during the Korean War, American prisoners started coming back from Chinese captivity expressing communist convictions, the CIA (and, to a lesser degree, the Navy and Army) decided that our new enemies had hold of something – a brainwashing technique, a truth drug – that could reshape the human mind. We had to have it, too.

On this date in 1953, the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, authorized Project MKULTRA. Its purpose was to find “avenues to the control of human behavior… including radiation, electro-shock, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices.” Its scope extended from finding “substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public” to devising “physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time.”

Almost all papers relating to the project were destroyed in 1973 on the orders of one of its prime movers, then CIA director Richard Helms. What little we know with certainty comes from limited congressional investigations and a report of the Inspector General – but even these outline sketches are enough to reveal events both horrible and shameful. Unwitting people were slipped high doses of hallucinogens in public places and left to believe themselves in the grip of psychosis. Others, often unidentified foreign prisoners, were interrogated for months under combinations of drugs that left them permanently damaged. Patients going to reputable clinics to be helped for mild depression received instead electroshock treatment far beyond the medical guidelines, often combined with drug-induced coma and ceaseless suggestion tapes. There were deaths, conveniently ascribed to suicide. Hundred of lives were ruined. The profession of psychiatry was deeply undermined. And nothing substantive came out of it except, perhaps, the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual: the CIA’s first and most influential handbook for torturers.

Read entire article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kaplan/mkultra-the-perversion-of_b_535231.html

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“Stop the Chinese Government’s Psychiatric Torture of Falun Gong Practitioners”

cchrint — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:33:15 +0000

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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UK Professor of Psychology “Psychiatry – The Nightmare of the People”

cchrint — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:15:01 +0000

Psychology Articles
By Stephen Myler
March 2010

In this paper I want to review the investigations from the Citizens Committee for Human Rights in Mental Health. It is this organisation in the United States and other countries that have consistently brought the dangers of psychiatry to the attention of the general public who by and large are the victims of a marriage between pharmaceutical companies and their paid distributors of lethal drugs, psychiatrists. This alliance has been based on the greed for money, profits and kudos all in the name of a science that as one leading authority called – “hokum”

Introduction: A Short History

The history of psychiatry is strewn with the deaths; torture and misadventure that would make any sane person wonder why it has been allowed to continue to practice this black art for so long. Of course the anti-psychiatry movement has been around for almost as long as the profession itself. How did this all begin? You have to go back to the days of the asylums that grew up in the early part of the 1800’s particularly in England and the USA. These places were no more than prisons for the mad, those souls that could not function within the societies norms that dictated how one should act and behave. The head of the asylums was a medical doctor, the first psychiatrist. This man caged the mentally ill in cells, with no heating, little food but rotten scraps and in order to cure them of their madness the inmates were tortured by flogging, burning, immersion in water and many other inhumane acts called treatment. The down fall of the asylums started in England with the York Retreat a Quaker run institute for the mentally ill run on very different lines from the asylums that were government institutions. In the York retreat the inmates were given jobs to perform, were helped by keeping simple rules and rewarded for following them.

Read entire article: http://www.freepsychologyarticles.com/psychiatry-the-nightmare-of-the-people.html

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CCHR International » torture

In Australia – Electric shock therapy on the rise for young

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