Experts Demand Shutdown of ECT Study

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A group of mental health experts are calling for Manchester University and the UK National Institute for Health Research to immediately suspend and investigate a planned trial that combines electroconvulsive therapy and ketamine, reports The Observer. The group includes psychiatrists and psychologists who raise concerns about the dangers of combining the potent hallucinogen with ECT. They state in a blog post that the study’s call for participants is “unethical” and misrepresents the scientific evidence base and risks of both ECT and ketamine.

Letter From Nine Mental Health Experts To Funders And Ethics Committee About Ketamine + Electroshock Therapy Study (JOHNREADBLOG, June 21, 2014)

Health experts attack ketamine plan to tackle depression (The Observer, June 22, 2014)

 

19 COMMENTS

  1. It is simply unbelievable that in this day and age that these kinds of experiments are going on. The United Kingdom is, in general, more responsive to the needs of those in mental distress than in the rest of the industrialized world. That these kinds of experiments continue even there is a reproach to the unfettered and unquestioned role of psychiatry as a pseudo-medical practice.

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    • Honestly – try figuring out why the person’s in such shitty psychological state and do something about it or at least offer them human support instead of throwing chemicals at them. It really doesn’t matter if it’s SSRIs, ketamine, magic mushrooms, marihuana, alcohol or whatever else – it’s not fixing the problems.

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  2. Hail, gang– and remember it’s like this: for our own Sandra Steingard the jury’s still out on this, for David Healy the jury is in and ECT appears safe and effective, so his written a book defending it that’s not too old or dusty, assuring us the while that it’s drugs that are the devil in the works, S. O. S., Nardo 1boringoldman, who assures one and all including himself that the only consequent nightmare associated with ECT is the bad aesthetic time that, presumably, the patient misses in sedation, but the poor attending physician is forced to endure.

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  3. Dr. John Breeding on years of effort to ban brain/memory damaging ECT:

    http://psychcentral.com/lib/dr-john-breeding-on-ect/0007290

    Shock Treatment, Brain Damage, and Memory Loss: A Neurological Perspective by John M. Friedberg, M.D.

    http://www.sntp.net/ect/friedberg.htm

    http://psychrights.org/research/Digest/Electroshock/electroshock.htm

    And tons more on the web by real experts who expose the current ECT pushers like megalomaniac Max Fink who has been lying about the horrible brain damage and memory loss from ECT throughout his sordid career to make a literal killing at his victims’ expense. Though he like other psychiatrists admitted early in his career that the purpose of ECT and psychiatric drugs were the brain damaging “therapeutic effects” of dumbing people down and robbing them of their memories, humanity and executive brain functions, Fink had to lie and deny the truth as psychiatry pretended to cure the bogus DSM stigmas they invented and voted in with Big Pharma/Business to torture and brain damage millions of people in the guise of medicine while really exerting torture and sadistic, fascist social control and severe punishment for anyone acting in any way but the robotic slave behavior approved by the psychiatric therapeutic state religion forced on one and all by robbing citizens of their civil, human, constitutional rights with impunity.

    The sooner psychiatry is exposed as an arm of the state to silence any critics or dissidents in keeping with one’s democratic rights just like fascist Stalinist Russia, the sooner the majority of people can reclaim their human rights and challenge the government of crony capitalism mainly serving the 1% hijacking the globe.

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