MIA Blogger Ted Chabasinski is featured in a recently released excerpt from Richard Cohen’s “41 Days An Unfinished Documentary.” The clip explores Chabasinki’s important role in bringing a legal halt to the use of electroshock in California for a brief time in the 1980s.
Speaking in Berkeley in 1982, Chabasinski describes how, because his mother had been labeled with a mental illness, he was expected to become mentally ill, too. “So when I was six I was taken from my foster parents, taken to Bellevue Hospital, and given 20 shock treatments,” he says. “And when I went back home, I couldn’t remember parts of my neighborhood, I couldn’t remember children who I’d played with. I was told that a little boy had been my best friend; I didn’t remember him. But I do remember starting to cry when everybody told me I should remember him. That showed I was sick because I couldn’t remember him.”
“Is it any wonder a boy who measured in excess of 180 I.Q. and survived New York’s Snake Pit for ten years later showed up in California to create a political action that made headlines around the world?” comments Cohen in the clip description.
Ted Chabasinski: A Stand Up Man (Richard Cohen Films) (YouTube, March 22, 2015)
