ECT

The safety of our children is a sacred obligation we strive to preserve. Anything or anyone that harms them becomes the object of our...

The Irish Times reports that a judge has ordered ECT for a 16-year-old with depression and an eating disorder. The doctor asked the court...

This is the final of four installments about the bizarre, ongoing conduct of psychiatrists at Upton House, an Eastern Health psychiatric facility in Melbourne, and the collusion with their conduct by all relevant agencies. This last installment will document the failure, so far, of the State and Federal Governments to intervene in even this most extreme and blatant example of abuse of power by psychiatry. If I, as a Professor of Clinical Psychology with 40 years clinical and research experience in this field, can be so easily dismissed/ignored by the relevant systems in Victoria, what chance do the average users of mental health services and their families have of being heard in this State?

Afraid of facing me in court, the state gave up entirely and a young man was freed from involuntary ECT treatment. It was a total victory. Meanwhile, the Psychiatric Industrial Complex is finding more subtle ways to inflict electrical energy upon the brains of children labeled with ADHD.

The December 4 "grand rounds" at the Oregon Health and Science University consisted of a presentation on what they call "Interventional Psychiatry"—an interesting euphemism for Electroshock, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), and the comeback street drug, Ketamine.

Work on the May 16 International Day of Protest Against Shock Treatment is moving right along. This spontaneously-organized, grassroots effort now includes 21 cities in 16 states, plus two each in Canada and the United Kingdom. There will also be demonstrations in Ireland, New Zealand, and Uruguay. We CAN win, and you CAN be a leader.

A fictional shock survivor was the narrator of my novel, but her memory loss was such that she did not know huge sections of the story she was trying to tell. In finding solutions to such problems, I came to take in not only the extent of the injury but the sheer ingenuity of the daily work that shock survivors have to do to manage and inject meaning back into their lives.

For almost two decades I was a victim of what I now am aware was psychiatric torture. I believe because I am a woman, it was easier to become a psychiatric victim and to be denied my right to be human. I got my first bolt of electricity just three days after childbirth on the thirtieth of January 1976. I continued to be electrocuted for the month of February until the middle of March, twelve more times while simultaneously being drugged into oblivion.

While most of the sting is gone, even now — almost sixty years on — I can’t get through a single day without thinking about shock treatment and the state hospital. I regularly have dreams or nightmares about being lost in a strange place and someone making me feel like dirt.

From Aeon: In the 1950s, psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron developed a treatment called psychic driving, which involved removing distressing memories and pathological behaviors through an...

In March, 2018, the Court issued an Order denying class certification in the case filed against the manufacturers of ECT shock devices. Attorneys for the ECT victims strongly disagree with the Court's assessment, and have now petitioned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for permission to appeal the ruling denying class certification.

ECT-treated patients were at a greater risk of readmission compared to non-ECT treated patients, according to a study published online May 25, 2012 in...

In 1995 I had a very frightening experience that I have never discussed publicly before. At that time the main symptoms I was experiencing...

Electroshock survivor Nancy Rubstein and professor, author, and antipsychiatry theorist Dr. Bonnie Burstow were recently interviewed for CTV News Channel about Dr. Burstow's new book, The...

Lou Reed’s “Kill Your Sons,” about his ECT as a 17-year-old, gives voice to an event that majorly radicalized him to distrust authorities. Lou’s talents enabled his rage over his ECT to be transformed into the kind of art that deeply touched society’s outcasts and victims of illegitimate authority. But such trauma often only destroys.

In December, the FDA proposed down-classifying the device used in electroshock treatment (ECT), which would loosen regulations and potentially make ECT more widely available...

"A retired nurse, a Harvard-educated musician and others sued British Columbia this week, claiming it forcibly subjects mental health patients to electroconvulsive therapy and...

A group of mental health experts are calling for Manchester University and the UK National Institute for Health Research to immediately suspend and investigate...

The Journal of ECT, looking at the question of whether antidepressant medications at the start of ECT reduced post-ECT relapse in a sample of...

The relapse rate after short-term ECT is high, according to a study in the Journal of ECT, "owing to resistance to medication in these...

"It's time to regulate the use of whole body electrical stimulation, argue doctors in The BMJ today, after treating several people for muscle damage at their...

In a recent commentary, University of Toronto historian Edward Shorter laments the efforts of people like myself in states like Texas who have successfully put limits on shocking children in order to induce grand mal convulsions. His argument is that we who have fought against this are denying children a benevolent medical treatment. In order to understand why Shorter’s plea to use electroshock on children is so egregious, we need to know what it does to children’s brains, which means a look at the science.

In The Other Mrs. Smith, Dr. Burstow chose to use the fiction format, presumably because she felt it was the best way for readers to understand what it is like to experience electroshock and deal with the aftermath of massive memory loss. In this she succeeds spectacularly.

A literature review by John Read and Richard Bentall SUMMARY Aim – To review the literature on the efficacy of electroconvulsive therapy , with a particular...

Audit of ECT usage, demographics, and adherence to guidelines and legislation raises concern over its continued use.