Tag: ECT

“We need the MindFreedom Shield to have someone in our corner when we are told that it doesn't matter what we want, that someone else can make a choice about our bodies that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives.”

I live with the changes every day, even now, four years later. It often feels as though the shocks have rendered me one-handed, only ever capable of dealing with one thing at a time.

The risk of undergoing shock treatment remains. As the FDA warns, “The long-term safety and effectiveness of ECT treatment has not been demonstrated.”

History shows us that the mentally ill are extraordinarily vulnerable to therapeutic experimentation, some particularly brutal and extreme, which continues to the present day.

Proponents of ECT have resorted to ad hominem attacks and rude language in addition to reiterating the same tired points over and over. John Read responds.

Researchers argue that we need a paradigm shift away from the biomedical model of mental illness to one informed by political action and common sense.

An open letter from patients, psychiatrists, and professors calls on NICE to rewrite the new ECT guidelines to avoid putting patients’ safety at risk.

The New York Times article paints a rosy picture of ECT, but it’s based on a misleading study and dismisses the plentiful research on ECT’s harms.

A new documentary about gay activists' defeat of the APA ends with a disclaimer that ECT is "effective" for severe depression. Bruce Levine spoke with the filmmakers.

The basic assumptions behind unethical practices like lobotomies and insulin shock therapy are still the foundation on which psychiatry’s main treatments are built today.

On Denmark's declining use of depression pills for children, and why one should never stop fighting to change psychiatry and society's reliance on it.

If Minnesota is going to mandate ECT for people like Charles Helmer, there are at least 20 questions they need to consider before proceeding.

More than 200 people signed an open letter to the FDA requesting electroconvulsive therapy’s safety studies and electrical dosing protocols.

Psychiatry has a history of continuing to perform harmful, even deadly procedures. But does it still happen? Medication-induced akathisia filled two and a half pages of the DSM-IV. Why was it written out of the DSM 5?

In my experience, psychiatry is a discipline in which treatment and gaslighting exist in a complex braid. One side might show more than the other at times, but they’re closely woven together and hard to pick apart.

An interview with John Read and Irving Kirsch to discuss their paper which calls to prohibit ECT. This is because the negative effects of ECT are so strong, the evidence supporting it is so weak (especially in the long-term and beyond the improvement due to placebo) and there are other means of addressing the difficulties that the person is struggling with.

The New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH) is publishing false and misleading advertisements about electric shock services under the guise of educational materials without even acknowledging the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) December, 2018 Rule.

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.

We have reached the point where we have to ask: Is psychiatry doing anything useful for society, or has it degenerated to an insatiable, high-cost and self-sustaining rentier gorging on the public purse? The Australian Productivity Commission is holding an enquiry into mental health; it is to be hoped that this will assist in the process of uncovering the truth.

The dark-suited man slithered, Shock box in hand, To our bedsides, four girls, innocent, naked, Waiting….waiting….waiting, Sticky-headed, One by one.

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.

A scientific understanding of electricity’s effects on the human body has only been around since the last half of the 20th century. If this understanding of electric shock and electrical injury was had in the first part of the 20th century, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) would likely never have been accepted by modern western medicine.

In an internet email discussion among a large group of supposedly enlightened mental health professionals, few came forward to outright condemn or ban ECT. One participant responded to my comments with, "It worries me how this debate gets so polarized." This refusal to say or to accept something polarizing is a hallmark of most so-called reformers in the field of mental health.

The importance of a remarkable new film, The Minds of Men, was underscored by otherwise inexplicable recent events surrounding government support of ECT. Without any testing or opportunity for public response, effective December 26 the FDA has approved ECT for infliction upon people with “treatment-resistant depression.”

This is a call for action against the horror euphemistically known as “electroconvulsive therapy.” At a time when society is finally making advances against ECT, a courageous 80-year-old shock survivor, Connie Neil, has decided to go on a hunger strike to try to stop the horror that was visited on her from continuing to be visited on others.