Tag: ECT

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.

A major electroconvulsive therapy case that was on the eve of trial just settled to the satisfaction of the injured ECT patients and the DK Law Group, LLP. As an expert in the case I am pleased to report that this is a significant victory. The evidence secured has paved the way for more suits against ECT manufacturers that are on the way.

This week on MIA Radio we turn our attention to Electroshock or Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) as it’s known in the UK. On Wednesday, September 19th, this emotive and controversial intervention was discussed at the 57th Maudsley debate, held at Kings College, London.

From The Tyee: "Most of us associate ECT with the torture endured by Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and think it’s...

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.

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.

Due to the thickness of the scalp and skull, transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) is incapable of targeting networks of neurons in the brain.

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.

From The Vancouver Sun: Bonnie Burstow's recently released book The Other Mrs. Smith is not only an accurate portrayal of the horrific consequences of ECT but...

In September of 2017, DK Law Group, LLP filed a Class Action Complaint against the manufacturers of ECT shock devices, alleging that they caused injury to patients by withholding from the FDA data relating to serious iatrogenic brain injuries resulting from ECT. The following developments have taken place since then.

Essentially what Choy et al are seeking in their editorial is the total suppression of information concerning the harmful and often permanent effects of high voltage electric shocks to the brain, thus implying that the very large number of individuals who report more extensive and persistent damage are not worth listening to.

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...

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

In the midst of flagrant professional misrepresentation of ECT, this is a call to arms. Quite simply, the time has come for a frontal assault on the ECT industry and on the professionals associated with it. The time has come to rid society of this barbaric “treatment” altogether.

From Fox43: Last week, two Pennsylvania state representatives, Tom Murt and Stephen Kinsey, introduced a bill to prohibit the use of electroconvulsive therapy on children...