If you wish to know the truth about psychiatry, prepare yourself, because it is disturbing to face the facts about how human beings are being treated by mainstream psychiatry. Liberally prescribing psychotropic drugs for more than two decades including “off-label” uses on young children, psychiatry is now pushing an even worse treatment, Electroconvulsive “Therapy” (ECT). Historically ECT has been used, but had taken a back seat to what some call “chemical straightjackets” – potent psychotropic drugs. Psychiatrists now under the gun for over-prescribing potent drug cocktails to young and adult patients, with disastrous consequences, are backpedaling to now get the FDA to legalize a greater use of ECT, by categorizing it as less harmful than it really is.* And that’s just a portion of the truth about psychiatry.
Having captured a huge client base in school children, where restless bored behavior is now labeled “disordered” and medicated, psychiatrists are billing the government billions of dollars annually for prescriptions to children, soldiers, prisoners and the elderly in nursing homes. If public scrutiny curtails the use of dangerous prescription drugs, it is frightening to think that ECT could replace it. Considering the frailty of the aged, it is hard to believe that electroshock would be used on them, or, heaven forbid, a child. Need more truth about psychiatry?
In his detailed and extensive article, Electroshock: Scientific, Ethical, and Political Issues, psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Breggin states:
Contemporary ECT is more dangerous since the current doses are larger than those employed in earlier clinical and research studies. Elderly women, an especially vulnerable group, are becoming the most common target of ECT. Because . . . it is fundamentally traumatic in nature, because so many of the patients are vulnerable and unable to protect themselves, and because advocates of ECT fail to provide informed consent to patients – ECT should be banned.*
If the American Psychiatric Association succeeds in getting shock treatments reclassified as less harmful, we will see more and more ECT leveled at the helpless, of any age. If anyone, like a psychiatrist, believes that people might be “talked out of” their problems, then why destroy the mind and memory, as ECT does? Psychotropic drugs already put the patient mentally out of reach – shock treatment, more so, due to brain damage.
In regards to psychiatry, per the Say No to Psychiatry’s website, the patient never solves their problems whether with psychiatric drugs or ECT. Instead of viewing and solving one’s problems, they are just hidden from view, which then makes them harder to discover, in the attempts of a resolution. This is true of psychiatric drugs, but more so of ECT.
Dr. Peter Breggin reiterates,
“ECT is one of the worse and permanently destructive methods used by psychiatry. Before heavy tranquilizers and muscle relaxers were used to render the patient completely immobile, shock treatments often caused broken vertabrae due to the severity of the force involved with electric shock. There is nothing mild about this ‘treatment’. Slick advertising campaigns and glossy brochures cannot turn this very harmful procedure into a useful and safe one.”
Is ECT a rational treatment? The question hardly needs asking. Consider a person who has just experienced a life shock – be it the death of a loved one, divorce, rape, placement into foster care, the war environment where friends and foe are killed, etc. Shock is what has disturbed them. Is the correct treatment to add another, far worse one? Clearly, it is not.
As one famous artist said, after receiving ECT:
Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.
~ Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning author who received ECT as many as 15 times in 1960 and was released in 1961. He killed himself after complaining that psychiatric electric shock ruined his life.
Now that’s an historical truth about psychiatry.