Section/Psychiatry

ECT - The Shocking Truth

If human rights include freedom from brutality and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, then there is no doubt that contemporary psychiatry’s major “treatment” fixations are human rights abuses.

Two of the main treatments used by psychiatrists today are psychosurgery and electroshock. Electroshock therapy hides behind the euphemistic pseudonym of “electroconvulsive therapy” or simply, ECT.

Shock “treatment” simply overwhelms and damages the individual. It does not address the causes of “mental illness”.

Their action is to interfere, in a hit-and-miss way, with the individual’s current physical, emotional and thought processes. When the treatment “works,” it commonly means the problem or its manifestations are mechanically suppressed; the trouble with this is that, to varying degrees, so is the patient and his awareness of life. Meanwhile, the underlying problem remains, and in due course, the individual will find himself less able to cope with life than before.

Brain Damaging Effects of Electroshock; The Facts

Anyone who has seen electroshock performed knows this procedure has all the marks of physical torture that belongs in the armoury of a Gestapo interrogator.  Electroshock is up to a brutal 400 volts of electricity sent searing through the brain.  The same ECT machine that is used for “therapy” is used to torture political prisoners.  Consider also that after exposure of the electrical shock methods used on prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the US Congress included provisions in the Department of Defence Appropriations prohibiting “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment” with regard to persons kept in detention by the Department of Defence and in the custody or control of the United States Government worldwide.  We do not condone the use of electrical shock of prisoners of war, and we should not condone its use as “therapy” on the mentally disturbed.  It never addresses the cause of the person’s problems and offers no cure.  ECT is dangerous, cruel, and inhumane.

• Electroshock was developed in 1938 out of a Rome slaughterhouse, where pigs were electroshocked to make it easier to slit their throats in order to kill them.  A psychiatrist, Ugo Cerletti, had been experimenting with electric shock on dogs, placing an electrode in the dog’s mouth and another in its anus.  Half of the animals died from cardiac arrest.  After seeing the pigs being shocked, he decided to use this on humans. 
• Psychiatry deceptively cloaks electroshock with false medical legitimacy: the hospital setting, white-coated assistants, anaesthetics, muscle paralysing drugs and sophisticated-looking equipment.  But the scientific principle behind ECT is no more advanced than the principles behind neighbourhood bullying.
• Today, psychiatry shocks and tortures the brains of 2 million individuals worldwide. In 2004-2005, in Australia, nearly 16,000 ‘treatments’ of ECT were given.  It also causes memory loss, brain damage and intellectual impairment.
• The elderly can be a target for ECT; In Australia, in 2005, over 3,500 electric shocks were given to people between the ages of 65 and 85. In New Zealand, in 2003-4 31% of the electroshock given was to people aged 70 or older.
• Yet, psychiatry admits it they still do not know how ECT “works”. Psychiatry has over 50 theories but when one psychiatrist was questioned under deposition in a California ECT suit about what the 460 volts of electricity does to the brain, he said he was not an expert, go ask an electrician!
• Imagine a heart surgeon claiming he does not know how the heart works but has dozens of theories-and no scientific fact-about why a coronary bypass operation should be performed.  You would sue him for malpractice, which is what should be done to any psychiatrist damaging a patient with ECT today-and the colleges that taught him, as well as the psychiatric associations still endorsing it.

Publications and Information

Because of psychiatry’s litany of lies about ECT’s “safety and efficacy,” it has fallen to CCHR and scores of victims to ensure that people are fully informed about its risks. For more information about the often-irreparable damage and even fatal effects of electroshock, click the continued button.

The following CCHR publications expose the brutal history and current use of electroshock, how this treatment has been used for torture, and has led to the destruction of some of our most loved artists.

The Brutal Reality - Harmful Psychiatric 'Treatments'

This explores the origins of electroshock from a Rome slaughterhouse in 1938 and Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Download PDF...

Harming Artists - Psychiatry Ruins Creativity

ECT, psychosurgery and other brutal psychiatric treatments have destroyed many great artists in the name of “helping” them. Download PDF...

Creating Racism - Psychiatry’s Betrayal

Charges of racism and genocide have been leveled at psychiatry and psychology since their birth. Read how electroshock without anesthetic was administered to black South Africans during Apartheid.Download PDF...

Psychiatric Hoax - The Subversion of Medicine

There is a pervasiveness about the mental health thinking that appears in primary care medicine today. It is largely due to the promotion of psychiatry’s diagnostic system, the DSM. This booklet, primarily for medical doctors, includes a chapter on the harmful impact of DSM on general medicine-today, family physicians and doctors prescribe more antidepressants than psychiatrists.Download PDF...

History of Psychosurgery

Modern psychosurgery can be traced to an incident in 1848 when an explosion drove an iron rod through the cheek and out the top of the head of railway worker Phineas Gage.

Instruments of Destruction

Not to be confused with medical brain surgery which alleviates actual physical conditions, psychosurgery destroys healthy brain tissue and is condemned by many doctors for its crippling effect on the patient.

Psychosurgery uses various methods to destroy the brain-tearing it with a scalpel, burning it with electrode implants or shredding the frontal lobes with an ice pick.

The Roots of Torture:

The roots of psychosurgery can be traced to a medieval treatment called “trepanning” (cutting out circular sections of the skull). Ancient doctors believed this liberated demons and bad spirits from a person.

However, modern psychosurgery can be traced to an incident in 1848 when an explosion drove an iron rod through the cheek and out the top of the head of railway worker Phineas Gage. Before the accident, Gage had been a capable foreman, a religious man with a well-balanced mind and a shrewd business sense. After the rod was removed and he recovered, Gage became fitful, irreverent, grossly profane, impatient and obstinate.

That an alteration in behaviour could be achieved by damaging parts of the brain without killing a person did not go unnoticed, and in 1882 Swiss asylum superintendent Gottlieb Burckhardt became the first known psychosurgeon. He removed cerebral tissue from six patients, hoping “the patient might be transformed from a disturbed to a quiet dement.” Although one died and others developed epilepsy, paralysis and aphasia (loss of ability to use or understand words), Burckhardt was pleased with his now quiet patients.

So was born a new mental “treatment.”

On November 12, 1935, Egas Moniz, a professor of neurology in Lisbon, Portugal, performed the first lobotomy inspired by an experiment in which the frontal lobes of two chimpanzees were removed. Moniz conducted the same operation on humans, theorising that the source of mental disorders was this part of the brain.

A 12-year follow-up study observed that Moniz’s patients suffered relapses, seizures and deaths. Yet this did not deter others from following in his footsteps.

“Operation Ice Pick”

On September 14, 1936, U.S. psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman performed his first lobotomy. Using electric shock as an anaesthetic, he inserted an ice pick beneath the eye socket bone into the brain with a surgical mallet. Movement of the instrument then severed the fibres of the frontal brain lobes, causing irreversible brain damage.

Between 1946 and 1949 the lobotomies increased tenfold. Freeman himself performed or supervised approximately 3,500 procedures, producing armies of zombies. By 1948, the death rate from lobotomies was 3%. Yet Freeman toured from city to city, promoting his procedure by lecturing and publicly lobotomising patients in theatrical fashion. The press dubbed his tour “Operation Ice Pick.”

Today, under the sanitised name of “neurosurgery” for mental disorders (NMD), psychosurgery advocates such as the Scottish Health Secretary propose that lobotomies - performed by burning out the frontal lobes - be used on patients without their consent. In Russia between 1997 and 1999, Dr. Sviatoslav Medvedec, director of St. Petersburg’s Institute of the Human Brain, admitted to overseeing more than 100 psychosurgery operations given mainly to teenagers for drug addiction. “I think the West is too cautious about neurosurgery because of the obsession with human rights...” he said.

In 1999, Alexander Lusikian was admitted to the “Brain Institute” at St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was to receive psychosurgery to cure his drug addiction. The operation was performed without anaesthesia. Four holes were drilled into his head during a four-hour operation and sections of the brain were cauterised (burned) with liquid nitrogen, causing excruciating pain. After he was released, the wounds on his scalp festered so badly that he needed to be re-hospitalised. Within a week of the psychosurgery, Lusikian was craving drugs and within two months, he had completely reverted to drugs.

FROM STARDOM TO DESPAIR
Frances Farmer
1914-1970

Upset over a string of failed relationships, Hollywood actress Frances Farmer was arrested in January 1943, after a bout of heavy drinking. Refusing to cooperate with psychiatrist Thomas H. Leonard, she was committed to an institution. For the next seven years, she was subjected to 90 insulin shock treatments and numerous bouts of electroshock. She later told of being “raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats, poisoned by tainted food, chained in padded cells, strapped in strait jackets and half drowned in ice baths.” By the time of her release, she was withdrawn and terrified of people. After three years, she was up to working again-sorting dirty laundry. Her career and life were ruined.

HISTORY OF ELECTROSHOCK

Spawned from the slaughterhouses of Rome in 1938, today psychiatrists around the world have reason to thank their ECT pioneers for a financial blessing that has showered them with the good things in life, all at the press of a button. Shock treatment, for the psychiatrist, is clean and quick-and lucrative. In the United States alone, ECT is a $3-billion-a-year industry.

In a Rome slaughterhouse, psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti witnessed butchers incapacitate pigs with electricity before slitting their throats. The attendants would walk through the pig pens with a large pair of electrically wired pincers which had metal disks spiked with small metal points on each pincer arm. The pig’s head was grasped with the pincers, the animal fell to the ground paralysed from the shock, whereupon it could be easily killed. Cerletti lost no time in developing this for use on humans to control behaviour. Electroshock-also known as electro-convulsive therapy, shock treatment and ECT- was thus pioneered by Cerletti in the mid-1930s.

Cerletti was fascinated by the control potentials of electroshock. The first man who received it pleaded with Cerletti, “Not another one! It’s deadly!” A witness recounts that, “The Professor (Cerletti) suggested that another treatment with a higher voltage be given.”

Murdering the Mind

German psychiatrist Lothar B. Kalinowsky, who witnessed this first electroshock while a student of Cerletti, became one of the world’s most ardent and vigorous proponents of this “treatment.” He developed his own ECT machine and in 1938 introduced his electroshock procedure to France, Holland and England, later pioneering it in the United States. By 1940, ECT had arrived in many countries around the world.

Today, the administration of electroshock brings an estimated $3 billion annually into psychiatric industry coffers in the U.S. alone. However, those receiving this “treatment” are the ones who pay the costliest price. Documented studies show ECT leaves irreversible brain damage. Shock treatment causes confusion of time and space orientation, permanent loss of memory and can result in death. Yet psychiatrists continue to use it. Nobody has ever been “cured”-only deprived of their memory, feelings and will.

CREATIVITY AND LIFE DESTROYED

Ernest Hemingway
1899-1961

Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway allowed himself to be talked into receiving 20 electroshock treatments. The result devastated him. As he told a friend, “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....” Indeed we did. He committed suicide shortly afterwards.

How Electric Shock “Works”

Ask the foremost psychiatrists and they have no explanation to justify why or how their ECT “works.” It is literally as scientific as sticking one’s head in a light socket. Do it often enough and you will become disoriented, confused, lose your memory or even die. CCHR describes the electroshock process.

1. The patient is injected with an anaesthetic to block out pain and a muscle relaxant to shut down muscular activity and prevent spinal fractures.
2. Electrodes are placed on the temples bilaterally (from one side of the brain to the other) or unilaterally (front to back on one side of the brain).
3. A rubber gag is placed in the mouth to keep teeth from breaking or patients from biting their tongues.
4. Between 180 and 480 volts of electricity are sent searing through the brain.
5. To meet the brain’s demand for oxygen, blood flow to the brain can increase as much as 400%. Blood pressure can increase 200%. Under normal conditions, the brain uses a blood-brain barrier to keep itself healthy against harmful toxins and foreign substances. With electroshock, harmful substances “leak” from blood vessels into the brain tissue, causing swelling. Nerve cells die. Cellular activity is altered. The physiology of the brain is altered.
6. The results are memory loss, confusion, loss of space and time orientation and even death.
7. Most patients are given a total of six to 12 shocks, one a day, three times a week.

Ask the foremost psychiatrists and they have no explanation to justify why or how their “treatment” works. It is literally as scientific as sticking one’s head in a light socket. Do it often enough and you will become disoriented, confused, lose your memory or even die. Same result as ECT-but it will cost you a lot less.