ECT

antrim | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Saturday September 18, 2004 14:38 by s.fleming

749 receive ECT.The question to psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses is: Would you be prepared to administer this to one of your loved ones?

The latest report by the Inspector of Mental Hospitals ending 2003 in the Republic reveals that 749 received the brain damaging electro convulsive ‘treatment’ (ECT) – THE PASSING OF AN ELECTRICAL CURRENT –through the brain administered by psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses and considered to be ‘helpful’ in the treatment of so-called mental illness. Last year it was pointed out that the figure was 1021.It is simply unacceptable that this barbaric treatment continue. The question to psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses is: Would you be prepared to administer this to one of your loved ones?

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Psychiatry today also continues to ruin lives with their so- called drug treatments which simply act as chemical straitjackets, reducing the person to a robotic like nature, the effect of the drugs is simply a chemical lobotomy. The psychiatric ‘patient’ today is simply treated as a non –entity.

Psychiatry is violence against vulnerable people.

Quotes on ECT:
"All ECT (electric shock) does is produce brain damage. ...If you want brain damage, it's your prerogative... there's no more effective way than ECT. It's more effective than a car wreck, or getting hit with a blunt instrument."

- Dr. John Friedberg, Neurologist

“Electroshock or electroconvulsive therapy involves the passage of an electrical current through the brain of the patient to produce a grand mal or major epileptic seizure. ..The shock induces an electrical storm that obliterates the normal electrical patterns in the brain, driving the recording needle on the EEG up and down in violent, jagged swings. This period of extreme bursts of electrical energy often is followed by a briefer period of absolutely no electrical activity, called the isoelectric phase. The brain waves become temporarily flat, exactly as in brain death, and it may be that cell death takes place at this time.
A shock-induced seizure is typically far more severe than those suffered during spontaneous epilepsy. In early times, when the shock patient's body was not paralyzed by pharmacological agents, it would undergo muscle spasm sufficiently violent at times to crack vertebrae and break limb bones.”

From Toxic Psychiatry, by radical psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin, M.D.

History of ECT:

The story of electric shock* began in 1938, when Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti visited a Rome slaughterhouse to see what could be learned from the method that was employed to butcher hogs. In Cerletti's own words, "As soon as the hogs were clamped by the [electric] tongs, they fell unconscious, stiffened, then after a few seconds they were shaken by convulsions.... During this period of unconsciousness (epileptic coma), the butcher stabbed and bled the animals without difficulty....
"At this point I felt we could venture to experiment on man, and I instructed my assistants to be on the alert for the selection of a suitable subject."
Cerletti's first victim was provided by the local police - a man described by Cerletti as "lucid and well-oriented." After surviving the first blast without losing consciousness, the victim overheard Cerletti discussing a second application with a higher voltage. He begged Cerletti, "Non una seconda! Mortifierel" ("Not another one! It will kill me!")
Ignoring the objections of his assistants, Cerletti increased the voltage and duration and fired again. With the "successful" electrically induced convulsion of his victim, Ugo Cerletti brought about the application of hog-slaughtering skills to humans, creating one of the most brutal techniques of psychiatry.”

http://www.sntp.net/ect/ect3.htm