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If anybody ever tells you that Electro-convulsive shock therapy is not painful go to this site.
I endured this sort of stuff from 1952 to 1958. It hurts! It hurts like hell and it is abuse not therapy. They might as well just have beaten me with sticks.
No requittal. No f-----g requittal!!!
http://www.myfoxboston.com//dpp/news/undercover/video-of-tee...
www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/undercover/video-of-teen-restrain...
Comments
Horrible!
I watched another station's report.
That link didn't work for some reason - here's one that does.
http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/undercover/video-of-teen...
It is amazing that anyone actually thought that this was a good idea, and even worse when you realize that this was done even after the people involved witnessed this. I cannot imagine how you dealt with this other than that you're here today, which is a testimony to the person you are. I am so proud of you, Bev, for all that you have become in spite of all that you endured.
Love, Andrea Lena
you are an amazinglly strong woman
to have endured that, and come out the other side to become the wonderful person you are.
Jeeminy Christmas. I
Jeeminy Christmas.
I haven't watched the videos, but I've never even heard of someone trying to claim that EST (ElectroShock Therapy) wasn't painful. Well, maybe that it wasn't painful to THEM - the patient was another story.
I'm relatively immune to electrical shocks, and even _I_ don't like being hit with high voltage. 18,000 volts through the right arm makes anyone turn the air blue. (the last time it was 110 through my right arm, across my chest, and down my left arm. Took about an hour before I was feeling right again)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
ECT
That crap looks more like aversion therapy. Here is a (propaganda) link about ECT.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYl13Relzbs
And a Wiki link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
It is bollocks. Note a few things, though: a small number of shocks to a SEDATED patient spread over two to three weeks. Not 31 shocks to a waking 'patient' in one session. To quote Wiki's summary,
"The use of both anesthesia and muscle relaxants is universally recommended in the administration of ECT. If anesthesia and muscle relaxants are not used the procedure is called unmodified ECT. In a minority of countries such as Japan, India, and Nigeria, ECT may be used without anesthesia. WHO has called for a worldwide ban on unmodified ECT and the topic is currently being debated in countries like India"
I have known folk who had massive episodes of this 'treatment', and I put them into one of my characters in 'Sweat and Tears'. The fear, the memory loss; that was from 'proper' treatment. The Fox link (what a pity it is from such a sordid company) shows open and unashamed torture.
The main problem with ECT
Isn't that it is painful, but that it is based on bad science. Your brain is electro-chemical, not just electrical, and sending massivle ammounts of electricity through it does nothing more than fry synapses. They might as well give you massive doses of (put drug of choice) here for all the long term good it does.
It's a lot like Radiation Therapy for cancer. The science is unsound, but people continue to use it because it has a "proven" track record. There was a study a few years ago...never mind. We were talking about ECT.
There is no "magic bullet" to cure mental illness. Doctors should have learned that from Lobotomy.
He entered the hall to get warm. She left it two hundred years later.
Faeriemage
Mad Science
I read something about ECT years ago that was chilling, stuck in my memory. The guy's name was Ugo Cerletti and his inspiration came from seeing cattle in the slaughterhouse get shocked prior to being butchered. Seeing how docile they became he decided it would be good for people.
The article (in a book by anti-psychiatry extremist Thomas Szazz, somethng of a cult figure in the 70's) used Cerletti's own journals to damn him. The doctor was a total fruitloop. The first human guinea pig he was given by the hospital was screaming STOP IT YOUR KILLING ME and he was completely dismissing this, observing that the subject was "displaying paranoid symptoms". Sounds like a bad joke, and in a way it is. These professionals latch onto a "treatment" like this and manage to practice it for decades before someone puts a stop to it, because torture produces compliance which they equate with mental health since it makes their job easier.
Sick.
"You can either fly Over the Rainbow or Under the Radar but you can do both..."
That';s exactly how it was.
No matter how I reacted; shouting, screaming, kicking, crying; every normal reaction to pain seemed to elicit exactly the opposite response to the one a normal person might expect. Screaming was deamed unco-operative and intransigent. Shouting was deemed aggression, kicking was deemed to be violence. Even crying didn't ellicit sympathy. I vaguely remember it being described as (Wait for this one,) efemminate and retrograde.
How could anybody ever trust a doctor again, (I cant!) I self medicate my hormones today for exactly that reason!
The best latterday example of psychiatric abuse is the diagnosis of 'Munchausen's syndrome by proxy.'
Every proper and normal response by a mother to something endangering her child is deemed to be a sympton of Munchausen's syndrome. For a mother it is totally a catch 22 situation designed to ensure her child is taken from her and diagnosed as being at risk. It's absolutely obscene. Once a mother is referred to a social services psychioatrist then her fate is sealed. her child will be taken from her because the diagnoses of Munchausen's is entirely within the remit and gift of the psychiatrists. Every single, normal maternal reaction to her infant's threat is described as a symptom of Munchausen's.
In psychiatry nothing changes only the theories get more and more bizarre. The worst of it is that idiots like Roy meadows et al can get away with their lunacy in the children's courts.
How anyone with even a shred of humanity,
could justify this type of treatment as being beneficial, is completely beyond my understanding! Man's inhumanity to man has always left me disgusted and sickened by the abuses that have been heaped on some in the name of "treatment."
I have said it to you many times...I don't know how you managed to become the rational, caring, wonderful person that you are today, given the horrible things that were done to you in your youth, but I am so glad you did survive and even prosper, in spite of what an uncaring, unfeeling, callous and abusive world did to you back then.
I also know that it is impossible for you to bury those memories no matter how hard you try, but remember, that was then, and this is now. You have a great bunch of people who care about and for you now. Those horrible, unfeeling and uncaring people who did those things to you are long gone, and good riddance to the lot of them.
I know that these things still go on, and it's terribly wrong to subject another human being to that sort of torture. It MUST stop!
All my love and hugs, Beverly.
Catherine Linda Michel
As a T-woman, I do have a Y chromosome... it's just in cursive, pink script.
Electro shock therapy
Beverly
I never had to endure such mistreatment. I am sorry that you had to and have to relive it.
I have however been shocked a whole lot of times and even once woke up on the floor. I am an electrician. Shocks do hurt, with the exception of the one that nearly killed me.
I have felt your pain while reading "Spacetran". I do hope that you continue to use your wondeful stories as a release.
James
just as a side note
there was an episode of Cold Case called Boy Crazy that had the victim suffer through it ala One Flew over the Cuckoo's nest. I ddidn't cry at the latter, but the ending of the Cold Case episode did have me crying.