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IMPORTANT
FACTS
1. Electroconvulsive
Therapy (ECT, shock treatment)—the passage of up to 460 volts of electricity
through the brain—can wipe out memory and, as such, has destroyed many great
artists’ creative abilities.
2. Italian psychiatrist
Ugo Cerletti “discovered” the brutal practice in a Rome slaughterhouse in 1938.
Here, pigs were shocked using electricity before their throats were slit—a practice,
Cerletti admitted, that inspired him to administer the method to humans.
3. ECT is still widely
used, with hundreds of thousands subjected to it each year around the world—over
100,000 in the U.S. alone, where it is a $5 billion a year industry.
4. Psychosurgery—a brutal
practice that destroys healthy brain tissue based on the false idea that it
can “change behavior” for the “better”—continues to destroy lives, costing thousands
of dollars per operation.
CHAPTER
THREE Cruel Electroshock, Destroying the Brain
If Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway were alive today, he would probably
conduct a heated argument with psychiatrists who hold him up as an example of
“great writers with mental illness.” Tricked into a psychiatric institution,
he was stripped of his clothes and his dignity, and given 20 electroshocks.
Several weeks later, he confided, “What these shock doctors don’t know is about
writers and such. … They should make all psychiatrists take a course in creative
writing so they’d know about writers … 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 …”
In July 1961, days after being released from the Mayo psychiatric clinic, Hemingway
committed suicide.
“Electroshock,” “shock treatment,” or “ECT” is pain inflicted in the name of
therapy. It is just as controversial and destructive today as it was in 1975,
when the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was released. At the time, psychiatrists
gave patients up to 20 shocks a day, arguing that it could “wipe the mind clean
and let it re-grow,” a phenomenon that is about as likely as growing back a
leg after it has been amputated.
Psychiatrists continue to lie about the number of shock-related deaths. While
publicly admitting to one death per 10,000 people, the mortality rate has been
independently verified as being more on the order of 1 in 200, a rate 50 times
higher. Even if a patient does not die from the ECT, the general average life
expectancy is significantly reduced by the effects of this destructive procedure.
Proponents of ECT falsely claim that it is “safe and effective”— while having
to admit that they have no idea how it works. This hasn’t stopped them from
using it to make $5 billion per year in America alone, electroshocking more
than 110,000 citizens and hundreds of thousands more in other countries.
Composer and singer Raven Kane Campbell tells of her father’s musical dreams,
destroyed by electroshock. “My talented father, Lou Frechette, was known as
‘The Wonder Boy’ of Chicago; he was the organist for the silent movies in major
theaters and was one of only two people who knew how to play the world’s largest
organ at Chicago Stadium. You could sing him a melody and he’d play it back
to you like an orchestra.”
“However, all that ended when he suffered a breakdown, after working several
jobs at once to pay for his large family. The long hours took their toll.” As
Campbell described it, “‘help’ arrived in the form of three big guys in a white
truck carrying a straitjacket. He was given extensive shock treatment and drugs.
When he returned home several months later,” Campbell says, “he would sit at
the organ and cry because all that music in his head had disappeared and he
couldn’t control his fingers on the keys that he had played so effortlessly
for so many years beforehand.”
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