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Before CCHR, brutal ECT
and psychosurgery could be unleashed arbitrarily on patients without their
consent. Now, more than 100 laws protect people from these and other harmful
practices.
CHAPTER
FOUR The Right to Informed Consent
Human rights include freedom from brutality and cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment and with �equal protection of the law.� There is no doubt that
psychiatry�s major treatments are human rights abuses and minimally require
informed consent before being administered.
In medicine, as opposed to psychiatry, the standard for informed consent includes
communicating the �nature and purpose of a proposed treatment or procedure
and the risks and benefits� of such treatments and the alternatives, �regardless
of their cost or the extent to which the treatment options are covered
by health insurance.�
When CCHR was formed in 1969, patients subjected to psychosurgery, electroshock
and psychiatric drugs enjoyed none of the informed consent rights of general
medical patients. While doctors cannot force their patients to undergo
an appendectomy, or chemotherapy for cancer, psychiatrists have acquired
tremendous power which enables them to not only force citizens to submit
to electroshock, psychosurgery and drug treatments, but also to inflict
grievous physical and mental damage upon them in the process�all without
any accountability.
A primary objective of CCHR has been to achieve the right of fully informed
consent for all patients in the mental health system before they can be
subjected to any of psychiatry�s invasive and destructive procedures.
CCHR has been in the vanguard, demanding full disclosure of the side effects
of psychiatric treatment.
For example, electroshock treatment (ECT) creates a grand mal convulsion in
a body by the application of 180 to 460 volts of electricity across the
brain.
Unlike neurological surgery for legitimate physical conditions such as tumors,
where the brain is visibly impaired, psychosurgery attempts to alter behavior
by destroying perfectly healthy brain tissue�tearing it with a scalpel,
burning it with electrode implants or, now less common, shredding the
frontal lobes with a miniature ice pick. The death rate from psychosurgery
is up to 10%.
Until the protections were instituted due to CCHR and its co-campaigners�victims
groups, human and civil rights advocates�ECT and psychosurgery, incredibly,
could be given arbitrarily without patient consent. Next
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