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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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