Killing the Soul

ECT was developed by Italian psychiatrist, Ugo Cerletti in 1938 after experimenting on pigs in a Rome slaughterhouse. The electric shock stunned the pig sufficiently so that its throat could be easily cut, producing a swift death. Today, between 180 to 460 volts of electricity are sent searing through the human brain. A shock wave passes through the head, causing the brain to discharge energy in a very chaotic fashion. This increases metabolism to a very high level, which deprives the brain of oxygen and destroys brain cells. This is, in fact, brain damage and the cause of spatial and time disorientation that always follows shock treatments.

Psychosurgery, another unscientific, yet brutal �treatment,� destroys healthy parts of the brain, with psychiatrists asserting this will somehow change behavior for the �better�. It was popularized in the 1930s and 1940s by Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz and American psychiatrist Walter Freeman, and became best known through a procedure called lobotomy. Moniz said that to �cure� patients, �we must destroy the more or less fixed arrangements of cellular connections that exist in the brain.� A 12-year follow-up study concluded that his patients suffered relapses, seizures and deaths.

Freeman used electric shock as an anesthetic before forcing an ice pick beneath the eye socket bone into the brain of a patient; he then moved the instrument back and forth to sever the fibers of the frontal brain lobes. He dubbed his proce- dure �surgery of the soul.� Freeman traveled the country in a camper he called the �lobotomobile�, and performed his surgical intrusion in theatrical fashion for all who wanted to watch. The press dubbed his tour �Operation Ice Pick.�

With the procedure causing a 10% death rate, more than 10,000 people were killed worldwide during psychosurgery�s heyday. Freeman eventually lost his license to practice over a patient�s death from the procedure. Moniz, on the other hand, was twice shot by disgruntled patients, the second time fatally. Despite all this, psychosurgery is still performed in many countries today.

A HISTORY OF DANGEROUS TREATMENTS
Psychiatric practices that destroy healthy brain tissue, cause irreversible brain damage and destroy basic social skills are claimed to be �workable.� They include 1) psychosurgery, 2) contemporary electroshock, 3) insulin shock therapy and 4) Metrazol shock. Today little has changed. Psychiatrists� �modern� treatments are still human rights abuses, and yet they continue to insist that their methods are superior. Failing to understand the cause of or achieve the cure for mental trauma, they routinely harm troubled individuals.

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