Abuse Cases

Psychiatrists persist in inflicting psychosurgery and electroshock on patients even though no valid medical or scientific justification exists for these practices. After more than 60 years, psychiatrists can neither explain how they are supposed to work nor justify their extensive damage.

When Jennifer Martin�s 70-year-old mother experienced headaches and nausea and stopped eating and talking, a psychiatrist claimed she was in shock from recent deaths in her family and gave her ECT. Less than 24 hours later she was dead. An autopsy revealed that the problem was not depression, but a brain stem complication. �Shock treatment killed her,� Ms. Martin said.

A grieving husband says a psychiatrist  recommended electroshock because it would release a chemical in the brain that would make his wife, Dorothy, feel better. Although aware of her earlier heart attacks, he administered 38 electroshocks. The last one killed her. 

In 2001, the New Zealand government was forced to formally apologize and pay $6.5 million to 95 former patients of the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Unit for torture and abuse they suffered at the direction of psychiatrist Selwyn Leeks in the 1970s. ECT had been applied to victims� legs, arms and genitals without anesthetic.

At 28, Gwen Whitty was a wife and mother of two with another child on the way. When she developed difficulty breathing, psychiatrist Harry Bailey recommended �deep sleep therapy� for a �rest��which turned out to involve heavy doses of barbiturates and sedatives while shackled to a bed, kept unconscious for two to three weeks, and given repeated electroshock. Ten years later, a doctor discovered two jagged steel plates in her head, attached to the bone by Bailey to cover holes in her skull.

More than 1,000 people were subjected to Deep Sleep Therapy (DST) in Sydney, Australia. The deadly combination of a drug-induced coma and electroshock ultimately killed 48 people before it was banned in 1983.

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