Daring to take the Business of Electroshock by the Prods., February 14, 2009
This review is from: Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (Hardcover)
Linda Andre had been blessed. With an I. Q. measured at 156, a powerful work ethic, a drive to succeed, a musician's ear and artist's eye, she sailed through her academic career to the heights of scholarship and was beginning a brilliant career as a writer and photographer when, at 25, the assault happened, like a horrific mugging and beating. Permanently brain damaged by the assault, her I. Q. had been chopped down to 118. Gone also was her gift for photography. Perhaps worse of all was the complete erasure of five years of her memory, one-fifth of her lifetime, including all her prestigious academic training, as if she'd never lived those lost years. Any other mugging would have thrown the perpetrators into jail for years and cost them millions in civil penalties. But this was a legal mugging. And the perpetrators even made $20,000 for destroying much of Ms. Andre's life. They were, after all, licensed doctors of medicine and, instead of using a baseball bat on her head (which would have been kinder), they sent up to 200 volts of electricity into her brain with their electro convulsive "therapy" machine.
Why would doctors, of all people, inflict such physical and emotional harm to another? Ms. Andre, having no memory of the events leading up to her assault, can only go by what other people have told her and the existing documentation. So she spends most of her affecting and exhaustively researched book looking for the answer then joining and later becoming a leading voice in the struggle against ECT machines and other instruments of this medical holocaust which claims thousands of victims each year, robbing them of their day-to-day abilities to function and up to decades of memory.
Here Ms. Andre documents the countless efforts to ask the questions and tell the mental patient's stories through various media only to learn that even the most trusted outlets have their own visions of what the answers are, regardless of the facts put in front of them. Few readers of this book will be able to sit complacently in front of their TVs afterwards, just as none of us should ever sheepishly allow any "expert" with certain conflicts of interest to lead us to ruin.
It is also a pleasure to read the facts behind ECT rather than the gushing accolades of Carrie Fisher (who receives regular shocks and has lost, so far, 4 months of her life-memories) and of Kitty Dukakas (who, along with lost memories, must constantly write notes to herself before her damaged short-term memory loses the information).
My deepest hope is that medical school students will read Ms. Andre's book, take it to heart and dare to ask those questions.
I have gone threw this not as a patient but as a partner and father broken into two stories.
The first happened some time back and was posted on this site. To recap here it is....
Tall popies are cut down in there prime (great Australian pastime) There will never be people in Australia that will rise above there station while these types of thinking are arround. If you were to try to do so you would be charged with grand delusions and pumped full of pills by the mental health system.
I had a mate who sold contraceptions to America and was jailed for seven years. Why you might ask? 29 million people here 10 million female half sexually active thats 5 million times $40 per month for the pill and times that by twelve months now thats a lot of money thats about 2 billion.Just a pitance that the doctors rip from the coffers or the state
If you think you are more important than the American president (which I am ) then you have delusions of grandure and can be medicated for this. Watch out all Americans because everyone of you personally think you are better and more important than your president.. Think for a moment now..!!!!!! Who runs this country Australia. Doctors and our female prime minister, I would never say anything sexist about a woman prime minister, but she is just a arse hole.These figures can also be used for the so called mentally ill and the health system.
Then there is this one....schizophrenia is a disease of older people.
It is all right for a child to have an imaginary friend and talk to this friend and is in the genes that all humans have this quality. Imagination is also a quality also built into the genes and is how our society developed to where we are today. These imaginary friends came about when you were the only child for miles around and to stop insanity you had a imaginary friend. (shit I had one ) Now doctors who did not have a friend in there mind see this as a problem. The problem arises when the child is abused and the friend has hate in its dialogue with there imaginary friend .
Then there was this to contend with....
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