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TESTIMONY OF LEONARD ROY FRANK AT A PUBLIC HEARING ON
ELECTROCONVULSIVE "TREATMENT" BEFORE THE MENTAL HEALTH
COMMITTEE OF THE NEW YORK STATE ASSEMBLY, MARTIN A.
LUSTER (CHAIRMAN), MANHATTAN, 18 MAY 2001
My name is Leonard Roy Frank, from San Francisco, and
I'm here representing the Support Coalition
International based in Eugene, Oregon. SCI unites 100
sponsoring groups who oppose all forms of psychiatric
oppression and support humane approaches for assisting
people said to be "mentally ill." This year the United
Nations recognized Support Coalition International as
"a Non-Governmental Organization with Consultative
Roster Status."
I've taken the epigraph for my presentation from a
talk on the Holocaust by Hadassah Lieberman, the wife
of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, which was rebroadcast on
C-SPAN last month. She quoted the Bal Shem Tov,
founder of Hasidism: "In remembrance lies the secret
of redemption."
INTRODUCTION
Some personal background is relevant to the substance
of my testimony: I was born in 1932 in Brooklyn and
was raised there. After graduating from the Wharton
School at the University of Pennsylvania, I served in
the U.S. Army and then worked as a real estate
salesman for several years. In 1962, three years after
moving to San Francisco, I was diagnosed as a "paranoid
schizophrenic" and committed to a psychiatric
institution where I was forcibly subjected to 50
insulin-coma and 35 electroconvulsive procedures.
This was the most painful and humiliating experience
of my life. My memory for the three preceding years
was gone. The wipe-out in my mind was like a path cut
across a heavily chalked blackboard with a wet eraser.
Afterwards I didn't know that John F. Kennedy was
president although he had been elected three years
earlier. There were also big chunks of memory loss for
events and periods spanning my entire life; my high
school and college education was effectively
destroyed. I felt that every part of me was less than
what it had been.
Following years of study reeducating myself, I became
active in the psychiatric survivors movement, becoming
a staff member of Madness Network News (1972) and
co-founding the Network Against Psychiatric Assault
(1974) -- both based in San Francisco and dedicated to
ending abuses in the psychiatric system. In 1978 I
edited and published The History of Shock Treatment.
Since 1995, three books of quotations I edited have
been published: Influencing Minds, Random House
Webster's Quotationary, and Random House Webster's Wit
& Humor Quotationary.
Over the last thirty-five years I have researched the
various shock procedures, particularly electroshock or
ECT, have spoken with hundreds of ECT survivors, and
have corresponded with many others. From all these
sources and my own experience, I have concluded that
ECT is a brutal, dehumanizing, memory-destroying,
intelligence-lowering, brain-damaging, brainwashing,
life-threatening technique. ECT robs people of their
memories, their personality and their humanity. It
reduces their capacity to lead full, meaningful lives;
it crushes their spirits. Put simply, electroshock is a
method for gutting the brain in order to control and
punish people who fall or step out of line, and
intimidate others who are on the verge of doing so.
BRAIN DAMAGE
Brain damage is the most important effect of ECT.
Brain damage is, in fact, the 800-pound gorilla in the
living room whose existence psychiatrists refuse to
acknowledge, at least publicly. Nowhere is this more
clearly illustrated than in the American Psychiatric
Association's 2001 Task Force Report on The Practice
of Electroconvulsive Therapy: Recommendations for
Treatment, Training, and Privileging, 2nd ed. (p.
102), which states that "in light of the accumulated
body of data dealing with structural effects of ECT,
'brain damage' should not be included [in the ECT
consent form] as a potential risk of treatment."
But 50 years ago, when some proponents were careless
with the truth about ECT, Paul H. Hoch, co-author of a
major psychiatric textbook and New York State's
Commissioner of Mental Hygiene, commented, "This
brings us for a moment to a discussion of the brain
damage produced by electroshock.... Is a certain
amount of brain damage not necessary in this type of
treatment? Frontal lobotomy indicates that improvement
takes place by a definite damage of certain parts of
the brain." ("Discussion and Concluding Remarks,"
Journal of Personality, 1948, vol. 17, pp. 48-51)
More recently, neurologist Sidney Sament backed the
brain-damage charge in a letter to Clinical Psychiatry
News (March 1983, p. 11):
"After a few sessions of ECT the symptoms are those of
moderate cerebral contusion, and further enthusiastic
use of ECT may result in the patient functioning at a
subhuman level.
Electroconvulsive therapy in effect may be defined as
a controlled type of brain damage produced by
electrical means....
In all cases the ECT 'response' is due to the
concussion-type, or more serious, effect of ECT. The
patient 'forgets' his symptoms because the brain
damage destroys memory traces in the brain, and the
patient has to pay for this by a reduction in mental
capacity of varying degree."
Additional evidence of ECT-caused brain damage was
published in an earlier APA Task Force Report on
Electroconvulsive Therapy (1978). Forty-one percent of
a large group of psychiatrists responding to a
questionnaire agreed with the statement that ECT
produces "slight or subtle brain damage." Only 28
percent disagreed (p. 4).
And finally there is the evidence from the largest
published survey of ECT-related deaths. In his
Diseases of the Nervous System article titled
"Prevention of Fatalities in Electroshock Therapy"
(July 1957), psychiatrist David J. Impastato, a
leading ECT proponent, reported 66 "cerebral" deaths
among the 235 cases in which he was able to determine
the likely cause of death following ECT (p. 34).
MEMORY LOSS
If brain damage is electroshock's most important
effect, memory loss is its most obvious one. Such loss
can be, and often is, devastating as these statements
from electroshock survivors indicate:
"My memory is terrible, absolutely terrible. I can't
even remember Sarah's first steps, and that's really
hurtful... losing the memory of the kids growing up
was awful."
"I can be reading a magazine and I get halfway through
or nearly to the end and I can't remember what it's
about, so I've got to read it all over again."
"People would come up to me in the street that knew me
and would tell me how they knew me and I had no
recollection of them at all... very frightening."
(Lucy Johnstone, "Adverse Psychological Effects of
ECT," Journal of Mental Health, 1999, vol. 8, p. 78)
Electroshock proponents are dismissive of the memory
problems associated with use of their procedure. The
following is from the sample ECT consent form in the
APA's 2001 Task Force Report (pp. 321-322): "The
majority of patients state that the benefits of ECT
outweigh the problems with memory. Furthermore, most
patients report that their memory is actually improved
after ECT. Nonetheless, a minority of patients report
problems in memory that remain for months or even
years." The text of the Report supplies flimsy
documentation for the claims in the first two
sentences, but the third sentence, at least, is closer
to the truth than coverage of the same point in the
sample consent form of the first edition of the APA's
Task Force Report (1990, p. 158) which reads, "A small
minority of patients, perhaps 1 in 200, report severe
problems in memory that remain for months or even
years." And even the more recent Report underestimates
the prevalence of memory loss among ECT survivors.
The vast majority of the hundreds of survivors I've
communicated with over the last three decades
experience moderate-to-severe amnesia going back two
years and more from the time they underwent ECT. That
these findings do not appear in published ECT studies
may be accounted for by the bias of electroshock
investigators, virtually all of whom are ECT
proponents, by denial (from ECT-induced brain damage)
on the part of participants and their fear of punitive
sanctions if they were to report the extent and
persistence of their memory loss, and finally by the
difficulty in having anything published in a
mainstream professional journal that seriously
threatens the vested interests of an important segment
of the psychiatric community.
DEATH
The 2001 Task Force Report on ECT states, "a
reasonable current estimate is that the rate of
ECT-related mortality is 1 per 10,000 patients" (p.
59). But some studies suggest that the ECT death rate
is about one in 200. This rate, however, may not
reflect the true situation because now elderly persons
are being electroshocked in growing numbers: statistics
based on California's mandated ECT reporting system
indicate that upwards of 50 percent of all ECT
patients are 60 years of age and older.
Because of infirmity and disease, the elderly are more
vulnerable to ECT's harmful, and sometimes lethal,
effects than younger people. A 1993 study involved 65
patients, 80 and older, who were hospitalized for
major depression. Here are the facts drawn from this
study: The patients were divided into 2 groups. One
group of 37 patients was treated with ECT; the other
group, of 28 patients, with antidepressants. After 1
year, 1 patient among the 28, or 4 percent, in the
antidepressant group was dead; while in the ECT group
10 patients among the 37, or 27 percent, were dead.
(David Kroessler and Barry Fogel, "Electroconvulsive
Therapy for Major Depression in the Oldest Old,"
American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, Winter 1993,
p. 30)
BRAINWASHING
The term "brainwashing" came into the language during
the early 1950s. It originally identified the
technique of intensive indoctrination, combining
psychological and physical pressure, developed by the
Chinese for use on political dissidents following the
Communist takeover on the mainland and on American
prisoners of war during the Korean War. While
electroshock is not used overtly against political
dissidents, it is used throughout most of the world
against cultural dissidents, nonconformists, social
misfits and the unhappy (the troubling and the
troubled), whom psychiatrists diagnose as "mentally
ill" in order to justify ECT as a medical
intervention.
Indeed, electroshock is a classic example of
brainwashing in the most meaningful sense of the term.
Brainwashing means washing the brain of its contents.
Electroshock destroys memories and ideas by destroying
the brain cells which store them. As psychiatrists J.
C. Kennedy and David Anchel, both ECT proponents,
described the effects of this tabula rasa "treatment"
in 1948, "Their minds seem like clean slates upon
which we can write" ("Regressive Electric-shock in
Schizophrenics Refractory to Other Shock Therapies,"
Psychiatric Quarterly, vol. 22, pp. 317-320). Soon
after published accounts of the erasure of 18 minutes
from secret White House audiotapes during the
Watergate investigation, another electroshock
psychiatrist reported, "Recent memory loss [from ECT]
could be compared to erasing a tape recording."
(Robert E. Arnot, "Observations on the Effects of
Electric Convulsive Treatment in Man--Psychological,"
Diseases of the Nervous System-, September 1975, pp.
449-502)
For these reasons, I have proposed that the procedure
now called electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) be
renamed electroconvulsive brainwashing (ECB). And ECB
may be putting it too mildly. We might ask ourselves,
Why is it that 10 volts of electricity applied to a
political prisoner's private parts is seen as torture
while 10 or 15 times that amount applied to the brain
is called "treatment"? Perhaps the acronym "ECT"
should be retained and have the "T" stand for torture
- electroconvulsive torture.
SEVEN REASONS
If electroshock is an atrocity, as I maintain, how can
its use on more than 10 million Americans since being
introduced more than 60 years ago be explained? Here
are seven reasons:
1. ECT is a money-maker. Psychiatrists specializing in
ECT earn $300,000-500,000 a year compared with other
psychiatrists whose mean annual income is $150,000. An
in-hospital ECT series costs anywhere from
$50,000-75,000. One-hundred thousand Americans are
believed to undergo ECT annually. Based on this
figure, I estimate that electroshock is a $5
billion-a-year industry.
2. Biological model. ECT reinforces the psychiatric
belief system, the linchpin of which is the biological
model of mental illness. This model centers on the
brain and reduces most serious personal problems down
to genetic, physical, hormonal, and/or biochemical
defects which call for biological treatment of one
kind or another. The biological approach covers a
spectrum of physical treatments, at one end of which
are psychiatric drugs, at the other end is
psychosurgery (which is still being used, although
infrequently), with electroshock falling somewhere
between the two. The brain as psychiatry's focus of
attention and treatment is not a new idea. What
psychiatrist Carl G. Jung wrote in 1916 applies today:
"The dogma that 'mental diseases are diseases of the
brain' is a hangover from the materialism of the
1870s. It has become a prejudice which hinders all
progress, with nothing to justify it." ("General
Aspects of Dream Psychology," The Structure and
Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960) Eighty-five years later,
there's still nothing in the way of scientific evidence
to support the brain-disease notion. The tragic irony
is that the psychiatric profession makes
unsubstantiated claims that mental illness is caused
by a brain disease while hotly denying that
electroshock causes brain damage, the evidence for
which is overwhelming.
3. The myth of informed consent. While outright force
is seldom used, genuine informed consent is never
obtained because ECT candidates can be coerced and
because electroshock specialists refuse to accurately
inform ECT candidates and their families of the
procedure's nature and effects. ECT specialists lie
not only to the parties vitally concerned, they lie to
themselves and to each other. Eventually they come to
believe their own lies, and when they do, they become
even more persuasive to the naÔve and uninformed. As
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1852, "A man cannot dupe
others long who has not duped himself first." Here is
an instance of evil so deeply ingrained that it's no
longer recognized as such. Instead we see such
outrages as ECT specialist Robert E. Peck titling his
1974 book, The Miracle of Shock Treatment and Max
Fink, who for many years edited the leading
professional journal in the field, now called The
Journal of ECT, telling a Washington Post reporter in
1996, "ECT is one of God's gifts to mankind." (Sandra
G. Boodman, "Shock Therapy: It's Back," 24 September,
Health [section], p.16)
4. Backup for treatment-resistant psychiatric-drug
users. Many, if not most, of those being
electroshocked today are suffering from the ill
effects of a trial run or long-term use of
antidepressant, anti-anxiety, neuroleptic, and/or
stimulant drugs, or combinations thereof. When such
effects become obvious, the patient, the patient's
family, or the treating psychiatrist may refuse to
continue the drug-treatment program. This helps
explain why ECT is so necessary in modern psychiatric
practice: it is the treatment of next resort. It is
psychiatry's way of burying their mistakes without,
except rarely, killing the patient. Growing use and
failure of psychiatric-drug treatment has forced
psychiatry to rely more and more on ECT as a way of
dealing with difficult, complaining patients, who
often are hurting more from the drugs than from their
original problems. And when the ECT fails to "work,"
there's always -- following an initial series -- more
ECT (prophylactic ECT administered periodically to
outpatients), or more drug treatment, or a combination
of the two. That drugs and ECT are for practical
purposes the only methods psychiatry offers to, or
imposes on, those who seek treatment or for whom
treatment is sought is further evidence of the
profession's clinical and moral bankruptcy.
5. Lack of accountability. Psychiatry has become a
Teflon profession: criticism, what little there is of
it, doesn't stick. Psychiatrists routinely carry out
brutal acts of inhumanity and no one calls them on it
-- not the courts, not the government, not the people.
Psychiatry has become an out-of-control profession, a
rogue profession, a paradigm of authority without
responsibility, which is a good working definition of
tyranny.
6. Government support. Not only does the federal
government stand by passively as psychiatrists
continue to electroshock American citizens in direct
violation of some of their most fundamental freedoms,
including freedom of conscience, freedom of thought,
freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from
assault, and freedom from "cruel and unusual
punishment," the government also actively supports
electroshock through the licensing and funding of
hospitals where the procedure is used, by covering ECT
costs in its insurance programs (including Medicare),
and by financing ECT research (including some of the
most damaging ECT techniques ever devised). A recently
published study provides an example of such research.
The ECT experiment, which was conducted at Wake Forest
University School of Medicine/North Carolina Baptist
Hospital, Winston-Salem, between 1995 and 1998,
reports the use of electric current at up to 12 times
the individual's convulsive threshold on as many as 36
depressed patients. The destructive element in ECT is
the current that causes the convulsion: the more
electrical energy, the greater the brain damage. This
reckless disregard for the safety of ECT subjects was
supported by grants from the National Institute of
Mental Health. (W. Vaughn McCall, David M. Begoussin,
Richard D. Weiner, and Harold A. Sackeim, "Titrated
Moderately Suprathreshold vs. Fixed High-Dose Right
Unilateral Electroconvulsive Therapy: Acute
Antidepressant and Cognitive Effects," Archives of
General Psychiatry, May 2000, pp. 438-444)
7. Electroshock could never have become a major
psychiatric procedure without the active collusion and
silent acquiescence of tens of thousands of
psychiatrists. Many of them know better; all of them
should know better. The active and passive cooperation
of the media has also played an essential role in
expanding the use of electroshock. Amidst a barrage of
propaganda from the psychiatric profession, the media
passes on the claims of ECT proponents almost without
challenge. The occasional critical articles are
one-shot affairs, with no follow-up, which the public
quickly forgets. With so much controversy surrounding
this procedure, one would think that some
investigative reporters would key on to the story. But
it's happened only rarely up to now. And the silence
continues to drown out the voices of those who need to
be heard. I'm reminded of Martin Luther King's 1963
"Letter from Birmingham City Jail," in which he wrote
"We shall have to repent in this generation not merely
for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people,
but for the appalling silence of the good people."
CONCLUSION
As noted earlier, I'm here representing the Support
Coalition International. But more significantly, I'm
also here representing the true victims of
electroshock: those who have been silenced, those
whose lives have been ruined, and those who have been
killed. All of them bear witness through the words I
have spoken here today.
I'll close with a short paragraph, in way of summary,
and a poem I wrote in 1989.
If the body is the temple of the spirit, the brain may
be seen as the inner sanctum of the body, the holiest
of holy places. To invade, violate, and injure the
brain, as electroshock unfailingly does, is a crime
against the spirit and a desecration of the soul.
Aftermath
With "therapeutic" fury
search-and-destroy doctors
using instruments of infamy
conduct electrical lobotomies
in little Auschwitzes called mental hospitals
Electroshock specialists brainwash
their apologists whitewash
as silenced screams echo
from pain-treatment rooms
down corridors of shame.
Selves diminished
we return
to a world of narrowed dreams
piecing together memory fragments
for the long journey ahead.
From the roadside
dead-faced onlookers
awash in deliberate ignorance
sanction the unspeakable --
Silence is complicity is betrayal.
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