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Rights and Against Psychiatric Assault
Contact: Sherry Taub Phone: (631) 757-0394 E-mail: sherrytaub@justice.com
For Immediate Release*****For Immediate Release******
Flying Back Over the Cuckoo's Nest: The Hidden Growth of Forced Electroshock
In New York, and What Governor Pataki Won't Let Us Know
We are deeply dismayed by Governor Pataki's veto of the electroshock reporting bill after its passage by a large margin in both the assembly and the senate, and we vow to seek the help of all citizens concerned about our human rights and their own, in overturning it.
The New York Organization For Human Rights and Against Psychiatric Assault is made up of New Yorkers who have psychiatric disabilities -- or were diagnosed as having them -- and their allies. We are people who have received the services of the mental health system or been subject to its involuntary interventions. Some of us are people who have survived electroshock, including forced electroshock. Some of us have family members who have survived electroshock. NAMI does *not* represent us. NAMI's positions frequently diverge from ours and from those supporting disability rights.
The practice of institutional psychiatry goes on behind high walls erected to segregate people from society. The history of psychiatric treatment has proven that these walls often keep damaging practices "safe" from public scrutiny.
We have demonstrated in support of Paul Henri Thomas and Adam Szyszko, two men who were forcibly shocked at Pilgrim State Psychiatric Center on Long Island, who managed, through luck and individual circumstances, to get their plight known to advocates outside. Many of us testified at the NYS Assembly's 2001 hearings on electroshock and worked to improve the bills originally introduced by Assemblyman Luster, chair of the Mental Health Committee. After hearing and investigating our concerns, after requesting that the New York State Commission on Quality of Care do the extensive investigation required to find what sketchy and conflicting records of shock use already existed, he saw the clear need for a bill like the one Governor Pataki has vetoed. An overwhelming majority of legislators in both the senate and the assembly also saw this clear need, and voted to begin to address it in law. Yet Governor Pataki, under admitted pressure from the Psychiatric Association and the Hospital Association and OMH, denies it.
In the course of Assemblyman Luster's investigation of electroshock, the state Mental Hygiene Legal Service revealed that in the previous year alone, there had been a 73% increase in court-sanctioned administration of electroshock over the patient's expressed objections. It is unlikely that this deeply disturbing fact would have come to light without our urging investigation.
The bill that the Governor rejected did not in any way attempt to regulate electroshock. It required the state Office of Mental Health to collect information on its current use. Six other states (Vermont, Colorado, California, Illinois, Texas, and Massachusetts) already have a similar or even more thorough reporting bill. In no way was this a radical initiative. To call it somehow stigmatizing, as Pataki has, is akin to claiming that FDA oversight of prescription drugs makes people feel stigmatized when they're given a prescription. Today the powerful industry opposition to collection of data on who gets electroshocked, under what circumstances, who is forced to undergo electroshock over objection or without consent, and how many injuries or deaths occur, has been made clearly visible to all.
The industry and those who share its interests have manipulated a veto of reporting legislation that was created with overwhelming support from a broad range of advocacy groups. What are the actual reasons for this desire to suppress information? Whose interests would that information threaten?
Currently, control of information about electroshock is in the hands of those with financial and other self-serving interests in promoting it. It is a known fact that APA electroshock policy, accepted as the industry standard, was largely shaped by men who have been publicly exposed as having personal financial interests in sales of electroshock equipment. It has been shown that psychiatrists who use electroshock make appreciably more in income than those who do not. There is no reason to be surprised that the APA's recently revised guidelines spread a far wider net for those considered to be "good candidates" for electroshock.
Perhaps it's time the public recognized that we are not "lacking insight" here, as the psychiatric establishment has been given far too much power to declare. At long last, the public is increasingly aware of big money interests in health care, and the resulting abuse of public trust that can result from them. We must be vigilant and demand that our government seek out, record, and make easily accessible the hard data to protect against such abuses. Though Governor Pataki claims this is an unnecessary expansion of the state's responsibility, we can think of no responsibility more appropriate and necessary for the state Office of Mental Health to undertake.
Mission Statement of The New York Organization For Human Rights and Against Psychiatric Assault
- Work/fight to end coercive psychiatry entirely
- Provide a forum to connect, educate and support human rights activists like ourselves throughout New York State
- Educate the public about our human rights demands and about alternative ways of thinking about madness
- Support and promote choice, freedom and self-determination for all human beings
- Listen and incorporate issues particularly affecting women, people of color, LGBT people, and people with other kinds of disability into our work