Thank you so much for this! My dear mother was subjected to this treatment decades ago! And when I had a bout with severe depression in my 50s, my first thought was, "Oh God! Am I heading down the same path as my mother?" I thank God for holistic integrative medicine doctors who put me on a path of restoration, regeneration and wholeness.
The problem medicine has lost touch with the Hippocratic School and the teachings of Hippocrates. It does not examine the root cause of a problem, it immediately starts treatment. The root cause of most problems begins with malnutrition, people not getting the nutrients their brains need to function. I know what ECT is like,, I went through quite a number of them back in 1967, 1970 and 1971. Why? For my first 12 years, I hardly had any food to eat, because of the Great Depression and then little money during the 1940s. I was always ten pounds lighter than other children my age. Then, when i was 12, I stayed with an aunt in California who made me eat dairy, which my father was against. In 5 months I gained 32 pounds, then kept on gaining and wound up at 150 pounds at 5'3". ..and for the next 25 years fought weight by not eating regularly; depriving my brain and body of nutrients. At 29, (1963) after going on a 600 calorie daily diet for 5 month, I got my weight down. I was married to a very cold man who rarely came near me..One evening after we went out with another couple, I said to him that I wanted a divorce, because I would like to have someone who loved me. I never expected what would happen next. My husband went ballistic and started beating me up and ripped my dress off of me and tore it into shreds. I calmed him down by making love to him...and then I went into my bedroom and didn't want to come out. A couple days later, he came into the bed room and took me by the hand and took me to a very strange mental hospital. This was the start of many other mental hospital experiences, which I was totally cognizant about. I wrote about them in 1995, when my book Sharing from the heart was published., in a chapter entitled Mental or Malnourished? I did not focus enough on lack of sleep!
The next experience was in 1966. when my husband put me into another mental hospital. I was exhausted. as i had a new baby (our third) in January 1965. In September 1965, I went back to college and had just finished college exams with top grades the end of January 1966. .All i wanted to do was stay in bed. So, he has the authorities, put me in the hospital to give me ECT. I went through a series, but I said a prayer, "Please protect my brain." it was very scary, having electrodes put on both sides of the head and something put in your mouth, so you won't bite your tongue. Then, you felt the electrical shock and then nothing. I went through a number of ECT treatmemts...and my memory was very sketchy at the time. However, i had been into nutrition for 6 years, since 1961...and was using many B vitamins. I didn't use white sugar, white flour, and was into reading labels to avoid additives, preservatives.and chemicals. Once you have been in a mental hospital, you become very vulnerable to being put in again and again. it was a very scary learning experience. i have no regrets about the marriage, because of the knowledge I gained. However, after 21 years of marriage, I walked out and let him keep the house, as I just wanted to be free. I never wanted to get married again. Life really began for me at 43. I accomplished more than I ever thought I could. I got more and more involved in nutrition and health; and in 1979 wrote a 300 page manuscript entitled How to Raise an Organic Baby: A mother's 22 years of experience in raising four children. A NYC publisher was interested, but it wasn't published, because the AMA would not approve. So, I just kept on learning . At this point, I have been on the path for 64 years...and there are still things to learn. There is hope for people who have gone through ECT, if they followed a top diet and took the right supplements ;and trusted totally in the only One who has the answers, our Creator.. Psychiatrists don't have any answers!
My daughter had several RCT’s. She & her husband made up their minds without telling me about the decision. She had been taking anti depressants for years, they didn’t work, so she was willing to do anything to be happy. She committed suicide when she was 43. Her stepmother was a nurse & pushed these horrible drugs. As I was just a bookkeeper & believed in taking a shower, taking a walk or getting a divorce. She listened to them & not me. It was 15 years ago & I still miss her every day!
Dr. Peter R. Breggin, MD is the leading expert on the brain-damaging effects of ECT, publishing the first medical book critical of ECT, “Electroshock: Its Brain-Disabling Effects,” in 1979. His book, “Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex,” was published in 1997 and an updated second edition in 2008.
To be honest I thought electric shock treatment had been stopped. Years ago my father suffered from depression and they wanted to use electric shock on him and we absolutely refused to allow it. I am very proud that we never allowed them to make a zombie out of my father.
In Massachusetts, the "Baker Children's Center" (referred to by DCF as Judge Baker) is one of the facilities that does this regularly to kids.....especially the unfortunates who end up as wards of the state. The average joe has no idea that this is still going on or that its legally sanctioned.
I only recently learned that one of my husband's co-workers had undergone this treatment for his depression. Long story short - he died of brain cancer. I can't believe this is still going on.
ECT destroyed my aunt's life. She had incredible courage and did her best to re-build herself after enforced (NO CONSENT, fought them on the table) treatment as a teenager, but the consequences were shattering and lifelong.
I had NO IDEA this medieval torture practice was still allowed!!! Rise up, everybody. This has to be stopped.
Thank you, Sayer, for bringing it to our attention!
There is so much promise on the horizon with psychedelic treatments in clinical care. Texas is leading the way with several states coming along. Many of our military suffering PTSD and head trauma have taken it in Mexico with miraculous results- sometimes with 1 dose restoring them. A documentary will be released on Nov 3, In Wind and War. Also Americans4ibo and Bryan Hubbard. Its the last hope I have for my son who suffered a head injury 20 years ago. The usual medical practice has nothing.
A lot of so-called doctors are simply upper class snobs (and very often something else besides that), and they cold-bloodedly and insensitively do bad things to people that they know are bad things, while telling their patients that they are doing only good to them, while these doctors plainly defraud the tax payer by filling their pockets with cash in the process.
These 'upper class' people may (and plainly often do) reason that others not from their own class are simply scum, and that makes it quite alright as far as they are concerned to abuse people who don't have such plummy upper class accents or whatever. If anyone naively thinks I am exaggerating here, just see if you survive under the present abusive system a few more decades and then reflect, if you do survive that long, on how medical staff actually treated you during that time.
Like the paedophile who sets out to become a scout master or primary school teacher in order to have free access to children in order to abuse them, so the psychopath has a cold fascination with harming and even killing others, possibly as someone with a horrible mental illness themselves who commits suicide by proxy by making others do the dying for them, so they choose to get a job as a doctor or nurse.
These doctors and nurses love to judge themselves as perfect examples of mental health, and they 'know' exactly what to do with 'nutters'.
Many years ago doctors and nurses used to give insane asylum patients in England a sound beating at the time of the full moon as it was medically assumed that 'lunatics' would certainly get worse and less manageable around the time of the full moon, so a good beating was assumed to be just what they needed.
Times have not changed at all, just the methodology.
Deliberately causing permanent brain damage to massively damp down what in real practice is often wide-ranging general mental activity in 'patients' is the standard treatment still. The problem 'goes away' because much of what actually makes an individual is simply erased by chemical or electric brain surgery.
The doctors call this 'successful treatment', really meaning an outcome resulting in the patients becoming a cabbage who is simply no longer even capable of doing or saying this or that even if they wanted to, and a lot more damage occurs besides, to the organs of the body including the CNS.
Quite a few doctors and nurses of genuine merit who are actually human beings in the general sense are speaking out and not participating in outdated practices though, but if you can find one though you will be very lucky, as in real practice they are far and few between.
Some medical staff in surgical wards or COVID ICU wards for instance very plainly act at times more like soldiers ill-treating captive enemy POW's.
I think that to hold certain positions in the UK and elsewhere, that a certain standard of spiritual understanding and empathy ought to be required to be demonstrable.
“When our medical system stops asking why and makes no attempt to understand root causes for (mental illness or neurochemistry)* impacts, and starts silencing symptoms instead of understanding them, it becomes a machine of suppression rather than healing.
They are teaching this in nursing school as a treatment for depression and other psych disorders when"regular" treatment fails. Some patients were from State mental hospitals. Others talked happily about how it helped them when else would. They had to return on a regular basis .. So obviously it's just another expensive treatment that suppresses symptoms temporarily but offers no long term help bc it didn't address root causes. Typical.
Thank you so much for this! My dear mother was subjected to this treatment decades ago! And when I had a bout with severe depression in my 50s, my first thought was, "Oh God! Am I heading down the same path as my mother?" I thank God for holistic integrative medicine doctors who put me on a path of restoration, regeneration and wholeness.
I survived 22 ECT. I lost about 18 months to 2 years of memory, if not more.
My former sister in law was “treated” as a young woman and has suffered lifelong trauma and disability
The problem medicine has lost touch with the Hippocratic School and the teachings of Hippocrates. It does not examine the root cause of a problem, it immediately starts treatment. The root cause of most problems begins with malnutrition, people not getting the nutrients their brains need to function. I know what ECT is like,, I went through quite a number of them back in 1967, 1970 and 1971. Why? For my first 12 years, I hardly had any food to eat, because of the Great Depression and then little money during the 1940s. I was always ten pounds lighter than other children my age. Then, when i was 12, I stayed with an aunt in California who made me eat dairy, which my father was against. In 5 months I gained 32 pounds, then kept on gaining and wound up at 150 pounds at 5'3". ..and for the next 25 years fought weight by not eating regularly; depriving my brain and body of nutrients. At 29, (1963) after going on a 600 calorie daily diet for 5 month, I got my weight down. I was married to a very cold man who rarely came near me..One evening after we went out with another couple, I said to him that I wanted a divorce, because I would like to have someone who loved me. I never expected what would happen next. My husband went ballistic and started beating me up and ripped my dress off of me and tore it into shreds. I calmed him down by making love to him...and then I went into my bedroom and didn't want to come out. A couple days later, he came into the bed room and took me by the hand and took me to a very strange mental hospital. This was the start of many other mental hospital experiences, which I was totally cognizant about. I wrote about them in 1995, when my book Sharing from the heart was published., in a chapter entitled Mental or Malnourished? I did not focus enough on lack of sleep!
The next experience was in 1966. when my husband put me into another mental hospital. I was exhausted. as i had a new baby (our third) in January 1965. In September 1965, I went back to college and had just finished college exams with top grades the end of January 1966. .All i wanted to do was stay in bed. So, he has the authorities, put me in the hospital to give me ECT. I went through a series, but I said a prayer, "Please protect my brain." it was very scary, having electrodes put on both sides of the head and something put in your mouth, so you won't bite your tongue. Then, you felt the electrical shock and then nothing. I went through a number of ECT treatmemts...and my memory was very sketchy at the time. However, i had been into nutrition for 6 years, since 1961...and was using many B vitamins. I didn't use white sugar, white flour, and was into reading labels to avoid additives, preservatives.and chemicals. Once you have been in a mental hospital, you become very vulnerable to being put in again and again. it was a very scary learning experience. i have no regrets about the marriage, because of the knowledge I gained. However, after 21 years of marriage, I walked out and let him keep the house, as I just wanted to be free. I never wanted to get married again. Life really began for me at 43. I accomplished more than I ever thought I could. I got more and more involved in nutrition and health; and in 1979 wrote a 300 page manuscript entitled How to Raise an Organic Baby: A mother's 22 years of experience in raising four children. A NYC publisher was interested, but it wasn't published, because the AMA would not approve. So, I just kept on learning . At this point, I have been on the path for 64 years...and there are still things to learn. There is hope for people who have gone through ECT, if they followed a top diet and took the right supplements ;and trusted totally in the only One who has the answers, our Creator.. Psychiatrists don't have any answers!
In medical school I was taught that it can be effective for severe depression, but not much evidence was presented
My daughter had several RCT’s. She & her husband made up their minds without telling me about the decision. She had been taking anti depressants for years, they didn’t work, so she was willing to do anything to be happy. She committed suicide when she was 43. Her stepmother was a nurse & pushed these horrible drugs. As I was just a bookkeeper & believed in taking a shower, taking a walk or getting a divorce. She listened to them & not me. It was 15 years ago & I still miss her every day!
Dr. Peter R. Breggin, MD is the leading expert on the brain-damaging effects of ECT, publishing the first medical book critical of ECT, “Electroshock: Its Brain-Disabling Effects,” in 1979. His book, “Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex,” was published in 1997 and an updated second edition in 2008.
https://breggin.com/electroshock-ect
https://breggin.com/ECT-and-DBS-Resources-Center
Printable brochure on ECT: https://breggin.com/admin/fm/source/6905_breggin/ect-resources/Shock_treatment_brochure_June_8.pdf
To be honest I thought electric shock treatment had been stopped. Years ago my father suffered from depression and they wanted to use electric shock on him and we absolutely refused to allow it. I am very proud that we never allowed them to make a zombie out of my father.
In Massachusetts, the "Baker Children's Center" (referred to by DCF as Judge Baker) is one of the facilities that does this regularly to kids.....especially the unfortunates who end up as wards of the state. The average joe has no idea that this is still going on or that its legally sanctioned.
I only recently learned that one of my husband's co-workers had undergone this treatment for his depression. Long story short - he died of brain cancer. I can't believe this is still going on.
ECT destroyed my aunt's life. She had incredible courage and did her best to re-build herself after enforced (NO CONSENT, fought them on the table) treatment as a teenager, but the consequences were shattering and lifelong.
I had NO IDEA this medieval torture practice was still allowed!!! Rise up, everybody. This has to be stopped.
Thank you, Sayer, for bringing it to our attention!
There is so much promise on the horizon with psychedelic treatments in clinical care. Texas is leading the way with several states coming along. Many of our military suffering PTSD and head trauma have taken it in Mexico with miraculous results- sometimes with 1 dose restoring them. A documentary will be released on Nov 3, In Wind and War. Also Americans4ibo and Bryan Hubbard. Its the last hope I have for my son who suffered a head injury 20 years ago. The usual medical practice has nothing.
A lot of so-called doctors are simply upper class snobs (and very often something else besides that), and they cold-bloodedly and insensitively do bad things to people that they know are bad things, while telling their patients that they are doing only good to them, while these doctors plainly defraud the tax payer by filling their pockets with cash in the process.
These 'upper class' people may (and plainly often do) reason that others not from their own class are simply scum, and that makes it quite alright as far as they are concerned to abuse people who don't have such plummy upper class accents or whatever. If anyone naively thinks I am exaggerating here, just see if you survive under the present abusive system a few more decades and then reflect, if you do survive that long, on how medical staff actually treated you during that time.
Like the paedophile who sets out to become a scout master or primary school teacher in order to have free access to children in order to abuse them, so the psychopath has a cold fascination with harming and even killing others, possibly as someone with a horrible mental illness themselves who commits suicide by proxy by making others do the dying for them, so they choose to get a job as a doctor or nurse.
These doctors and nurses love to judge themselves as perfect examples of mental health, and they 'know' exactly what to do with 'nutters'.
Many years ago doctors and nurses used to give insane asylum patients in England a sound beating at the time of the full moon as it was medically assumed that 'lunatics' would certainly get worse and less manageable around the time of the full moon, so a good beating was assumed to be just what they needed.
Times have not changed at all, just the methodology.
Deliberately causing permanent brain damage to massively damp down what in real practice is often wide-ranging general mental activity in 'patients' is the standard treatment still. The problem 'goes away' because much of what actually makes an individual is simply erased by chemical or electric brain surgery.
The doctors call this 'successful treatment', really meaning an outcome resulting in the patients becoming a cabbage who is simply no longer even capable of doing or saying this or that even if they wanted to, and a lot more damage occurs besides, to the organs of the body including the CNS.
Quite a few doctors and nurses of genuine merit who are actually human beings in the general sense are speaking out and not participating in outdated practices though, but if you can find one though you will be very lucky, as in real practice they are far and few between.
Some medical staff in surgical wards or COVID ICU wards for instance very plainly act at times more like soldiers ill-treating captive enemy POW's.
I think that to hold certain positions in the UK and elsewhere, that a certain standard of spiritual understanding and empathy ought to be required to be demonstrable.
“When our medical system stops asking why and makes no attempt to understand root causes for (mental illness or neurochemistry)* impacts, and starts silencing symptoms instead of understanding them, it becomes a machine of suppression rather than healing.
* substitute with ‘any medical condition’?
My mother was administered 20 shock treatments in 1960, which made life hell for her while raising 7 children.
They are teaching this in nursing school as a treatment for depression and other psych disorders when"regular" treatment fails. Some patients were from State mental hospitals. Others talked happily about how it helped them when else would. They had to return on a regular basis .. So obviously it's just another expensive treatment that suppresses symptoms temporarily but offers no long term help bc it didn't address root causes. Typical.