Posts Tagged ‘ECT’

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Washington University in St. Louis Shocks Pregnant Women

Sunday, March 19th, 2017

Mark Wrighton, the Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL), wrote in the Spring 2017 Washington magazine, “One of the [Leading Together fund raising] campaign’s priorities is to advance human health.”

This is a laudable goal, but it is belied by the University’s strong support of the psychiatric industry and the reprehensible actions of psychiatrists on the university payroll.

The WUSTL interest in Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) and other harmful psychiatric “treatments” [Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS), and Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS)] is not superficial, it is widespread throughout the psychiatric department, and is a primary area of education for medical students.

Approximately 150,000 people get ECT every year in the US, with 2,000 shock treatments being done every year by WUSTL psychiatrists at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Complications after treatment usually increase with the age of the patient; small surprise there. WUSTL psychiatrists say that, “ECT is considered a safe treatment modality in pregnant women in whom a number of medications may be associated with risk to the fetus.”

“The main inpatient psychiatry facility has 48 beds and is divided into three locked units — intensive care floor, step-down floor and a geropsychiatry floor. The units are located on the 15th floor of the main Barnes-Jewish teaching hospital and are closely integrated into all of the specialty care inpatient units (e.g., surgery, internal medicine, neurology) of the hospital. The 15th floor also houses an ECT suite where approximately 2,000 treatments are done each year.”

Medical Residents are trained in these procedures. “A major emphasis of our program is intensive clinical training underscoring diagnostic skills, somatic treatments including psychopharmacology, ECT, and experimental procedures such as rTMS and VNS.”

“Residents evaluate patients referred to the Treatment-resistant Depression and Neurostimulation Clinic and work on the ECT service at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, providing ECT consults to the inpatient psychiatric services and to outpatients referred by their outpatient psychiatrist.”

These procedures are subjects of intensive research. “Faculty and staff of the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine conduct federally funded and industry-sponsored research through the Center for Mood Disorders.” — These procedures include ECT, TMS, and VNS.

Dr. Charles Zorumski says, “Our clinical studies are examining the benefits and risks of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in various groups of patients with psychiatric disorders, including the use of ECT as a maintenance therapy.”

Dr. Pilar Cristancho boasts that she won an award in 2008 at the Philadelphia Psychiatric Society, 6th Annual Colloquium of Scholars for “Electroconvulsive Therapy for treatment of severe major depression during pregnancy.” She also conducts research for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on pregnant women.

Dr. Michael Jarvis expresses his interest in “suicide and treatments for significant psychiatric illness such as Electroconvulsive Therapy and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.”

ECT can cost between $300 and $2,500 per session, there is apparently no set standard; a primary cost driver would be how much hospital support is required for the patient. With eight as the average number of treatments per patient, this means a course of ECT treatment will cost between $2,400 and $20,000. Medicare allowed charges are roughly $88 per session.

A TMS patient will usually have 20-30 treatments, typically in the range of $400-500 per session for a total cost of about $15,000.

The cost of implanting a VNS device is approximately $30,000 and up.

Predictably, the psychiatrists of WUSTL insist that ECT is safe and effective. Realistically, would you stick your finger in an electrical socket on purpose? Let alone your brain?

A prominent constitutional attorney was presented with a Human Rights Award at the 48th Anniversary celebration of the mental health watchdog, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). The event, held in Los Angeles on March 4th, included hundreds of guests from around the world honoring the awardees for their work in the field of mental health reform. Among his accomplishments, Constitutional attorney Jonathon W. Emord is currently challenging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration‘s (FDA) bizarre and dangerous proposal to reduce the risk classification of the electroshock treatment (ECT) device, which would make the brain-damaging procedure more widely used, including endangering children.

In accepting the award, Mr. Emord said, “ECT devices are a throw-back to an age of primitive torture, of ignorance and barbarism, where bludgeoning those with depression and psychoses into a lack of consciousness and awareness was considered therapeutic. This past year CCHR has done more than any other organization to fight against FDA’s indefensible proposal to make Electroshock Therapy devices far more available for psychiatric use, a move that would expand the horrors and compound the problems facing patients in need…Electroshock must be banned.”

Click here for more information about ECT and other horrifying psychiatric treatments.

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This is Your Brain on TMS

Monday, March 6th, 2017

TMS is now available in St. Louis, according to local TV commercials promoting this crippling form of brain stimulation.

Techniques such as “transcranial magnetic stimulation” (TMS) are psychiatry’s latest experiment in treatment of the “mentally ill.”

In TMS, a magnetic coil is placed near the patient’s scalp and a powerful and rapidly changing magnetic field passes through skin and bone and penetrates a few centimeters (up to 2.5 inches) into the outer cortex (outer gray matter) of the brain and induces an electrical current. Repetitive TMS (rTMS) can cause seizures or epileptic convulsions in healthy subjects, depending upon the intensity, frequency, duration and interval of the magnetic stimuli.

With ECT and psychosurgery under intense critical public scrutiny, psychiatry is now feverishly searching for a new “breakthrough miracle” – and TMS is one of the new catch phrases.

The TMS St. Louis web site (http://www.tms-stlouis.com/) says “Deep TMS Therapy is an FDA-cleared depression treatment for patients with depression who have not benefited from antidepressant medications.” Well, that makes every patient in mental health care eligible for TMS, since patently none of them have benefited from the drugs.

Why do some people say it “works”?

No one denies that people can have difficult problems in their lives, that at times they can be mentally unstable. Unfortunately, not only do psychiatrists not understand the etiology (cause) of any mental disorder, they cannot cure them. In effect, psychiatrists are still saying that mental problems are incurable and that the afflicted are condemned to lifelong suffering.
Psychiatric treatments such as TMS, however, are unworkable and dangerous, and while they may temporarily mask some symptoms they do not treat, correct or cure any physical disease or condition.

TMS may temporarily relieve the pressure that an underlying physical problem could be causing but it does not treat, correct or cure any physical disease or condition. This relief may have the person thinking he is better but that relief is not evidence that a psychiatric disorder exists. Ask an illicit drug user whether he feels better when snorting cocaine or smoking dope and he’ll believe that he is, even while the drugs are actually damaging him. Some depression treatments can have a “damping down” effect. They suppress the physical feelings associated with “depression” but they are not alleviating the condition or targeting what is causing it.

The brain is your body’s most energy–intensive organ. It represents only three percent of your body weight but uses twenty–five percent of your body’s oxygen, nutrients and circulating glucose. Therefore any significant metabolic disruptions such as TMS can impact brain function.

The brain stimulation breaks the routine rhythmic flows and activities of the nervous system. The nerves and other body systems are forced to do things they normally would not do. The human body, however, is unmatched in its ability to withstand and respond to such disruptions. The various systems fight back, trying to process the disruption, and work diligently to counterbalance its effect on the body.

But the body can only take so much. Quickly or slowly, the systems break down. Human physiology was not designed for this type of brain stimulation. Tissue damage may occur. Nerves may stop functioning normally. Organs and hormonal systems may go awry. This can be temporary, but it can also be long lasting, even permanent. Like a car run on rocket fuel, you may be able to get it to run a thousand miles an hour, but the tires, the engine, the internal parts, were never meant for this. The machine flies apart.

Side effects (adverse reactions) of TMS may include headache, scalp discomfort, facial muscle spasms, lightheadedness, fainting; altered endocrine, immune or neurotransmitter systems; loss of consciousness; seizures; mania; hearing loss; and, if the patient is depressed, the “treatment” may induce or exacerbate suicidal feelings. Adverse reactions are often delayed – i.e. may appear long after the patient has left the doctor’s office.

You may hear that TMS is called “noninvasive”, but it does impact the brain in ways that are not fully understood. One could say it is “noninvasive” in the same way that ECT is noninvasive – i.e. it doesn’t break the skin. Scorch marks not included. Little is known about the long-term side effects. Cognitive impairment has also been observed in some cases. Using different stimulation intensities and/or patterns may also have significant effects on the long-lasting outcomes.

Typical treatment involves a 40-minute session, five days a week, for four to six weeks. The cost can range from $6,000 to $10,000.

Physically intrusive and damaging practices such as TMS violate the doctor’s pledge to uphold the Hippocratic Oath and “Do no harm.”

New high-tech “treatments” for the brain will continue to be used to create the appearance of scientific progress, but in the end, psychiatry will be no closer to identifying any causes or effecting any cures; instead, their betrayal and brutality in the name of mental health continues. Psychiatry has proven only one thing — without the protection of basic human rights, there can only be diminished mental health.

Persons in desperate circumstances must be provided proper and effective medical care. The correct action on a seriously mentally disturbed person is a full, searching clinical examination by a competent medical doctor to discover and treat the true cause of the problem. Mental health facilities should have non-psychiatric medical experts on staff and be required to have a full complement of diagnostic equipment, which could prevent more than 40% of admissions by finding and treating undiagnosed physical conditions.

Click here for more information about the brutal reality of abusive psychiatric practices such as electroshock, TMS, deep brain stimulation, and psychosurgery.

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Remembering Carrie and Debbie

Friday, January 6th, 2017

We are sincerely grieved at Carrie Fisher’s death December 27th from heart failure. When we read that Carrie Fisher suffered a heart attack December 23rd on a plane flight from London to Los Angeles, we were shocked.

Fisher as Princess Leia was just 19 years old when she began shooting “Star Wars.” By the time she was 21 she was doing LSD in an attempt to self-medicate. In 2011 she confessed to Oprah that she had electroshock therapy every six weeks, since the antidepressants were not entirely effective in dealing with her mental issues, suffering memory loss as a result. She was hospitalized in 2013 for so-called bipolar disorder, and she was still taking psychotropic drugs and getting ECT.

One can only assume such treatment continued into present time, so it is now hardly shocking that she has suffered a heart attack as well. The amazing part is her resilience. All those drugs and electric shocks through the years, in a normal person, may well have been fatal far sooner.

Any benefit one claims for ECT, no matter how famous one is, has to speak only for a person’s innate strength, since ECT, as well as psychotropic drugs, is patently damaging.

A cursory review of over 200 psychotropic drugs shows that every one has potential adverse effects of heart attacks or other heart-related problems. During ECT, the heart rate is severely impacted, either speeding up or slowing down dramatically. Most deaths reported during or immediately after ECT are cardiovascular in nature.

And now, the FDA wants to reclassify ElectroConvulsive Therapy machines to exempt them from clinical testing if they are similar to machines currently being marketed, which effectively means they do not have to be demonstrated as safe and effective.

Frankly, the FDA should simply ban outright the use of psychotropic drugs and ECT machines as being dangerous and harmful.

We are doubly saddened by the passing of Debbie Reynolds, Fisher’s mother, just a day after Fisher’s death. Debbie Reynolds was recognized for her decades-long commitment to various charities, including the mental-health organization The Thalians, a group of entertainment professionals who support mental health care issues. Reynolds was among the founders of the Thalians charity group in 1955, and was the Thalians’ third president. A mental health center at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was named after the organization. It closed in 2012 and the Thalians now raise funds for veterans with mental health issues in association with the UCLA Medical Center. Honor the memory of both Carrie and Debbie by working with CCHR to continue to bring sanity to the mental health care profession.

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Passage of the 21st Century Cures Act

Saturday, December 17th, 2016

If you contacted your Senators and Representative about the dangers of the 21st Century Cures Act, thank you very much.

Unfortunately it passed — 392 to 26 in the House, and 94 to 5 in the Senate.

While some of the $6.3 Billion funded by this legislation is not controversial and may even be beneficial, a large chunk of the money will go to fund suicide-prevention programs, mental health services for children, and programs for court-ordered psychiatric outpatient treatment. It reinforces current laws that require insurers to treat mental illness as they do any other illness in terms of benefits (“parity“). And it creates a new position in the US Department of Health and Human Services called the Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use for coordinating mental health programs across the federal government.

The bill also lowers the regulatory bar of the Food and Drug Administration,  which may result in less safe and effective products reaching the market by putting less emphasis on clinical trials, which has caused some critics to label it the 21st Century Quackery Act. The FDA insists it will not compromise safety and efficacy; but they have already shown their fake reliance on safety and efficacy by approving psychotropic drugs and trying to make it easier to approve electric shock machines.

How concerned should we be? Very concerned. Proliferation of coercive and abusive mental health “care” by the current psychiatric industry is a waste of lives and funding.

Instead, here is what we should be doing:
1. Mental health hospitals must be established to replace coercive psychiatric institutions, where appropriate medical diagnostics and treatments can be performed. Proper medical screening by non-psychiatric diagnostic specialists could eliminate more than 40% of psychiatric admissions.
2. Establish rights for patients and insurance companies to receive refunds for harmful and abusive mental health treatment.
3. Clinical and financial audits must be done for all psychiatric facilities to uncover and correct fraud and abuse.
4. All mental disorders in the DSM should be validated by scientific, physical evidence.
5. Abolish mental health courts and mandated community mental health treatment.
6. Citizens groups and responsible government officials should work together to expose and abolish psychiatry’s hidden manipulation of society.

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Huffington Post Admits Mental Disorders Are Not Medical Conditions

Sunday, June 14th, 2015

Huffington Post Admits Mental Disorders Are Not Medical Conditions

A leading psychiatrist featured in the Huffington Post just admitted what CCHR has said for decades — mental disorders are not medical conditions.

Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University and chairman of the DSM-IV task force, had this to say, “Those of us who worked on DSM IV learned first-hand and painfully the limitations of the written word and how it can be tortured and twisted in damaging daily usage, especially when there is a profit to be had. … ‘Mental illness’ is terribly misleading because the ‘mental disorders’ we diagnose are no more than descriptions of what clinicians observe people do or say, not at all well established diseases.”

Kelly Patricia O’Meara further expounds on this:

“Slowly, ever so slowly, the scientific community finally is acknowledging what the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a mental health watchdog, has been exposing since 1969—that psychiatric disorders are not verifiable medical conditions, that the diagnosis is based solely on a checklist of behaviors, and that the drug ‘treatments’ have serious, life-threatening effects.”

While the number of psychiatrists worldwide declined 15% between 2005 and 2011, the number of psychiatrists in the U.S. rose 180% from 1975 to 2012. The global sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics rose 3% from 2006 to 2013; while the U.S. sales of these harmful drugs increased 5% from 2006 to 2012. U.S. sales of ADHD drugs rose 197% from 2006 to 2012. In 2011, 100,000 people in the U.S. were electro-shocked. In 2014, the U.S. Veterans Administration mental health budget was nearly $7 Billion.

It isn’t over. The total number of children and adults taking ADHD drugs rose from 6.7 million in 2006 to 10.2 million in 2013. The total number of Americans on all psychiatric drugs rose 19% from 2005 to 2013.

We’re effectively destroying an entire generation with harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs.

Contact your local, state and federal officials and representatives, and let them know what you think about this. Find Out! Fight Back!

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Nursing Home Abuses

Thursday, July 25th, 2013

Nursing Home Abuses

The June 2013 issue of Consumer Reports magazine had this to say about antipsychotic drugs given to nursing home patients:

“These and related drugs are supposed to be used only for patients with diagnosed psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and not for disciplinary reasons such as quelling agitation in patients with Alzheimer’s dementia. In a large 2010 study, almost 30 percent of nursing-home residents had received an antipsychotic; of them, almost one-third had no identified indication for use. The drugs don’t help dementia and have been linked to other risks, including less functional improvement, longer nursing-home stays, and a greater chance of dying. A review published in March by the Cochrane Collaboration concluded that most older adults with dementia can successfully be taken off antipsychotic drugs.”

Nursing-home residents have human rights protected by law. The Consumer Reports article goes on to say that “some nursing homes disregard the law, and often they get away with it. One reason is that residents or their families might be reluctant to make a formal complaint because they fear the staff will retaliate.”

In Missouri the Long Term Care Ombudsman Program provides support and assistance with any problems or complaints regarding residents of nursing homes and residential care facilities. Complaints concerning abuse, neglect and financial exploitation should be reported to the Missouri Division of Senior Services Elder Abuse Hotline, 800-392-0210, email address LTCOmbudsman@health.mo.gov.

In the U.S., 65-year-olds receive 360% more shock treatments that 64-year-olds because at age 65 government Medicare insurance coverage for shock typically takes effect.

Indiscriminate use of psychiatric drugs, electric shock, and violent restraints on the elderly are responsible for much needless suffering.

This abuse is the result of psychiatry maneuvering itself into an authoritative position over aged care. From there, psychiatry has broadly perpetrated the tragic but lucrative hoax that aging is a mental disorder requiring extensive and expensive psychiatric services. For example, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) labels Alzheimer’s Dementia as a mental disorder, even though this is a physical illness and the proper domain of neurologists. Medical experts say that 99% of Alzheimer’s cases do not belong in psychiatric “care.”

In most cases, the elderly are merely suffering from physical problems related to their age, but psychiatry claims that they are manifesting symptoms of dementia which necessitates “treatment” in a nursing home or psychiatric hospital. This is then used to involuntarily commit the elderly to a psychiatric facility, take control of their finances, override their wishes regarding their business, property or health care needs and defraud their health insurance.

If an elderly person in your environment is displaying symptoms of mental trauma or unusual behavior, ensure that he or she gets competent medical care from a non-psychiatric doctor. Insist upon a thorough physical examination to determine whether an underlying undiagnosed physical problem is causing the condition.

Contact your local, state and federal representatives and let them know what you think about this. Forward this newsletter to your family, friends and associates and recommend they subscribe.

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The New ECT – Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

The New ECT – Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

In our last newsletter we discussed Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) as an alternative to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in order for the psychiatric industry to continue generating income if ECT were banned.

One can even buy, with a doctor’s prescription, a portable home cranial electrical stimulation device for $695 from Fisher Wallace Laboratories, with a special price of $595 for the military. The doctor, by the way, does not have to be your own doctor; the company will provide someone for $50 who will write the prescription with a phone call.

As if that prospect wasn’t bad enough, we now have Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), the new horizon of psychiatric brutality, for use when other psychiatric methods have failed. TMS is recommended for those who are squeamish about getting ECT.

Guess what — none of these psychiatric methods have failed to produce their intended effect — making patients for life and ensuring the continuation of psychiatric profits at the expense of actually helping anyone.

With TMS, a large electromagnetic coil is placed against the scalp near the forehead. The electromagnet used in TMS creates electric currents that stimulate nerve cells in the brain. As with VNS, TMS is experimental; no one knows quite how it works or its long term adverse effects; it is still under investigation, so anyone succumbing to this procedure is in actual fact a research subject, a guinea pig as it were. There is still considerable controversy over its effectiveness, with the psychiatric industry touting miracle cures and pretty much everone else highly skeptical.

TMS is an outpatient procedure that doesn’t require anesthesia, surgery or electrode implantation. A typical course of “treatment” is five 40-minute sessions per week for up to six weeks. The cost can range from $6,000 to $10,000, depending on the clinic and the number of sessions, and is usually not covered by insurance. The cost of a portable TMS machine is around $6,000.

Health care costs are being driven out of control by litigation, malpractice suits, fraud, and the coercive use of psychiatric drugs and other psychiatric methods. Decades of psychiatric monopoly over mental health has only lead to upwardly spiraling mental illness statistics and continuously escalating funding demands.

The many critical challenges facing societies today reflect the vital need to strengthen individuals through workable, viable and humanitarian alternatives to harmful psychiatric options. For more information, download and read the CCHR booklet The Real Crisis in Mental Health Today – Report and recommendations on the lack of science and results within the mental health industry.

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The New ECT – Vagus Nerve Stimulation

Monday, April 1st, 2013

The New ECT – Vagus Nerve Stimulation

An electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) device is used for treating psychiatric disturbances by inducing in the patient a major seizure by applying a brief intense electrical current to the patient’s head, also called shock treatment.

About 100,000 people are being given ECT each year in the U.S. ECT has long been known to cause serious harm to patients, including extremely severe and permanent memory loss, inability to learn and remember new events, depression, suicide, cardiovascular complications, prolonged and dangerous seizures and even death. An ECT session costs between $1,000 and $2,000 and is usually given between 6 to 12 times to an individual over several weeks; an ECT machine sells for about $15,000.

In January, 2011 the Neurological Devices Advisory Panel of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended that ECT machines remain classified as high-risk devices (Class III for the most dangerous medical devices, also called “premarket approval”.) The panel recommended that the companies which manufacture ECT devices be required to prove that ECT is both effective and safe in order to remain in use, with the exception of catatonia for which a less stringent classification was recommended. No effective date has yet been established for ECT machine manufacturers to provide this proof, so the machines are still very much in use.

To confuse the issue, psychiatrists also call this “cranial electrotherapy stimulation,” which uses less electrical current than an ECT machine but is supposed to be something new and different.

To offset the potential loss of income if ECT machines are banned, new methods of psychiatric income are being devised. Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) is one such.

The vagus (Latin for “wandering”) nerve stretches from the head, through the neck and chest, to the abdomen. Besides connecting to the various organs in the body (heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, etc.), it conveys sensory information about the state of the body’s organs to the central nervous system. This means that the vagus nerve is responsible for such varied tasks as heart rate, intestinal contractions, sweating, keeping the larynx open for breathing, and so on.

VNS produces short bursts of electricity directed into the brain via the vagus nerve. The energy comes from a battery, about the size of a silver dollar, which is surgically implanted under the skin, usually on the chest. Leads are threaded under the skin and attached to the vagus nerve. The device is programmed to deliver these small electrical bursts every few minutes. The mechanism by which this is supposed to work is not entirely understood; it’s just a theory, and the patient is the research guinea pig.

Health care costs are being driven out of control by litigation, malpractice suits, fraud, and the coercive use of psychiatric drugs and other psychiatric methods. Decades of psychiatric monopoly over mental health has only lead to upwardly spiraling mental illness statistics and continuously escalating funding demands.

The many critical challenges facing societies today reflect the vital need to strengthen individuals through workable, viable and humanitarian alternatives to harmful psychiatric options. For more information, download and read the CCHR booklet The Real Crisis in Mental Health Today – Report and recommendations on the lack of science and results within the mental health industry.

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On the Sea of Memory

Saturday, March 23rd, 2013

On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering

a book by Jonathan Cott

Cott describes what it was like to re-invent himself after 36 ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy) sessions created a fifteen year gap in his memory. “At the end of the 1990s, the esteemed writer Jonathan Cott lost fifteen years of his life. After receiving repeated rounds of electroshock treatments to combat his severe clinical depression, Cott couldn’t remember anything he had experienced between 1985 and 2000. Not a shred remained of his intimate relationships, his travels, his writings, his joys and sorrows.”

Mr. Cott was interviewed by Steve Paulson on Public Radio International’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge (12/21/12). He said, “…basically, I don’t remember anything for 15 years from about 1985 to about 2000. And when I got out of the hospital I was still depressed. … I would never have signed a consent form to have ECT knowing what I know now.”

When a string broke during one of Itzhak Perlman’s performances, he continued to play on the remaining strings, and said, “…make new music with what you have, then with what you have left.”

Jonathan Cott continued to play his life with the memory he had left, going around to everyone in his address book and asking them to tell him who they were and how they knew him — little by little reconstructing his own memories from the memories of others.

One shouldn’t have to cope through this kind of trauma; life is tough enough without psychiatry destroying a person’s memory with ECT. Perhaps you know someone who has been harmed by psychiatric abuse; have them contact CCHR at www.CCHR.org/abuse.

Find out more about the harm that ECT does by clicking here, then write your state representative and senator and tell them to stop funding ECT, which is a big money-maker in the psychiatric mental health industry. Let us know who you contacted and what they said.

When we talk with people about ECT, many have the mistaken impression that this barbaric procedure is no longer used, when in fact it is still being heavily promoted and used by the psychiatric industry. The last time we checked, Medicare was paying for roughly 153,000 ECT shocks per year; over 6,000 of these in Missouri. Washington University in St. Louis is a leader in promoting and delivering ECT, and the WU psychiatrists say that if ECT didn’t fix your depression, you just didn’t get enough of it.

The second quarter 2010 newsletter of the Missouri Psychiatric Association (edited at Washington University) promoted ECT for pregnant women, and lamented the fact that in Missouri a cumbersome court order is required to shock someone under court protection for dementia, saying, “We believe that psychiatrists who administer ECT should be able to do so without legal and/or legislative barriers.” We say that these barriers are not strong enough; what say you?

Write your state legislators to abolish the practice of Electro-Convulsive Therapy. This barbaric pseudo-medical treatment is responsible for thousands of Missouri citizens being on the roles of Medicare and Medicaid. ECT causes permanent brain damage and the victims rely on Medicaid to survive.

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