Concerning insurance companies' bills, while it's true that companies are bilked out of tremendous amounts of money to pay for people in mental hospitals who shouldn't be there, we should not feel entirely sorry for the insurance industry. According to Dr. Duard Bok, a former employee of Psychiatric Hospitals of America, "the insurance companies pay out on one side, but get it back on the other side. They are double-dipping, because they can disregard their billings from patients because they get it back as shareholders."10
Electroconvulsive Therapy
Actually, it's electric shock treatment. But as the Citizens Commission of Human Rights points out, the people who profit from it like to call it electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), because this sounds a little better. Regardless of the label you give it, what this treatment amounts to is the destruction of brain cells by electricity. In other words, it's physician-induced brain damage.
In ECT, 180 to 460 volts of electricity are fired through the brain, for a tenth of a second to six seconds, either from temple to temple (bilateral ECT) or from the front to the back of one side of the head (unilateral ECT). The result is a severe convulsion, or seizure, of long duration - i.e., a grand mal convulsion, as in an epileptic fit. The usual course of treatment involves 10 to 12 shocks over a period of weeks.
This extreme treatment is given for severe depression, and it does work in the short term. That's because a facet of the brain damage caused is memory loss, and so patients forget what they were depressed about. Unfortunately, the memory loss is often permanent. Also, permanent learning disability can be another effect of ECT, with disastrous career, not to mention emotional, ramifications. The bottom line: When the patient's underlying problems return, she or he is even less able to deal with them than before the treatment, because of the brain injury that has been sustained. It should be noted that women are twice as likely as men to receive ECT.
The continued use of this medieval seeming therapy would perhaps be understandable if it had been shown to be effective. But as explained in a recent article in The Journal of Mind and Behavior,11 "Follow-up studies about the effects of ECT in which recipients themselves evaluate the procedure are both rare and embarrassing to the ECT industry. The outcomes of these studies directly contradict propaganda regarding permanent memory loss put forth by the four manufacturers of ECT devices in the United States (Somatics, MECTA, Elcot, and Medcraft), upon whom physicians and the public rely for information, much as the public relies upon pharmaceutical companies for information on drugs."
Former ECT recipient Diana Loper, of the World Association of Electric Shock Survivors12 stresses that the only way ECT stops depression is that "it wipes your memory out so you don't know what you were depressed about." Then, Loper says, after two weeks of a "brain-damage high," people want to kill themselves when they have never before been suicidal. Loper is passionate in her work to totally ban the procedure, which she says only causes brain damage and sometimes death:
"ECT is non-FDA approved. The machines were grandfathered to a certain extent but they were put in category 3, the most hazardous category that there is.... They're coming in with new machines now saying that they're new and improved, but there's nothing new and improved about this procedure. Why do I want to see this procedure banned? Why does our organization want to see it totally out of the way? Because it's damaging. Psychiatrists...are not only damaging people's brains, they are killing people.... The APA task force states that 1 in 10,000 people die of ECT.
"Our organization will stop this procedure. This is a promise I made. I kept a diary when I was being shocked. And I read my diary and I read it every day. And the last thing I said to my doctor is, 'Some day you'll never do this to anyone again....' We passed a law in Texas, last session. We have the strongest informed consent bill in the nation.''l3
What makes ECT so damaging? Bruce Wiseman emphasizes that the procedure always creates grand mal seizures: "Electroshock treatments send several hundred volts of electricity through the brain. The brain then becomes starved for oxygen and pulls more blood into the brain. This causes blood vessels to break, damage to the brain, and eventual brain shrinkage. As a result of the lack of oxygen and the destruction of the nerves in the brain, the person has a seizure.
This treatment is nothing but barbaric. If anyone else did it, they would be locked up as a terrorist. Yet 100,000 people a year in America get electroshocked, generating $3 billion to the psychiatric industry. That faction of the health care industry doesn't help. They're an enemy of the people and they're destructive."7
Internationally known psychiatrist and author Dr. Peter Breggin adds that the treatment is so off base that doctors fabricate reasons to support it: "Psychiatrists end up distorting a great deal and forcing people into a model that's incorrect," Breggin explains. "Some of my colleagues claim that some undefined biochemical imbalance causes a problem like anxiety or depression, when we've never found a biochemical imbalance. Then, having suggested that maybe there is such a thing as a disturbance in the brain that's hurting a person, my colleagues go and do terrible things to the brain, such as shock treatments for the depressed person."
Breggin believes that this makes as much sense as deliberately putting, patients in an automobile accident. "It traumatizes the brain horribly. Each person who gets shock treatment goes into a state called delirium or an acute organic brain syndrome. As a result, they're confused, they don't know which end is up, they may forget where they are and how to get around the hospital ward. They have an electrically induced closed head injury, with all the things you find in other closed head injuries. People are often permanently changed. They don't recover their memories and they don't l recover other mental functions."14
Diana Loper discusses a major motivation behind the popularity of ECT - profit: "ECT is the psychiatrist's most lucrative treatment, averaging between $800 and $1000 per individual treatment. A single series averages between 12 and 15 treatments, costing between $10,000 and $15,000. This isn't even including hospitalization. ECT is administered in private, for-profit psychiatric hospitals. In all states, insurance is what pays for this "treatment."l5
Cont ...