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Mental Health (Expert Forum)
Re ECT, all are misinformed
Questions posted in the Mental Health forum are being answered by Dr. Roger L. Gould, author of the Mastering Stress and Depression program and affiliated with the UCLA. Department of Psychiatry. Topics covered include anger, attention deficit disorder (ADD), bipolar disorder, dementia, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), learning disabilities, memory, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), panic, personality disorders, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, stress, transitions, and work problems.
Re ECT, all are misinformed
by Tim, Oct 10, 1999 12:00AM
"Dr. Alice" writes:
>You obviously have an axe to grind about ECT, however you are not well informed.
I beg to differ. I think I am actually better informed than nearly all physicians who do not bother to read the scientific data on ECT, but instead accept the spin that shock-proponents in entrenched positions in our universities and other institutions (their teachers, actually) put on them.
>Although this treatment is rather rarely used
The most glaring point where your ignorance shows through. I would not count 100,000 yearly applications of ECT (not
individual treatments, but the total number of heads put between the electrodes) as "rarely used." Contrare, ECT is now
receiving yet a new coat of whitewash (the Surgeon General aims to pronounce it "safe and effective") and likely after that it will be promoted as a first line "treatment" for depression.
>it is safe and invaluable in patient's with depression (and mania)
You are just parroting what the main shock proponents Fink, Weiner, Abrams, et al have to say. They literally write the book
on ECT and one of them even owns a company that produces shock machines. Talk about vested interests. Who would expect
them to say anything bad about their bread and butter [and nice cars and big houses and country club memeberships]?
>I happen to be a physician and psychiatrist and have >nothing whatever to do with the "industry" you refer to.
Yes you do, you defend it staunchly.
Doctor's Answer
by HFHS MD - RG, Oct 11, 1999 12:00AM
Dear Tim,
I am not sure what your question was regarding ECT, but for the benefit of other readers, I would like to mention that ECT has been found safe and effective in managing Major Depressive Disorder and Manic episodes not responding to conventional treatment modalities. While it is true that no treatment modality is void of any adverse effects, ECT has been concluded to be safe.
Though I acknowledge differing opinions of the use of ECT, I would suggest physicians and patients to review the latest peer-reviewed medical journals for recent updates on ECT.
Sincerely,
HFHS MD - RG
*keyword: ECT
I am not sure what your question was regarding ECT, but for the benefit of other readers, I would like to mention that ECT has been found safe and effective in managing Major Depressive Disorder and Manic episodes not responding to conventional treatment modalities. While it is true that no treatment modality is void of any adverse effects, ECT has been concluded to be safe.
Though I acknowledge differing opinions of the use of ECT, I would suggest physicians and patients to review the latest peer-reviewed medical journals for recent updates on ECT.
Sincerely,
HFHS MD - RG
*keyword: ECT
I am not sure what your question was regarding ECT, but for the benefit of other readers, I would like to mention that ECT has been found safe and effective in managing Major Depressive Disorder and Manic episodes not responding to conventional treatment modalities. While it is true that no treatment modality is void of any adverse effects, ECT has been concluded to be safe.
Though I acknowledge differing opinions of the use of ECT, I would suggest physicians and patients to review the latest peer-reviewed medical journals for recent updates on ECT.
Sincerely,
HFHS MD - RG
*keyword: ECT
I too think that ECT is quite a brutal and destructive procedure at least as lobotomy is.
I just wanted to ask you - are you a doctor? a patient? a relative of a patient? I admire your empathy and the way you relate to the subject.
For those of you who also feel that electroshock should go the way of lobotomy sooner rather than later, there is something you should know: without any serious consideration on his own part, the Surgeon General is planning to drastically extend the government whitewash of Electroconvulsive "Therapy." Despite all of the hard and "anecdotal" evidence that ECT is not "safe and effective" he plans to go ahead and declare it so in the first-ever Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health, due out in December. For information about that and how to influence the decision back towards 'sanity' you may want to browse to www.madnation.org/sgr.htm.
Tim K
I can't e-mail you because I do not have an e-mail address of my own :(
However, if you can comment on my postings i would be happy to hear from you this way ( my postings are called "Schizophrenia or an organic disorder?" and "More q's - Schizophrenia or an organic disorder?" ).
Whatever you can tell me about yourself here would be greatly appreciated
thank you for your attention to me.
N.
Yes I have had deep, personal, negative experience with the "mental health" system. Brain damage from so-called "treatment" left me with lifelong disability. I was forever unable to make my own way in life and for this I will never forgive them. It didn't have to be that way. If they had made some serious steps toward reform in the more than 30 years since my horrific experience that would be one thing. But they have gone wholly toward a deterministic, biological viewpoint, coercion has been increased and enshrined in the laws of 41 states, and the only "treatments" now being offered are drugs over which there are serious questions on efficacy and safety (placebos have been found to be as effective for most people; school kids do mass murder in the schools while on them, or during the dangerous withdrawal phase; the same goes for ECT--sham ECT has been shown to "work" as well as the real ZAP).
Electroshock is a "therapy" over which the entire medical profession is in denial. Where is a "right mind" to be in when such quackery is commonly excepted? Maybe there is no such 'animal' as sanity in the first place. Incredible resources are squandered in the pursuit of the chimera of "mental health," a term which they aren't able to even adequately define. Defacto, it means conformity to social norms, which vary from time to time and from society to society.
I have a pamphlet which I can send you. The title is *Schizophrenia, a Non-Existent Disease*. I am afraid to post my website here, because I lost an ISP once for "advertising" my website. The article can be found at www.antipsychiatry.org, or you can request it by mailing The Antipsychaitry Coalition, P.O. Box 1253, Topeka KS 66601. We are not Scientologists. (a too-often asked question).
Tim
Sorry for not replying for so long. It was a weekend and this is my work computer.
I don't know what they did to you, and why they did it. I really don't want to pick your wounds but if you can and willing to share it with me I will consider it a honour and I will be glad to hear you.
Generally I can tell you - as I said to someone else couple of days ago: schizophrenia ( and any other mental illness ) is, was and will always remain an impairment of the SOUL. This, I suspect, is the reason so much medication is needed to control the symptoms. Casting of the substance changes
ways of perception, ofcourse, but I don't see this as the way of a cure. No other disease I've ever heard about, which origin is strictly organic, requires such a great amount of chimical substance, of so many different types, for so long as mental diseases. That means something to me.
Any attempt to try and DIAGNOSE a mental illness by testing the physical matter are doomed to failure. The same way you will not attempt to diagnose pneumonia or a cancer based on the patient's mood, life style, social functioning and psychological profiling - it is not wise to go the other way round, too.
How old are you Tim?
I've heard about the horrifying 60's ( from the psychiatric point of view ).... Sometimes I think that the whole world is gone crazy - not only about ECT, but about nuclear weapon, polution, violence and almost everything else that is of a global importance. As my friend once said "Every person carries a self-preserving instinct, but the humanity, as a whole, lacks this instinct"
I work with a person that has a Ph.D in physics. This person worked a lot with magnetic resonance imaging, tomography, etc..
He never heard about ECT before. When I told him he was shocked. He could not understand how can anyone that has some sense in him call it a "safe therapy". How could it POSSIBLY be safe?!?!?
You need not have a Ph.D in physics to understand it.
Sometimes I feel we are the healthy and they are the sick. We are just a minority. That is all.
Your friend
Naomi
PS - did you saw my posts? What do you think?
I have an account with both and either would work well for you I think and give you e-mail capability.
Tim
I can get a web account cause I am at work. I do not have a computer at my house. I also can't use my job's e-mail for personal purposes and I can't go to one of the websites you mentioned because again it is not allowed ( my computer is a development computer - i.e. it contains projects in developmental level which is a confidential information ). For this reason my boss forbids me to send e-mails :((
Anyway, how's everything?
Your friend
Naomi
It was hard to believe, but you have me convinced you are truly one of those unfortunate people who cannot get e-mail! If it weren't for e-mail I'd probably still be on Puget Sound messing about with boats instead of landlocked, high and DRY. Anyway, after 35 years in the mental hell system I've finally realized I'm not "mentally ill" unless they take my money away, then I might easily be mistaken, as I'd be homeless! And of course all those that are homeless and that E. Fuller Torrey would "medicate" are that way because of mental illness.. hmmmm
Anyway I'm basically in the antishock crusade, and if we haven't lost yet, I don't think we're going to. It is frightening and incredible the level of self-deception doctors and other professionals will go to just to keep themselves from feeling bad when they finally have to confront the fact that they are giving people brain damage with memory