I have witnessed the damage electroshock can cause. I can truly say this so-called “treatment” is not what they claim. It is torture in disguise. I have two stories to tell so that others may be warned about this.
When I was 9 years old, my mother had recently been diagnosed with Diabetes Type 2, and began a steep emotional roller coaster between happy and very sad. I later learned this was a Vitamin B deficiency and that diabetics should take Vitamin B for that purpose. This was not known at that time and my mother was referred to a psychiatrist who “diagnosed” her with a mental illness and hospitalized her. She was then given dangerous and addictive drugs and electroshock, also known as ECT.
When she came home from the hospital I was really happy to see her as it had been several months. We were sitting on the sofa together when she pointed out a piece of furniture in the room—a child’s rocking chair—and asked, “Where did that come from?” I was in total disbelief at this because she had bought it for my younger sister just a few short months before as a Christmas gift. I said, “Mom, you bought it for Mary for Christmas, don’t you remember?” This incident was terrifying to me as a young girl and all I could think was, “If she couldn’t remember buying that chair, could she really remember me?”
My mother became extremely nervous and upset easily over things that other people in life could easily deal with. Mothering for her became very hard as it was just too much for her. Life in general became difficult for her after the ECT. It didn’t handle her sad condition but rather put her on a course of continual emotional roller-coastering for the next 20 years. Her diabetes worsened and she became what was known then as a brittle diabetic. She was put on numerous drugs to deal with her emotional instability. She roller-coastered emotionally and physically for the rest of her life. Her physical health continued to deteriorate after the ECT and a few months before she died, her kidneys failed and she had to have a kidney transplant. I was told that the doctors told my father that the kidney she received was a better match than that of a twin. Yet, she went into a diabetic coma and died only days later. At that time she was taking 36 prescriptions pills per day.
It was very, very sad growing up with a mother who went through all that when it wasn’t necessary. Proper diet and nutrition could have helped her. Instead she fell into the hands of psychiatry. She was previously a beautiful, very intelligent, vibrant woman and wonderful mother, but psychiatry—the drugs and the shock treatments given to her—ruined her life and created horrendous expense, grief and struggle for our family. I often wondered what our family life would have been like without this having happened and proper care been given to her instead.
After my mother had ECT, she became a permanent patient of psychiatry for the rest of her life. She was about 32 years old when given ECT and was only 52 when she died. The psychiatric “treatments” she received, worked great, didn’t it?
My second experience was with a young woman who received ECT. I met her after she had been given ECT and could easily see that she was harmed irreparably. She would spend her days sitting on her sofa rocking back and forth listening to extremely loud music while pouring over family scrapbooks trying to piece her life back together. She told me her memory was damaged severely, so much so that when she was released to the home she grew up in, she couldn’t even remember where the bathroom was. This was her childhood home where she had spent many years. She told me she couldn’t remember getting married or her own childhood, but most heartbreaking to me was to hear her say that she could not remember her children. Nor having given birth to them or raising them—at all. It was the saddest thing I had ever heard. Now she spent her days numb from psychiatric drugs, leafing through scrapbooks trying to force herself to remember. But she could not. Her husband divorced her, she could no longer work and is on welfare. She was just left with a shell of a life. Horrifying.
I recall one of the first things my mother ever taught me at about the age of 4 was to not put anything into an electrical socket, as it could shock and harm you severely. Yet laws continue to allow psychiatrists to run electricity through the brains of human beings under the guise of treatment. One has to scratch their head and ask, “How can this possibly be?” Well, it is very hard to confront evil and it is very difficult to conceive that human beings could possibly be treated this way. I cannot imagine how many others have silently suffered at the hands of psychiatrists.
From these experiences, I have concluded that laws cannot be enacted soon enough to ban ECT. This is not treatment—it is nothing more than authorized torture. Real medical treatment helps people recover from illness and injury—not worsen it. ECT should not be administered to any person, of any age, regardless of what the psychiatric industry touts as “safe and effective” treatment—it most certainly is not.