Harmful Treatment: From Magic Bullets To Spent Shells

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http://www.cchr.org/doctors/eng/page20.htm

 

HARMFUL TREATMENT

FROM MAGIC BULLETS TO SPENT SHELLS

 

 

Psychosurgery is " nothing short of a mental health holocaust

perpetrated by mind-stealing hacks in the dimly lit clinics of public

psychiatric hospitals. " 93

 

— Frank Vertosick

Neurosurgeon, 1997

 

 

“We are going in there [the brain] with the equivalent of a bulldozer to knock

down roads and tear up rail lines and pull down telegraph exchanges. You have to

ask, do we know enough to play these kinds of games with other people’s brains.”

 

— Paul Mullen, Professor of Forensic Psychiatry, Australia, 1999

 

 

 

Portuguese psychiatrist Egas Moniz and Italian psychiatrist Ugo

Cerletti (above) are considered the " fathers " of psychosurgery and

electroshock respectively. Such physical treatments helped

psychiatrists compete with neurologists who treat real brain diseases.

 

 

 

The evolution of psychiatric " treatments " has seen a continuous

procession of " miraculous " new developments which were all eventually

discredited.

 

" Prefrontal lobotomy, insulin coma, and other treatments that are now

totally rejected were claimed, in their time, to be just as effective

in treating mental illnesses as it is now claimed that drug treatment

is, " wrote Valenstein.

 

" Rarely has psychiatry been totally without a remedy advertised as

effective. Whether it be whipping the mentally ill, bleeding them,

making them vomit, feeding them sheep thyroids, putting them in

continuous baths, stunning them with shock therapies, or severing

their frontal lobes—all such therapies `worked' at one time, and then,

when a new therapy came along, they were suddenly seen in a new light,

and their shortcomings revealed, " according to Whitaker.94

 

 

 

Psychosurgery: Mental Surgery to Brain Butchery

THEN: PSYCHOSURGERY WAS TOUTED AS A TREATMENT " BREAKTHROUGH "

 

" The brain cutting operation known as pre-frontal lobotomy can bring

`striking' improvement to chronically sick mental patients.... "

 

— Science Newsletter, 1953

[Picture] LATER: RECOGNIZED AS A PSYCHIATRIC FAILURE

 

" ...The [psychosurgery] operations have a general blunting effect on

emotions and thought processes " and " there is no theoretical or

empirical justification for any of them. "

 

— Science, 1973

 

 

 

 

 

 

" We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our

society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who

deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated... Man does

not have the right to develop his own mind. "

 

— Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado, Associate Professor of Physiology, Madrid

University of Neuropsychiatry

Yale University Medical School, U.S. Congressional Record, 1974

 

 

Insulin-Coma Therapy: Viennese psychiatrist Manfred Sakel pioneered

insulin-coma therapy in the late 1920s. After patients had lapsed into

dangerous hypoglycemic comas, they were returned to consciousness

using an emergency administration of glucose.

 

In 1933, spectacular results were reported: 70% of 100 psychotic

patients had been cured, and another 18% notably improved. The New

York Times told of patients who had been " returned from hopeless

insanity by insulin. " Reader's Digest wrote that, " Patients act as if

a great burden had been lifted from them. "

 

Later studies revealed that 5% of all state hospital patients who

received the treatment had died from it.95 Researchers also found

evidence of neuronal shrinkage, death, and softening of the brain.96

 

 

 

ECT: Then " Harmless " — Now Provenly Damaging

THEN: ELECTROSHOCK WAS TOUTED AS A TREATMENT " BREAKTHROUGH "

 

" ...The electrical shock method seems relatively harmless... Perhaps

the most important advantage of this method, however, is the lack of

any discomfort for the patient associated with the method... The

patient does not usually remember even the kind of treatment he has

received, therefore he develops no antagonisms or uneasiness for

future treatments. "

 

— The Psychiatric Quarterly, 1940

[Picture] LATER: RECOGNIZED AS A PSYCHIATRIC FAILURE

 

ECT is " demonstrably ineffective and clearly dangerous. It causes

brain damage manifested in such forms as severe and often permanent

loss of memory, learning disability, and spatial and temporal

disorientation. "

 

— Dr. John Friedberg, neurologist, Psychology Today, 1975

 

 

 

 

Electroshock (ECT): ECT was invented in 1938 by Italian psychiatrist

Ugo Cerletti, head of the psychiatry department at the University of

Rome. After observing how pigs were prepared for slaughter using

electroshock, Cerletti realized that the best way to induce seizures

in humans was to apply electricity directly to the head, rather than

running the current through the body.

 

 

 

" If psychiatrists don't know what they do with their electroshocks,

the patients, themselves, know... First, a considerable fear, reaching

terror, they all testify; then serious memory troubles, from which

they sometimes never fully recover. Recorded accidents go from

mentioned fractures to... sudden deaths from the heart overworking...

as described in medical literature. "

 

— Dr. Barthold Bierens de Haan, Critical Dictionary of Psychiatry,

Switzerland

 

 

ECT advocates claim the memory loss caused by electroshock is helpful

because patients no longer recall events that had caused them anguish.

They also assert that ECT is safe, effective, and painless— " sleep

induced by electricity " with " no pain or discomfort. "

 

Hype aside, the reality is that " the level of the whole intellect is

lowered... the stronger the amnesia, the more severe the underlying

brain cell damage must be. " 97

 

A 2001 Columbia University study found ECT is so ineffective at

ridding patients of their depression that nearly all of those who

receive it relapse within six months of stopping treatment.98