MindFreedom Ireland do not consider that’ ECT’ can be therapy as it causes brain damage and therefore it should be abolished.
Doctors should not use brain damage as a ‘treatment’. It shows how deprived our ‘mental health’ services are when electroshock is still offered to people in severe emotional distress.
It should never be prescribed for any citizen against their will. No ‘mental health’ laws should allow anyone to be coerced to receive brain damaging electroshock at any time. The long, sad history of electroshock, including modified electroshock has caused more harm than good.
Therefore the Irish government should protect all its citizens and put an end to electroshock. Not to have put an end to electroshock without informed consent is outrageous.
” Yet another treatment procedure comparable in repulsiveness was the use of electric shock so as to alter an individual’s vision of his unhappy life. To the end of my days in psychiatry I could not accept that an electric shock would transform the parent mourning for a dead child, or the spouse for a lost partner, from being deeply depressed to being the classic ‘happy man’. To me it was wholly reminiscent of the many futile, sometimes dangerous, procedures used in desperation by us in the 1930s to safe the life of the dying consumptive………My job as house physician was to provide a completely purposeless ritual presence. I would stand at the head of the patient as he was anaesthetised and then apply an electric terminal at each side of the patient’s skull……..A series of standard shocks was then applied through the terminals…..Later, as a consultant psychiatrist, under NO CIRCUMSTANCES would I submit a patient to the procedure. What is more I found that they had NO NEED OF IT. The unexplained rational of the procedure was much too reminiscent of the use of cupping, blood-letting and the application of leeches.” Dr Noel Browne, Irish Psychiatrist, author of ‘Against The Tide’
