Electroshock

Overview

In spite of the sophisticated trappings of science, the brutality of electroshock verifies that psychiatry has not advanced beyond the cruelty and barbarism of its earliest treatments.

History of Electroshock

In a Rome slaughterhouse, psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti witnessed butchers incapacitate pigs with electricity before slitting their throats. The attendants would walk through the pig pens with a large pair of electrically wired pincers which had metal disks spiked with small metal points on each pincer arm. The pigs head was grasped with the pincers, the animal fell to the ground paralyzed from the shock, whereupon it could be easily killed. Cerletti lost no time in developing this for use on humans to control behavior. Electroshock also known as electro-convulsive therapy, shock treatment and ECT, was thus pioneered by Cerletti in the mid-1930s.

Cerletti was fascinated by the control potentials of electroshock. The first man who received it pleaded with Cerletti, “Not another one! Its deadly!” A witness recounts that, The Professor (Cerletti) suggested that another treatment with a higher voltage be given.

Murdering the Mind

German psychiatrist Lothar B. Kalinowsky, who witnessed this first electroshock while a student of Cerletti, became one of the world’s most ardent and vigorous proponents of this treatment. He developed his own electroshock machine and in 1938 introduced his electroshock procedure to France, Holland and England, later pioneering it in the United States. By 1940, electroshock had arrived in many countries around the world.

Today, the administration of electroshock brings an estimated $3 billion annually into psychiatric industry coffers in the U.S. alone. However, those receiving this treatment are the ones who pay the costliest price. Documented studies show electroshock leaves irreversible brain damage. Shock treatment causes confusion of time and space orientation, permanent loss of memory and can result in death. Yet psychiatrists continue to use it. Nobody has ever been cured, only deprived of their memory, feelings and will.

From Stardome to Despair
Frances Farmer
(1914-1970)
Upset over a string of failed relationships, Hollywood actress Frances Farmer was arrested in January 1943, after a bout of heavy drinking. Refusing to cooperate with psychiatrist Thomas H. Leonard, she was committed to an institution. For the next seven years, she was subjected to 90 insulin shock treatments and numerous bouts of electroshock. She later told of being raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats, poisoned by tainted food, chained in padded cells, strapped in straitjackets and half drowned in ice baths. By the time of her release, she was withdrawn and terrified of people. After three years, she was up to working again sorting dirty laundry. Her career and life were ruined.

Creativity and Life Destroyed
Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)

Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway allowed himself to be talked into receiving 20 electroshock treatments. The result devastated him. As he told a friend, “What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient …” Indeed we did. He committed suicide shortly afterwards.

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