Medical power, unrestrained, allows physicians to use any method which is the professional fad, no matter how irrational. Even when a sizeable number, approaching 50%, of patients actually report they have been harmed, not helped. This is the way it is with psychiatry's Electro-convulsive Shock Treatment.
How has this professional group acquired the authority to judge others as less than human, invalid and unworthy of the protection of ordinary human rights? They commonly do not even warn patients of the serious brain damage and memory loss that is a consequence of the 'treatment' of ECT. This is actually what is happening daily when, disguised as a practitioner of the healing arts, an agent for the control of those viewed as irrational, or 'mentally ill', does his work as he is sanctioned b¸ our society to do.
Blaming the individual for aberrations which result mostly from a skewed civilization that places the privilege of a few above the well-being of the bulk of humanity, they look for something to fix in that person as if he is only a broken machine. Tampering with the brain bÏ means of electricity, drugs, and whatever other perverse ideas come to fruition in their 'clinics' funded by drug company and government largesse, they truly care nothing for the souls, minds, bodies or rights of the individuals entrusted to their 'care'.
The very name of Psychiatry is a lie, for it means "mental healing". Allowed unlimited discretion to create the realities in the area of 'mental health care', they even claim the very brain disease they are producing by their drugs and shock has been 'discovered' to be the cause and proof of the biological basis of 'mental illness' they've been looking for the better part of 200 years!
It is quite certain to those of us who have tried for years to get those in psychiatry to hear and see past the 'mental illness' they always find our way, and everywhere around, to see the overriding damage they have imposed over the top of it all--that heeding the grievances of the thousands upon thousands harmed by their carelessness is nowhere on their priority list...
psychiatric power is more than three hundred years old and grows daily more all-encompassing. But we have not yet begun to acknowledge its existence, much less to understand its role in our society.--Thomas Szasz, M.D.
Doctors in all ages have made fortunes by killing their patients by means of their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that is the death of the soul.--R.D. Laing
Healing has become increasingly marginal to the West's dominant healing system.--Arthur Kleinman, M.D.
Cal Grandy