CAPA Statement Re Performance of “Stories for Hemingway’s Havana”

Sister and Brother Activists: We felt the need to issue a political statement about the performance of the play about Hemingway—Stories for Hemingway’s Havana–which CAPA hosted on July 7 2007. The play was put on as a CAPA benefit, courtesy of the playwright and actor Brian Gordon Sinclair. The reason why we agreed to Brian’s kind offer to do this performance free of charge to CAPA as well as the audience was that the play covers the final years of Hemingway’s life, including his being electroshocked—a psychiatric atrocity which deprived him of his ability to write and led to his suicide. Unfortunately, while a couple of the men read the script ahead of time, none of the women in CAPA did, and at least one of us surely should have. Moreover, the macho which dominated the performance seemed nowhere near so blatant in the script. Now the acting and the writing were brilliant—for indeed, Brian is a talented artist. And the performance captured the personality of the very macho Hemingway to a “t”. Herein, however, lay the problem. While of course, there is nothing wrong with a play about a macho man and while no one should be electroshocked whether macho or not, no frame existed which suggested that this over the top macho man was not simply loveable. Moreover, the bit on the electroshock was so short that it did little to mitigate the problem.

We regret any offence. And we are sorry that we did not proceed more cautiously. Measures that we have taken to ensure that such a problem does not occur in the future is including as part of our process a rigorous and specifically feminist read for problems before agreeing to any performance or release of material. Naturally, we will also be reading with reference to other oppressions. Our apologies to anyone who attended and was uncomfortable, as indeed, many of us at CAPA were.

This was our first venture into theatre which we did not pen or perform in. And we all take it as a lesson.

The Executive of Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault

Shocking Quotes

“If the body is the temple of the spirit, the brain may be seen as the inner sanctum of the body, the holiest of places. To invade, violate and injure the brain, as electroshock unfailingly does, is a crime against the spirit and a desecration of the soul.”
– Leonard Roy Frank, electroshock survivor/activist/author/editor (1991)

“The escalating rate of shocking the elderly is one reason why I have come out in reent years for a complete ban on the treatment. The elderly are less able to defend themselves against shock treatment, and their brains are more susceptible to devastating damage.”
-Dr. Peter Breggin, in phone interview with Don Weitz (March 1996)

“…informed consent for ECT becomes a mirage. …I now endorse public efforts to ban ECT. The banning of ECT should be supported by all concerned mental health professionals.”
– Dr. Peter Breggin, Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry (1997, p.156)

“Electro Shock Therapy – a device that might be said to do the work of the sleeping pill, the electric chair, and the torture rack. It’s a clever little procedure, simple. quick, nearly painless it happens so fast, but no one wants another one. Ever.”
-Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)

“Electroshock is violence”
– Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General and human rights advocate – invited address to the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, New York City (May 1983)

“Well, 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. It’s a bum turn, Hotch, terrible.”
– Ernest Hemingway in A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, 1967 [A few days after being released from the Mayo Clinic following a second ECT series. Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun.] – reprinted by Leonard R. Frank, Influencing Minds, p.161.

“Since the time I had electroshock which was 33 years ago, I have problems with permanent memory loss, problems with concentrating and learning anything new…Electroshock is brutal, unethical, torture…a crime against humanity.”
– Sue Clark, shock survivor-activist, written testimony read at Inquiry into Psychiatry, public hearings in Toronto (April 9, 2005)

Letter to NY Governor Spitzer – Stop Shocking “SimoneD”

July 10, 2007
Eliot Spitzer
Governor of New York
Ph: 518-474-8390, Fax: 518-474-1513

Dear Governor Spitzer,
I am writing re the extremely serious situation of “Simone D” whom I understand is currently incarcerated in Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in New York State where she has been subjected to electroshock (“ECT”) and currently threatened with thirty (30) more electroshocks. This woman is not only being shocked but shocked repeatedly–over 200 times so far! —and against her will, without informed consent. She has tried to refuse electroshock and has clearly and firmly asserted, “Electroshock causes more pain! I suffer more from shock treatment!” In other words, this woman is asserting she is being tortured by this so-called safe and effective treatment.

I wish to emphasize the fact that electroshock, particularly forced electroshock, constitutes state-sanctioned violence and assault, particularly against women. Two to three times more women than men, including elderly women, are currently subjected to electroshock– “ECT” is clearly sexist and ageist. It has permanently traumatized and disabled many thousands of young and older women and thousands of other psychiatric survivors, and caused or contributed to the death of several hundred others.

Electroshock is a psychiatric procedure that always causes harm – specifically brain damage including permanent memory loss. These disastrous and permanent effects have been documented in the medical-psychiatric literature (see Sackeim et al, 2007). Further, electroshock has been publicly and repeatedly denounced by shock survivors, activists and other critics as trauma and torture–an extremely serious violation of human rights. Since a New York Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s decision to shock “Simone D” against her will and since the New York Office of Mental Health (OMH) has officially approved forced electroshock against “Simone D”, New York State is seriously violating medical ethics and international law including the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention Against Torture—both human rights documents specifically and clearly prohibit any cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment and torture. In the court of public opinion, New York State stands accused of condoning and promoting electroshock as “state-sanctioned violence against women”.

I urge you to do whatever is necessary to prevent Simone D. from being electroshocked again. One shock is one too many! Please reply to my letter.

Sincerely,
Don Weitz, co-founder, Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault and insulin shock survivor
Copies to: David Peterson, Lieutenant Governor of New York
Michael Hogan, Commissioner, New York Office of Mental Health
Peter M. Rivera, Chair, New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities

Simone D – forced shock case in NY

Some of you may have read about the battle of Simone D. to refuse forced electroshock in New York State in this MindFreedom distributed press release from 31 May 2007. Unfortunately, Simone has lost. Below is the e-mail from her attorney, Dennis B. Feld, about this:

The New York Court of Appeals turned back the challenge brought by Mental Hygiene Legal Service to the order authorizing 30 shocks over Simone D.’s objection, which order was issued in late November, 2005 and had been stayed by the appellate process. This result will likely, and shortly, have Simone D. strapped to a Gurney and wheeled into Creedmoor’s ECT suite for “maintenance” shock treatments in additional to the at least 148 shocks she has received since 1999 (and over 200 during her lifetime). Although the Appellant’s Brief and the Amici Brief made these numbers clear to the Court as well as the very questionable efficacy of maintenance shock at that extraordinary high end, the Court’s ruling never made such a recitation in ultimately affirming the authorized regimen. Also lost on the Court, at least in our feeling that the Court’s very technical decision was in part driven by an unwillingness to be critical of the effort taken by psychiatrists to care for an involuntary confined and “problematic” population, was the fact that remission of Simone’s condition had never been achieved by ECT nor did ECT offer any hope that Simone D. would get to the point of being found capable of making her own treatment decisions or ever being released from the hospital.

So, there is nothing we can affirmatively take from our over 1 and 1/2 year battle in this matter and utilize in confronting New York State’s continuing turn to involuntary maintenance shock to control the behavior of individuals of whom the new (as well as the old) psychotropic drugs fail to render compliant and manageable to the State’s satisfaction. And, unfortunately we are left with intermediate appellate precedent that finds a patient’s greater interaction with her peers and diminished skirmishes with staff to be benefits which are “crystal clear” and evidence that ECT has improved the quality of her life.

This case also underscores the Office of Mental Hygiene’ s failure to explore non-medical alternatives such as transferring Simone D. to a unit/facility that has Spanish speaking clinicians who can approach and try to treat her in her primary language and also provide her cultural accommodations. Instead, the only alternative to shock the State will readily offer is a panoply of medications that even its experts acknowledge do not work. Out of this continuing blunder, Kim penned two lines in the Appellant’s Brief submitted to New York’s High Court that should earn a place in Leonard’s Quotationary: ” After appellant had been subjected to more than a decade of linguistic isolation at Creedmoor, the hospital gave up on transferring her to a ward with a Spanish speaking psychiatrist after less than six weeks. Yet Creedmoor had not abandoned more intrusive treatment with multiple drugs, even after several years of admitted failure.”

Maybe that’s the irony that convinces us that we need to continue to fight these battles if only to attempt to instill some sense into institutional psychiatry and continue to see if we can get the courts to understand that sometimes setting limits on what clinicians do in the name of treatment is indeed the best jurisprudence.

ECT Testimony Videos on YouTube

Anti-electroshock activist Sue Clark-Wittenberg, together with her husband, Steven Wittenberg, have posted a number of videos describing their, and others’, experiences with electroshock (a.k.a. electroconvulsive therapy) on YouTube. A list of the links are found on the Wittenberg’s site.

Summary of Sackheim Article by pychologist

Read this important summary of Sackheim’s ground-breaking work on electroshock:

Summary of ‘The Cognitive Effects of Electroconvulsive Therapy’,
Sackeim H, et al. (2007) Neuropsychophamacology, 31, 244-254.

Although numerous studies documenting cognitive deficits, particularly memory impairment, have been presented previously to the Health Select Committee, the Sackeim study is ‘the first large-scale, prospective study of objective cognitive outcomes of patients treated with ECT’. Prospective means following a sample over time rather than taking a ‘snap shot’ at just one time point. The 347 patients followed, for six months after ECT, certainly warrants the authors’ claim of being ‘large-scale’, relative to previous ECT studies.

Major Findings

Immediately after ECT patients performed significantly worse (compared to baseline performance) on a range of measures. The deficits following ECT were greatest for the measures assessing ‘memory for autobiographical events’, ‘retention of newly learned information’, ‘global cognitive status’ and ‘simple reaction time’.

A crucial question in ECT research is whether these immediate adverse effects, which are experienced by most ECT recipients, are temporary or permanent. While performance on some measures did improve over time, ‘Adverse cognitive effects were detected 6 months following treatment’. These adverse effects were particularly marked for memory for autobiographical events (retrograde amnesia). Thus after six months this sample of ECT patients, taken as a group, were significantly less able to remember events from their own lives. Furthermore for one in eight (12.4%) the brain damage was sufficiently severe for the researchers to classify it as ‘marked and persistent retrograde amnesia’.

Women and older people (the two groups who receive ECT at particularly high rates) were significantly more likely to suffer the adverse effects found in this study. This was also the case for people with lower IQ scores.

One argument used to counter previous research showing memory deficits in ECT recipients is that the memory deficits may be caused by the depression rather than the ECT. This study, however, found that ‘severity of depressive symptoms showed little relationship with the cognitive measures’.

Further evidence that the memory deficits were caused by the ECT is the finding that the number of shock treatments was positively related to the extent of the memory deficit.

Dr. John Read
Associate Professor
Psychology Department, University of Auckland

February, 12, 2007.

Stories for Hemingway’s Havana shock scene included July 7

THE COALITION AGAINST PSYCHIATRIC ASSAULT PRESENTS

A WORLD PREMIER OF

STORIES FOR HEMINGWAY’S HAVANA

performed by award-winning Canadian actor-playwright

BRIAN GORDON SINCLAIR
SATURDAY JULY 7TH, 2007, 7 PM
OISE/UT, 252 BLOOR ST. WEST
7TH FLOOR PEACE LOUNGE

Free, Donations Welcome

A Mad Pride associated event

“Sinclair masterfully cedes the stage to Hemingway and the author’s multifaceted personality…He understands Hemingway’s strengths as well as vulnerabilities and does him justice…he (Sinclair) reaches into the writer’s soul and becomes him.”
– Miami Herald, 2006

Resolution Against Electroshock

RESOLUTION AGAINST ELECTROSHOCK – A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
passed by MindFreedom (f/k/a Support Coalition International) board of directors June 28, 2001

The Board of Directors of Support Coalition International (now MindFreedom) unanimously and strongly condemns the psychiatric procedure of electroshock (“electroconvulsive therapy”,”ECT”)) as a serious human rights violation. It is our informed opinion, based on common sense, personal experience and scientific knowledge, that electroshock is a crime against humanity. It directly violates section 5 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which outlaws “cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment or punishment”, and the UN Convention Against Torture. It is our informed opinion that electroshock constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. We also believe that virtually all electroshock is forcibly administered – that is, without genuine, fully informed consent.

We want electroshock abolished for these reasons:

1. Electroshock always causes brain damage.

2. Electroshock always causes permanent memory loss.

3. Electroshock always causes learning disabilities and other intellectual impairments.

4. Electroshock often arouses fear or terror in patients.

5. Even by conventional psychiatic standards, electroshock has an extremely high relapse rate – over 70% within one year.

6. Electroshock does not significantly relieve “depression” or prevent suicide. In fact, several research studies indicate that electroshock can aggravate or trigger depression and suicide attempts: the Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway killed himself shortly after undergoing a second series of electroshock.

7. Psychiatrists frequently violate the ethical-legal principle of informed consent when prescribing/ordering electroshock. Subjects are not informed or misinformed about the procedure’s harmful effects. Nor are they informed about humane, non-injurious, non-medical approaches such as counselling (including peer counselling), self-help groups, and life-style changes.

8. Electroshock discriminates against highly vulnerable people. Its chief targets are women and the elderly. Children are also being subjected to electroshock in growing numbers. In the United States and Canada, more than 70% of electroshock is administered to women, and upwards of half of those undergoing electroshock are 60 years of age and older.

9. Electroshock machines have never been independently inspected or approved for their medical safety. Since 1978, the Food and Drug Administration of the United States government has officially placed shock machines in its most dangerous medical-device category: class III, ” hazardous” or “unsafe”.

10. Electroshock has caused many deaths. Such deaths are routinely minimized or under-reported in the medical-psychiatric literature. Rarely are psychiatrists or ECT facilities required to report electroshock-caused deaths, or any other information concerning their use of ECT to governmental regulatory bodies.

Board of Directors Support Coalition International (now known as MindFreedom)

Mary Maddock’s Petition Against Forced Drugging

The Illegality of Ireland’s Mental Health Act of 2001 as it Concerns the Forced Use of Mind Altering Drugs on Unwilling Patients

Petition by: Mary Maddock
Petition Host: Kathy Sinnott, MEP from Ireland South

My ‘treatment’ began in 1976 after the birth of my first child. With little or no discussion it was decided I needed medical treatment, i.e. drugs, mainly a nueroleptic called largactil, and a little later ECT as I had a chemical imbalance in my brain, without having any medical tests to make this diagnoses. I believe this to be the same as forced treatment, and I was forcefully treated with so many injections that to this day I remember the pain and soreness from the many shots.

I got no information about the treatment I received and was not capable of evaluating it myself as it is proven now that nueroleptic drugs cause a chemical lobotomy. I know this to be true from personal experience as simple tasks were a nightmare to perform and I was out of touch with my emotions.

I managed to survive this first onslaught for 7 yrs, but in 1982 I was a victim of psychiatry again and soon I was diagnosed as a manic depressive and was chemically lobotomised once again, this time by three different substances: largactil, surmontil and lithium. I remained on a combination of drugs for almost 20 yrs: on lithium and largactil for most of the time and on all three drugs for over 10 yrs.

I am now completely free from drugs for over 7 yrs and at almost 60 years old am leading a healthy and free life in body, mind, and spirit.

With the adoption of the Mental Health Act of 2001 (MHA), Ireland’s doctors now have the ability to legally force an unwilling patient to continue to take medication for real or perceived mental illness. The applicable text of sec. 60 reads:

60- Where medicine has been administered to a patient for the purposes of ameliorating his or her mental disorder for a continuous period of 3 months, the administration of that medicine shall not be continued unless either:
(a) the patient gives his or her consent in writing to the continued administration of that medicine, or
(b) where the patient is unable or unwilling to give such consent:
(i) the continued administration of that medicine is approved by the consultant psychiatrist responsible for the care and treatment of the patient, and
(ii) the continued administration of that medicine is authorised (in a form specified by the Commission) by another consultant psychiatrist following referral of the matter to him or her by the first-mentioned psychiatrist

The ramifications of this section of the MHA are startling, as what happened to myself can now be forced upon unwilling Irish citizens if two doctors believe it to be in the best interest of the patient, even without any objective standards of testing.

My friend and colleague John McCarthy was a delegate to the UN in regards to the recent convention on the rights of the disabled. The treaty, as originally worded in art. 17, left open a number of loopholes which would have allowed States Parties the ability to force involuntary treatment on a patient. His lobbying helped rewrite art. 12 so that it now reads that “every person with disabilities has a right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity on an equal basis with others.” Furthermore, art. 14 states that the disabled shall enjoy the same rights to liberty and security of their persons as the non-disabled, and that the existence of a disability does not “justify a depravation of liberty.” As of 30 March, 2007, both Ireland and the EU are signatories to the convention, and it is therefore binding law on both bodies.

Even before this, the Council of Europe created Europe’s most important human rights document, the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950), which offers protection inter alia of privacy (Article 8); against inhuman and degrading treatment (Article 3); against arbitrary deprivation of liberty (Article 5); and against discrimination in conjunction with other substantive rights (Article 14). I recognize that the EU does not have the authority to enforce these articles, but this document set the precedent for the above UN convention, and is binding on Ireland and every other nation that is current member state of the EU.

I strongly believe that the above portion of the MHA are in clear violation of international law, and respectfully ask that the EU, via the petitions committee, recommend that the involuntary forced use of mind altering medications in Ireland be stopped immediately.

Support statement of anti-shock demo by Leonard Frank

San Francisco, 12 May 2007

Greetings to all my friends participating in the anti-electroshock demonstrations (“STOP SHOCKING OUR MOTHERS AND GRANDMOTHERS”) on Mother’s Day in Toronto, Montreal, Cork (Ireland), and Eugene (Oregon).

My congratulations to each of you for protesting the use of the barbaric psychiatric procedure known as electroshock, or ECT.

These demonstrations are needed now more than ever before.

According to a leading ECT proponent, one to two million people worldwide are being electroshocked every year. And the numbers are growing.

Electroshock is psychiatry’s shock-and-awe “treatment.”

Electroshock is psychiatry’s weapon of mass brain destruction.

Electroshock is a brainwashing method disguised as a medical treatment. One electroshock psychiatrist described the effect of intensive ECT in this way: “Their minds are like clean slates upon which we can write.”

Electroshock is a brutal, dehumanizing, memory-destroying, intelligence-lowering, brain-damaging, life-threatening technique.

Electroshock robs people of their memories, their beliefs, their hopes, their personality and their humanity.

Electroshock reduces the capacity of people to lead full, meaningful lives, and crushes their spirit.

Electroshock is a method for gutting the brain in order to control and punish people who fall or step out of line, and intimidate others who are on the verge of doing so.

Electroshock is an atrocity. Even though sanctioned by the state, it is still an atrocity. What is legal is not necessarily right. It is well to remember that the Inquisition, slavery and the Holocaust were all, in their time, legal.

Electroshock has no place in a free society, and no society in which it is used is truly free.

We need to stop electroshock and we need to stop it now.

My thoughts and good wishes are with each of you on this occasion. May it be for those struggling against electroshock one of our finest hours.

Leonard Roy Frank