[Flames Draft Watcher]

Since ECT was brought up earlier here's another bit from Breggin's site...

"Advocating Against Shock Treatment

In 1979 I published Electroshock: Its Brain-Disabling Effects. This was the first and remains the only medical book devoted to a critical analysis of this barbaric treatment. It has helped to support the anti-shock movement led largely by former mental patients and former victims of shock treatment. In 2008, Dr. Ursula Springer wrote a history of Springer Publishing Company in which she called the publication of my first medical book one of the highlights of her career. She described frightening encounters with shock doctors when she went as a publisher to medical meetings, including a threat to boycott her firm, which never developed. I continue to provide an isolated voice within psychiatry documenting the dangers of electroconvulsive therapy and calling for it to be abandoned.

I was the sole scientific presenter on the brain-damaging effects of shock treatment at the NIH Consensus Development Conference on ECT in 1985 and may have helped the panel recognize and report on some of the dangers associated with the treatment.

In 2005, I testified as the medical expert in the first trial in history in which a jury returned a malpractice verdict against a shock doctor in favor of the injured patient. It is a source of gratification that I have been the psychiatric expert in the first malpractice suits won against perpetrators of shock treatment and psychosurgery."

My half-brother was subjected to this treatment in the past 15 years. Through drugs and ECT he has become more and more of a zombie over the past 15 years or so. It hasn't been pleasant to watch and he ended up on the street last winter.