NEWS RELEASE -- MAY 18, 2001
Electroshock survivor and author Leonard Roy Frank will
testify representing Support Coalition International at a
New York State Assembly committee hearing on electroshock,
scheduled for New York City, May 18, 2001.
BELOW is the testimony Leonard Roy Frank plans to give:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
TESTIMONY OF LEONARD ROY FRANK AT A PUBLIC HEARING
ON ELECTROCONVULSIVE "TREATMENT" BEFORE THE MENTAL
HEALTH COMMITTEE OF THE NEW YORK STATE ASSEMBLY,
MARTIN LUSTER PRESIDING, MANHATTAN, 18 MAY 2001
I've taken the epigraph for my presentation from a
talk on the Holocaust by Hadassah Lieberman, the
wife of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, which was rebroadcast
on C-SPAN last month. She quoted the Bal Shem Tov,
founder of Hasidism, a Jewish religious movement:
"In remembrance lies the secret of redemption."
My name is Leonard Roy Frank. I was born in 1932 in
Brooklyn and was raised there. After graduating from
the Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, I
served in the U.S. Army and then worked as a real
estate salesman for several years. Three years after
moving to San Francisco in 1959 I was diagnosed as a
"paranoid schizophrenic" and committed to a
psychiatric institution where I was forcibly
subjected to 50 insulin-coma and 35
electroconvulsive procedures. This was the most
painful and humiliating experience of my life.
It also left me with a memory gap covering the three
preceding years. It was a complete wipe-out (like
cutting a path across a heavily chalked blackboard
with a wet eraser). Afterwards I didn't know that
John F. Kennedy was president although he had been
elected three years earlier. There were also big
chunks of memory loss for events and periods
spanning my entire life; my high school and college
educations were effectively destroyed. I felt that
every part of me was less that what it had been.
Following years of study reeducating myself, I
became active in the psychiatric survivors movement,
becoming a staff member of Madness Network News
(1972) and co-founding the Network Against
Psychiatric Assault (1974); both based in San
Francisco. I am currently a member of the Support
Coalition International (based in Eugene, Oregon).
All three organizations were and are dedicated to
ending abuses in the psychiatric system. In 1978 I
edited and published The History of Shock Treatment.
Since 1995, three books of quotations I edited have
been published: Influenced Minds, Random House
Webster's Quotationary, and Random House Webster's
Wit & Humor Quotationary.
Over the last thirty-five years I have researched
the various shock procedures, particularly
electroshock or ECT, have spoken with hundreds of
ECT survivors, and have corresponded with many
others. From all these sources and my own
experience, I have concluded that ECT is a brutal,
punitive, dehumanizing, memory-destroying,
intelligence-lowering, brain-damaging, brainwashing,
heart-damaging, life-threatening, social-engineering
technique. ECT robs people of their memories, their
personality and their humanity. It reduces their
capacity to lead full, meaningful lives, it crushes
their spirits. Put simply, ECT is a method for
gutting the brain in order to control and punish
people who fall or step out of line.
Brain damage may be the most important and obvious
effect of ECT. The American Psychiatric
Association's 1991 Task Force Report on The Practice
of Electroconvulsive Therapy (p. 68), denies this in
stating that "in light of the available evidence,
'brain damage' need not be included [in the ECT
consent form] as a potential risk." Neurologist
Sidney Sament backs the brain-damage charge. In a
letter to Clinical Psychiatry News (March 1983), he
wrote,
"After a few sessions of ECT the symptoms are those
of moderate cerebral contusion, and further
enthusiastic use of ECT may result in the patient
functioning at a subhuman level. Electroconvulsive
therapy in effect may be defined as a controlled
type of brain damage produced by electrical
means.... In all cases the ECT "response" is due to
the concussion-type, or more serious, effect of ECT.
The patient "forgets" his symptoms because the brain
damage destroys memory traces in the brain, and the
patient has to pay for this by a reduction in mental
capacity of varying degree."
Additional evidence of ECT-caused brain damage comes
from an earlier report of an APA Task Force study of
ECT (1978), in which 41% of a large group of
psychiatrists responding to a questionnaire agreed
with the statement that ECT produces "slight or
subtle brain damage." Only 28% disagreed.
And finally there is the evidence from the largest
published survey of ECT-related deaths. In his
Diseases of the Nervous System article titled
"Prevention of Fatalities in Electroshock Therapy"
(July 1957), psychiatrist David J. Impastato, a
leading proponent of ECT, reported 66 "cerebral"
deaths among the 235 cases in which he was able to
determine the likely cause of death following ECT.
The 1991 Task Force Report on ECT referred to
earlier states that the death rate from ECT is
"approximately one per 10,000" (p. 157), but the
rate may be much higher, especially now that the
elderly are being electroshocked in growing numbers;
statistics based on California's mandated ECT
reporting system suggest that upwards of 50% of all
ECT patients are 60 years of age and older. What
does this mean in terms of ECT deaths? A 1993 study
involved 65 patients, 80 and older, who were
hospitalized for major depression. Here are the
facts taken directly from this study: The patients
were divided into 2 groups. One group of 37 patients
was treated with ECT; the other group of 28 patients,
with medication. After 1 year, 1 patient among the 28
in the medicated group was dead; 10 patients among
the 37 in the ECT group - a rate of 1 in 3.7, or 27%
- were dead. (David Kroessler and Barry Fogel,
"Electroconvulsive Therapy for Major Depression in
the Oldest Old," American Journal of Geriatric
Psychiatry, Winter 1993)
The term "brainwashing" came into the language
during the early 1950s. It originally identified the
technique of intensive indoctrination developed by
the Chinese for use on political dissidents
following the Communist takeover on the mainland and
on American prisoners of war during the Korean War.
While electroshock is not used overtly against
political dissidents, it is used against cultural
dissidents, social misfits and the unhappy, the
troubled and the troubling, whom psychiatrists
diagnose as "mentally ill" in order to justify ECT
as a medical intervention. Indeed, electroshock is a
classic example of brainwashing in the most
meaningful sense of the term. Brainwashing means
washing the brain of its contents. The term itself
derives from the Chinese words meaning "brain" and
"wash." Electroshock destroys memories and ideas by
destroying the brain cells in which memories and
ideas are stored. As psychiatrists J. C. Kennedy and
David Anchel, both ECT proponents, described the
procedure's effects in 1948, "Their minds seem like
clean slates upon which we can write" ("Regressive
Electric-shock in Schizophrenics Refractory to Other
Shock Therapies," Psychiatric Quarterly). Tabula rasa
therapy! For these reasons, I have proposed that the
procedure now called electroconvulsive treatment
(ECT) be renamed electroconvulsive brainwashing
(ECB). And perhaps ECB is putting it too mildly.
Maybe we should keep the acronym "ECT" and have the
"T" stand for torture - electroconvulsive torture.
We might ask ourselves, Why is it that 10 volts of
electricity applied to a political prisoner's
private parts is seen as torture while 10 or 15
times that amount applied to the brain is called
"treatment"?
If electroshock is an atrocity, as I maintain, how
can its use on more than 10 million Americans since
being introduced more than 60 years ago be
explained? Here are several reasons:
1. ECT is a money-maker. An in-hospital ECT series
can cost anywhere from $50,000-75,000. Using a low
figure of 100,000 Americans who are electroshocked
annually, most of whom are covered by private or
government insurance, ECT brings in $5 billion a
year.
2. The myth of informed consent. While outright
force is used in a relatively small number of cases,
genuine informed consent is never obtained because
ECT candidates can be coerced and because
electroshock specialists refuse to accurately inform
ECT candidates and their families of the procedure's
true nature and effects. ECT specialists lie not
only to the parties vitally concerned, they lie to
themselves and to each other. Eventually they come
to believe their own lies, and when they do, they
become even more persuasive to the naïve and
uninformed. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in 1852, "A
man cannot dupe others long who has not duped
himself first." Here is an instance of evil so
deeply ingrained that it's no longer recognized as
such. And you have such outrages, as ECT specialist
Robert E. Peck titling his 1974 book, The Miracle of
Shock Treatment and Max Fink, who for many years
edited the leading professional journal in the
field, now called The Journal of ECT, telling a
Washington Post reporter in 1996, "ECT is one of
God's gifts to mankind." (Sandra G. Boodman, "Shock
Therapy: It's Back," 24 September)
3. Lack of accountability. Psychiatry has become a
Teflon profession: the criticism, what little there
is of it doesn't stick. Here you have all these
psychiatrists carrying out brutal acts of inhumanity
and no one calls them on it. Not the courts, not the
government, not the people. Psychiatry has become an
out-of-control profession, a rogue profession, a
paradigm of authority without responsibility, which
of course is a good working definition of tyranny.
4. Sadism and anger. Psychiatrists do not feel
kindly toward "patients" who are unresponsive to
their "ministrations," those who cannot or will not
cooperate with their supposed "healers." They are a
source of embarrassment, a mark of failure. Instead
of taking responsibility for their ineptitude,
psychiatrists blame the patient or the disease. The
patient is "treatment-resistant," they say. "Quick
Henry, the little black box and we'll get him, or
more likely her, back under control our control."
(About two-thirds of those undergoing ECT are women).
5. Electroshock could never have become a major
psychiatric procedure without the active collusion
and silent acquiescence of tens of thousands of
psychiatrists. Many of them know better; all of them
should know better. The active and passive
cooperation of the media has also played an
important role in expanding the use of electroshock.
Amidst a barrage of propaganda from the psychiatric
profession, the media passes on the claims of ECT
proponents almost without challenge. The occasional
critical articles are one-shot affairs, with no
follow-up, which the public quickly forgets. With so
much controversy surrounding this procedure, one
would think that some investigative reporters would
key on to the story. But it hasn't happened up to
now. And the silence continues to drown out the
voices of those who need to be heard. I'm reminded
of Martin Luther King's 1963 "Letter from Birmingham
City Jail," in which he wrote "We shall have to
repent in this generation not merely for the
vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but
for the appalling silence of the good people."
I am here representing the Support Coalition
International, a group of psychiatric survivors
allied with more than 100 "sponsoring groups" who
oppose forced psychiatric oppression and who promote
humane empowering alternatives. But more
significantly, I'm also here representing the true
victims of electroshock: those who have been
silenced, those whose lives have been ruined, and
those who have been killed. All of them bear witness
through the words I have spoken here today.
I'll close with a short paragraph, in way of
summary, and a poem I wrote about 15 years ago.
If the body is the temple of the spirit, the brain
may be seen as the inner sanctum of the body, the
holiest of holy places. To invade, violate, and
injure the brain, as electroshock unfailingly does,
is a crime against the spirit and a desecration of
the soul.
Aftermath
With "therapeutic" fury
search-and-destroy doctors
using instruments of infamy
conduct electrical lobotomies
in little Auschwitzes called mental hospitals
Electroshock specialists brainwash
their apologists whitewash
as silenced screams echo
from pain-treatment rooms
down corridors of shame.
Selves diminished
we return
to a world of narrowed dreams
piecing together memory fragments
for the long journey ahead.
From the roadside
dead-faced onlookers
awash in deliberate ignorance
sanction the unspeakable
Silence is complicity is betrayal.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Leonard Roy Frank currently lives in
San Francisco. His e-mail address is:
For more information on electroshock see:
Feel free to redistribute this information,
forwarded by:
Support Coalition International
454 Willamette, Suite 216
PO Box 11284
Eugene, OR USA
general info:
web:
phone:
toll free: 1-877-MAD-PRIDE
fax:
Support Coalition International is a non-profit
federation of 100 grassroots groups
to win human rights and alternatives
for people labeled with mental disabilities.
MAD PRIDE CELEBRATION -- JULY 2001
