To: <s-acc@yahoogroups.com>
From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 08:48:44 -0800
Subject: Re: [s-acc] Re: ECT machines
Xzb:
This is an important distinction that you raise. I was bullied in an effort to get me to take ECT when I was in the hospital in DC. Like you say it involved private insurance and the economic means of my family. I avoided it [a] because I knew already it was torture and [b] I kept my nerve and didn't let them "lose their cool" and order it.
We don’t see ECT used here by force here. It’s not court ordered, only people who have private insurance or economic means get it. It is only used when people really don’t respond to nothing although. A couple of attorneys told me they prefer it except for the memory loss issues.
I knew a psychiatrist in the Bay Area, who was "shrink" for the [Berkeley/Albany] Mental Health Board when I was Chair, who had been on the Board overseeing the "Soteria" style program in San Francisco. He hated ECT, but he said he'd had one patient who had insisted despite his efforts to persuade otherwise.
Chemo and radiation are also damaging. People make an intelligent decision to have or not have it.
"Intelligent" is what's key here. We do not have a treatment system that stresses the rationality of decision-making. And we have a social class system that puts the hardest burdens on the oppressed and then denies it - that is not rational.
You are right it is possible to oversimplify the problem. But the FDA's current plan to reduce the rationality for the benefit of psychiatric self-interest is entirely out of line, and goes the wrong way, I believe. They have "lost their cool."
Andrew