Today’s Road to ECT Not Paved with Good Intentions

     Writer and psychiatric drug withdrawal advocate Jules Jones tells the horrifying story this week on the Mad in America site of her transfer from innocent cardio patient to recipient of thirty-nine electroshock sessions. It is an increasingly common tale of someone who is incrementally moved from the physical health end of modern medicine to the mental health end because of untrained MDs labeling them incorrectly with a mental disorder they do not actually have.

     Thirty years ago Jules had been coping well with the rigors of work and children. She never had one thought that she was “depressed” when she began experiencing heart symptoms that sent her to her MD. He referred her to a cardiologist. Tests were run and Jules was diagnosed with an episodic racing heart that, understandably, might have felt more terrifying than it actually was. She was prescribed a beta blocker to slow the arrhythmia down. It all seemed like simple enough, evidence-based medicine to her.

     Then her cardiologist suddenly moved into the murky waters of mental health. She “suggested” Jules might be depressed, might have some psychological cause behind her worry, and should go back and consult with her primary care physician.

     Jules did, and there she was told point blank by her general practitioner that she was experiencing depression. It was caused by a chemical imbalance, she was told, and there was a pill that would balance her back out. Jules, innocently enough, accepted the diagnosis.

     Twenty years of horrific medical abuse followed: five psychiatric labels, twenty-one psychiatric drugs, thirty-nine rounds of electroshock. A ruined life.

     Jules was able to successfully taper off all her psychiatric drugs nine years ago with the help of her wife, who is a naturopath, but there are still periods within those two decades which are not clear in her memory.

     
     What combination of faulty ideas and ill will were these two medical doctors operating on?

     What hidden standards did they have in their minds which allowed them to think they knew more about another’s mental health than Jules herself did?

     Forty years ago psychiatrists used the lie of “chemical imbalance” to legitimize themselves as “real” doctors who could treat mental “disease” with their Big Pharma promoted drugs.

     Since then their bogus theories have so contaminated regular medicine that we now have general practitioners and physical medicine specialists who also presume to know more about their patients’ psyches than their patients themselves.

     It’s a circle no one in their right mind would ever have wanted completed.