Читать книгу Shock! - Donald Ph.D. Ladew - Страница 3

Above all do no harm.

—The Hippocratic Oath (The physician’s oath)

At 2:00 AM the Cabrillo Springs Psychiatric Hospital & Clinic, unlike its state or metropolitan counterparts, was quiet. Inside, from a small treatment room near the center of the complex, an occasional murmur of sound could be heard above the hum of machinery and air conditioning.

On a good day, or night, as many as one “treatment” might be given every ten minutes. In the language of the Harvard Business School, the treatment room was a profit center.

Finding that the patient has insurance seemed the most common indication for giving electro-shock.” —David S. Viscott, The Making of a Psychiatrist

It wasn't surprising that the patients in the back wards of the clinic were quiet. Under the watchful eye of ward nurses and attendants, the prisoner-patients had been given their evening ration of mind-numbing drugs, some powerful enough to buckle the knees of an elephant. This is how psychiatric health care professionals “subdue and control difficult, uncooperative and unruly patients.” Not surprisingly, all patients are deemed in need of subduing. The issuance of drugs is another profit center.

There were four people in the treatment room: a burly male attendant to subdue and control uncooperative and unruly patients; a psychiatric intern, a psychiatric nurse skilled in the administration of anesthetics and the operation of treatment room equipment; the psychiatrist, who diagnosed the patient's medical-mental illness, and thus prescribed the treatment; and finally, the victim of this medieval ritual, this twentieth-century Auto da Fe.

An Auto da Fe is literally a “judicial sentence or act of faith,” usually ending with the public burning of heretics. Those who refused to admit wrongdoing, or those who defiantly clung to their "heresies" were burned alive.

The woman on the gurney near the entrance lay still except for an occasional twitch of fingers and toes. The age given on her chart was fifty-five. She looked older. Her eyes were open.

To look there was to sink into a well of terror, a terror the drug-paralyzed muscles of her throat could not articulate. And if she could have spoken, what might she have said?

"Why do you torture me? What have I done? Why am I being punished? Won't someone please listen?

“Terror acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and should be employed in the cure of madness.” —Benjamin Rush The Father of American Psychiatry.

She hadn't been allowed any food for eight hours in order to effect full bowel and bladder elimination. As happens frequently in torture, psychiatric therapy and death, the muscles of the bladder and bowels relax, and uncontrolled elimination occurs adding to the degradation. The victim's misery is thought less important than the offended sensibilities of the practitioners.

"...The major task in nursing care (after shock therapy) is resocialization through habit training. Incontinence (uncontrolled urination) exceedingly common, gradually comes under control through regular toilet periods." —Psychiatric Nursing Multheny & Topalis 4th Ed.

The attendant picked her up like a child and transferred her to the treatment table with practiced ease. It resembled an operating table, though less complex; the more obvious differences being the straps placed over the woman's legs, waist and shoulders. The Neanderthal quickly strapped her to the table.

Two large tears hung motionless in the corners of her desperate eyes.

"It is impossible to keep a shred of human dignity when you are strapped to a table, convulsing and slobbering like an idiot, reduced to a hunk of will-less flesh. My body was no longer mine - they could make it jerk and froth at will. For many years afterward, I tried to remember what it was like to be a person, not a thing, but I couldn't." —Jonika Upton

The psychiatrist stood to one side, a modern day Torquemada waiting for his acolytes to prepare the way.

Their movements were precise, choreographed, filled with prediction and consequence. The tortured always remember the agony of waiting.

The nurse pulled the old woman's wispy hair away from her temples, soaked a ball of cotton in acetone and proceeded to scrub her temples methodically. The powerful odor washed over the sensitive nasal tissues of everyone in the room.

Only the old woman, aware of its acrid bite, was beyond comment or question, a prisoner in a dark chemical cell. Yet even there the smell registered on the delicate receptors of the central nervous system, which then transmitted their message to her brain. There, this new data, unevaluated, undifferentiated, added to her increasing sense of doom.

Acetone, besides being a fingernail polish remover, is used in electronic circuits to clean electrical contacts. It is considered helpful as it improves the flow of electric current through such circuits. There, on the altar stone of psychiatric sacrifice, it served the same purpose.

The nurse efficiently removed the woman's wedding ring from her bony finger and tossed it casually into a metal tray. She checked for other articles of jewelry. As the nurse's hand touched the patient's face, it unknowingly triggered a memory from the old woman's youth.

After the birth of her first and only child, she had lain in the hospital room, weary and dazed. She remembered feeling depressed and resentful. It had been a long and difficult delivery.

Then like an essence of peace and validation, two large brown hands, smelling faintly of cigars and cologne, had clasped her face with such tenderness she wept.

Her husband's voice was as clear in her memory as it had been then.

"My princess, we have a son. I am so very, very proud of you." And she felt his lips warm on hers.

Does memory lie? Where is his face? She opened her eyes then and smiled, and he was there, but now...

The nurse turned away and pulled a low cart covered with a nest of black, plastic-coated cables ending in silver-tipped electrodes toward the operating table: An electro-encephalograph machine. Across the top a roll of chart paper waited for needle-like pens to inscribe incomprehensible lines: For what purpose? For what science? Were they there to validate that electro shock destroys the electrical circuits of a healthy body and the spirit that is really a man or woman?

The nurse connected the electrodes to various points of the woman's body to monitor both brain and heart activity.

Up to this point no one spoke. No order had been given, no questions asked. The chief inquisitor had brought the heretic to the stake; her satanic possession would be purged. He stood to one side, empty of emotion, empty of humanity, as empty as the machines of his abysmal trade.

As to the use of confessions, Father Spee remarks... "The result is the same whether she [the accused] confesses or not. If she confesses, her guilt is clear; she is executed. All recantation is in vain. If she does not confess, the torture is repeated - twice, thrice, four times... She can never clear herself. The investigating body would feel disgraced if it acquitted a woman; once arrested and in chains she has to be guilty, by fair means or foul.” —1631 Father Friederich Von Spee Cautio Criminalis (Precautions for prosecutors) The Inquisition

You see? How simple. She has to be mad. Her psychiatric inquisitor can never admit that she might be sane…not ever.

The attendant stepped back from the table. The nurse set up an intravenous solution. Finally, something in the environment offered sufficient resistance to provoke a human response on her features. She frowned and muttered something unintelligible, and then quite clearly, "The old bag hasn't any veins." At this point she turned to the high priest.

"Does she get pentothal?" she asked.

He seemed to be considering something, some significant technical point. He didn't look at the patient's chart; he just stared at her with narrow, vulpine eyes.

"No, I don't think so," he said. "We'll do an unmodified bilateral treatment".

Modified ECT is effected by first rendering the patient unconscious and then administering a paralytic drug, such as succinycholine in conjunction with Pentothal sodium. It is also necessary to provide mechanical means for breathing, as with the onset of these drugs, the patient is unable to breath unassisted. Unmodified treatment is done without any of these so-called precautions.

The nurse's head came up a fraction. She hesitated for less than a heart beat.

"This should be interesting," she murmured.

She pushed the mechanical breathing aid away from the table, and then inserted a mouth gag of rubber covered with gauze between the woman's teeth to prevent her from biting through her tongue or shattering her teeth.

On another stand near the head of the table sat another machine. Unlike the EEG, it only had two cables, each tipped with a silver electrode. The old-fashioned case was black with a crackle finish. On the top were four or five knobs and dials. It wasn't very complex. Two wires came from the device, each tipped with a small button electrode.

The nurse opened a small jar of conductive gel especially impregnated with tiny bits of graphite to make it a better conductor of electricity. She applied it first to the woman's temples, then to the electrodes.

“...Such ECT instruments usually contain nothing but a simple transformer that steps up the voltage from the wall outlet from 110 volts to about 150 volts. The machine may or may not have an automatic timing device to limit the duration of the shock. The current that passes through the head (between the electrodes) is limited mainly by the electrical resistance of the head. The total power drawn is about 60 watts - enough to light a conventional light bulb. The result is not very different from what would be accomplished by plugging two pieces of metal into a wall outlet and placing their other ends on the temples—except the voltage from the wall outlet is a little lower..." —Peter Sterling, Ph.D., Professor (Neurobiology)

Finally the conductor of this rite macabre stepped forward to a point just behind the black machine and made a few adjustments.

"We'll try one hundred and fifty volts, at a half second."

The Psychiatrist paused; a minute change passed over his face. Was it excitement? Was it anticipation? Was it a re-enactment of some medieval memory? Did he long for the robes of his former office?

“What counts alone with shock therapists is the "adjustment" their fearful apparatus and its brain-searing explosion produces. In effect there is little difference between the white-coated psychiatric shock specialist and his primitive forebear, the mud-daubed witch doctor, who also treated diseases of the mind by scaring out, routing out, and exorcising by dire agony and inhuman ordeal the demons or devils - today disguised by scientific-sounding names - which they believed caused patients to behave in such deplorable, tactless, or irritating ways. In the name of this adjustment, and in order to bring about the desired quiet and submissiveness, the patient is put through a crucifixion of such torment as one would wish to spare the lowliest animal.” —Robert Linder Ph.D. The Revolutionist's Handbook

He looked at the tableau for a moment, and pressed the button marked 'activate'.

How much imagination would it take to see an arm in clerical black thrust the torch into a pile of wood beneath a heretic's feet?

The older machine didn't have controls to set the duration automatically so the high priest had to 'estimate' a half second. It was in fact much closer to two seconds.

Despite the straps, despite the strength of the attendant, the woman's body arched upward with incredible violence to form an inverse bow. For a few seconds her body remained in this position, with only her shoulders, feet and clenched hands touching the table. She was in the classic position of tonic stiffening, common during the beginning of a grand mal epileptic seizure.

A muffled snap came from the area of her back.

"Shit," the attendant muttered. He knew. He'd heard it before: Compression fracture of the spine in the middorsal region, somewhere between the forth and eight dorsal vertebrae.

“Such fractures are most frequently asymptomatic and of little clinical significance. Rarely, but more serious, fractures of the humerous or femur occur. Actually, electroshock therapy is a fairly safe procedure...” —Psychiatric Nursing Multheny and Topalis 4th Ed. ]

Her body shook and jerked in a violent series of clonic spasms, a terrible parody of St. Vitus Dance. Mercifully, the woman sank into unconsciousness after the application of the current.

But, in that moment before unconsciousness, a white-hot spear of pain plunged through her temples: Terrible, bright explosion, darkness, and then silence.

She exhibited the outward manifestations of a typical, generalized grand mal epileptic seizure. But she didn’t have epilepsy! It directly followed the tonic/clonic convulsions associated with epilepsy and other forms of brain damage.

Immediately after the application of current to her temples, blanching became noticeable, followed by frothing at the mouth. During and after the 'treatment' the body snorted and made other revolting sounds associated with a respiratory system out of control. These outward manifestations of sadistic torture echoed the destruction in the brain and were no less brutal and loathsome.

“Because of the lower impedance of the blood it is probably the vascular tree (the blood circulatory system), which bears the brunt of the current as it passes through the head. Grossly blanching is apparent with the initial spasm, and is followed by varying degrees of vasoparalysis, stasis, subarachnoid and intracerebral hemorrhage (Sludging of blood into and over the brain). In fact, ten percent of all ECT deaths are directly due to intracerebral damage... "All parts of the brain were vulnerable - the cerebral hemispheres, the cerebellum, third ventricle and hypothalmus. " Shock Treatment Is Not Good For Your Brain —John Frieberg MD]

The doctor turned to his assistants. He sent one back to ward duties then instructed the nurse and the other attendant to see to the patient and left.

Sentence had been passed; the patient-prisoner found guilty, punishment was measured and delivered. When you are named mad, and the name of your madness is inscribed in that modern Book of The Dead - DM III-R, The Psychiatrist's Handbook of Mental Illness - obviously you deserve your punishment.

The tyrant and the executioner name the malady, accuse, incarcerate and punish others for their own criminal madness.

To be named schizophrenic/witch must surely be a crime. Why else would such inhumane punishment be meted out, disguised in the wretched raiment of therapy? Carve on their tombstones, 'We did it for their own good': never, R.I.P. For those who make the terrible, the unforgivable choice of being different, there is no peace before the inquisitor, or the psychiatrist.

The nurse quickly disconnected the woman's body from the instrument of her "salvation", still twitching uncontrollably, and with the help of the attendant, placed her on the gurney. They wheeled her quickly into the recovery room and left the area: the attendant to the back wards and the nurse to her small office off the long hall.

Two hours later, unattended, the woman died, without protest, without a fight, alone...battered in body and spirit, without ever having been asked, "What's wrong?"

In the psychiatric clinic, souls do not exist, nor spirit, nor Atman, not even the elegant 'élan vital'. Such delusory ideas are hateful to the meat-body, machine-mind of psychiatric medicine. The beautiful word 'psyche' meaning spirit, unfortunate root to the word, psychiatrist, has never been recognized by that evil trade.