Zapping Children’s Brains and Other Such Human Rights Abuses…

Nobody knows how and why electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) works, except that sometimes it does alleviate the symptoms of severe depression from which a person might be suffering. That said, the problem in Australia is that psychiatry is allowed to practice without reasonable restraints, since this is a profession for which there is no suitable benchmark nor any overarching regulatory authority. All these white-coated buffoons need do is scream ‘suicide’ or ‘murder’ and legislators will gleefully sign-off on laws that clearly breach fundamental human rights principles.

Reading through the submissions to the current Senate suicide inquiry, I even found references from allegedly well-respected human rights organisations, strongly advocating for the government to lock up nutters for as long as was necessary, and to forcibly treat them with whatever technology was at psychiatry’s disposal. Scary stuff but emblematic of the curious relationship that has long existed between law and psychiatry, with the former choosing ignorance about mental health and thus ceding all practice wisdom to the latter.

Hence, when I woke up this morning to find this story in the Sunday Age (see link, below), about little kiddies being zapped senseless with ECT, I at once felt that pang that comes with knowing that the human rights of vulnerable children are being legally abused, as well as that anger that here again is that fucked-up Australianism of ‘stay dumb, keep quiet, just follow’. ECT should only ever be used where the subject person is an adult capable of giving free and informed consent, and where information about the risks and benefits of the procedure have been provided to that subject person, which would include her or him being advised of alternative treatments and their comparative efficacy. In practice, that rarely happens.

Under no circumstances should ECT ever be used on children, since as a treatment without proven clinical efficacy it remains experimental, and thus we have no way to measure what impact it is having on the developing brain…

Sharp Rise in the Use of Shock Treatment Sparks Old Debate…