Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know about Shock Treatment PDF

Rating: (18 reviews) Author: Prof. Linda Andre ISBN : 9780813544410 New from $18.54 Format: PDF

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Review

"Linda Andre's book is both a powerful memoir of her own experience as an ECT "patient" and a documented account of the underbelly of the 'shock industry.' It raises profound questions about ECT that both psychiatry and the National Institute of Mental Health--if they want to be honest with the American public--desperately need to address." ----Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill

"For many years, activist and writer Linda Andre has been forcefully and cogently examining the reigning (and mostly unchallenged) professed claims and practices of our medical establishment's wizards of shock therapy. In this thoroughly-researched, pathbreaking, and essential book, the author undraws the curtains that have for too long cloaked these claims, practices, and wizards. It is a work of courage, heart, and brains." --Jonathan Cott, Author of On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering

"This book is brilliant analysis. It is successful on many levels, including its most important task: presenting an overview of the history, safety and efficacy of electro-convulsive therapy. The book is also a masterpiece of scientific writing. Through her extensive personal and professional research, Andre explained things I had already known about ECT, but with additional clinical facts and exceptional insight. She detailed the people and places that have formed the basis for the historical foundations of ECT at the same time that she described the politics and organizations that have continued to promote ECT as a safe and effective modality." --Stefan Kruszewski MD, International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine

"This superb study documents a development that is an ongoing controversy in the field of psychiatry: electro convulsive therapy (ECT) and the appropriateness of using it to treat a host of conditions. Weaving her own, often poignant, experiences with ECT into the narrative, Andre contends that ECT proponents/practitioners undercut informed consent through systemic deceit, including failure to reveal negative consequences. The audience for this excellent resource should include those who make mental health policy. Highly recommended." --Choice

About the Author

Linda Andre is a writer, activist, and the director of the Committee for Truth in Psychiatry. Since receiving ECT in the early 1980s, she has been an advocate for the human and civil rights of psychiatrically labelled people, particularly the right to truthful informed consent. She has been interviewed by numerous publications and media such as 20/20, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press; 1 edition (February 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813544416
• ISBN-13: 978-0813544410
• Product Dimensions: 1.1 x 6.6 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know about Shock Treatment PDF

Earlier this year, Marcia Angell, writing in The New York Review of Books, lamented, "It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine." Angell's review laid out the many ways in which the medical field, particularly psychiatry, has allowed itself to be thoroughly corrupted by its extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

In her compelling new book, Doctors of Deception, Linda Andre demonstrates that this corruption extends to the big business of shock treatment (also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)). For decades a small group of psychiatrists, many with financial interests in shock machine manufacturers, has controlled the principal source of funds for ECT research, the National Institute of Mental Health, thereby insuring that studies which could demonstrate the extent of shock's devastating memory, attention and learning effects were never undertaken.

Those same gatekeepers wrote the American Psychiatric Association (APA) task force reports on electroconvulsive therapy so that negative findings regarding shock would never reach a broader audience. The reports were created to serve as public relations documents and psychiatrists have cited them regularly before federal and state governmental bodies as proof that shock is safe and effective in the absence of any real proof that it is.

Andre shows us how psychiatrists have for decades buried evidence, falsified reports, and employed a "new and improved" public relations mantra to sell a brain damaging procedure.

by Ron Thompson
Linda Andre has spent over 20 years trying to alert the public to the inevitable harm done by the psychiatric treatment known as 'electroconvulsive treatment', or more simply, as ... shock.
Now she's written DOCTORS OF DECEPTION: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (2009), published by Rutgers University Press.
Unlike other books written by former patients of psychiatry who feel their treatment was much worse than any problems they had prior to their encounter with psychiatry, Linda's book is relatively short on her personal story and long on scholarship about the history of shock since it's appearance in 1938. This makes her book at once excellent investigative reporting and serious history, as well as a compelling personal story.
One of many things that suggest the importance of this book is the startling statement that the dangers of shock treatment were far better recognized in the 1940's than they are now.
Andre discusses the main reason such a 'shocking' fact is true.
In two early chapters, she makes a strong case that eugenical thinking, the pseudo-scientific idea that certain races, or certain categories of people, are biologically inferior to others - an idea which had a dismayingly wide vogue for the first four decades on the 20th century - has never really gone away regarding mental patients.
If this inferiority is assumed to be true, then any damage caused by treatment must be of less harm than if committed against 'normal' human beings.