LETTERS IN VIEW : Pros, Cons of Shock Therapy
As a licensed clinical social worker and co-producer of a documentary in production on the ex-psychiatric patients’ rights movement, I find your article, “A New Image for Shock Therapy” (Sept. 15) disturbing.
Thousands of former psychiatric patients nationwide have been organized now for more than 20 years. They and their organizations are readily available, but no statements from them appear in your article.
Consistently, and with no demands for anonymity, they have vigorously disapproved the use of shock (electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT).
These client groups particularly deplore that ECT practitioners play fast and loose with the information they offer patients about the procedure and with the methods they employ to obtain their consent.
ECT is quick, profitable and frequently covered by health insurance. Its resurgence began after the non-medical professions had cut deeply into psychiatry’s share of the psychotherapeutic market, and psychiatrists sought respectability for procedures over which their medical degrees grant them a monopoly.
MICHAEL H. WEINBERG
Pasadena
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