Attn: Journalists, Medical Writers, Book Reviewers, Health Professionals,

Human Rights Activists

For Immediate Release

July 4, 2006
Contact: Leonard Roy Frank
2300 Webster St., #603
San Francisco, CA 94115
415-922-3029 lfrank@igc.org

THE ELECTROSHOCK QUOTATIONARY: NEW, FREE, WEB-ACCESSIBLE BOOK EXPOSES TRAGIC REALITY OF ELECTROSHOCK.

To download the book free….

Go to: http://www.endofshock.com/102C_ECT.PDF

Electroshock? They still do that? You bet they do, to more than 100,000 Americans every year! Since 1938, psychiatrists have subjected millions of people throughout the world to electroshock (shock therapy, electroconvulsive treatment, ECT), but the public knows little about this harmful practice.

The Electroshock Quotationary by shock survivor and editor Leonard Roy Frank is an illustrated, 154-page collection of chronologically arranged quotations, excerpts, and essays about the history and nature of electroshock: who gets it and why, how it’s administered, what the experience is like, what its effects are, and how the struggle surrounding its use is being played out within and beyond the psychiatric profession. More than 400 entries dating from 47 A.D. to the present are included in this highly readable and carefully researched expose of one of medicine’s most controversial procedures.

“ECT is one of God’s gifts to mankind. There is nothing like it, nothing equal to it in efficacy or safety in all of psychiatry.” Max Fink, electroshock psychiatrist, 1996

“The magnitude of the [electroshock] atrocity is too great to communicate. That’s why it’s the perfect crime.” Rich Winkel, electroshock survivor, 2005

Electroshock is a psychiatric procedure that induces a grand mal seizure, or convulsion, by passing electricity through the brain. Two-thirds of those who undergo ECT are women, half are elderly, and payment is usually covered by insurance. Electroshock is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry. Opponents charge that electroshock causes permanent brain damage, memory loss, learning disability, and a significant number of deaths; is often used as an instrument of social control; and is sometimes administered by means of coercion or outright force and seldom with genuine informed consent.

Frank edited the best-selling Random House Webster’s Quotationary in 1998 and The History of Shock Treatment in 1978. Active in the psychiatric survivors movement since 1972, he is a member of MindFreedom International, a coalition of more than 100 grassroots groups working for human rights in psychiatry, and also The Coalition for the Abolition of Electroshock in Texas, from whose website The Electroshock Quotationary may be downloaded free of charge at http://www.endofshock.com/102C_ECT.PDF