Sarah Price Hancock, psychiatric survivor and activist, recently authored a letter to the FDA making several key demands as it regards electroshock, the ‘treatment’ featured in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ HERE, now euphemistically known as electro-convulsive treatment (ECT). You can read the entire letter HERE. She asks for your help circulating this letter.
ECT: SURVIVORS PUSH BACK AGAIN
Sarah is a Psychiatric Recovery and Rehabilitation Consultant & Author “Daring to Dream: Essential tools to find employment.” She is an activist working for greater safety/restrictions involving a harmful psychiatric practice euphemistically known as ‘Electro-convulsive shock’ or ‘ECT.’ She is asking for your help circulating this letter and informing the public and the media about the harms of ECT. As a psychiatric survivor herself who works as a rehabilitation consultant, she demands that people who were injured ECT be given access to rehabilitation services, the same as other brain injury survivors. She submitted a letter to the FDA on December 28, 2020.
Sarah states on her website:
“The submitted open letter is co-signed by 14 professional and paraprofessional organizations, 168 Americans, and 49 international citizens from countries whose medical device regulations rely in part on FDA decision. Signatories included up to eight words describing their Real-World Data and Real-World Evidence regarding ECT’s post-market safety and adverse events. It was submitted as part of a larger international patient safety and informed consent movement to Standardize, Regulate & ECT, providing brain injury rehabilitation to ECT recipients. The public will not take notice of this problem until they see the number of people effected—which is why I’m focusing efforts on “auditing” or conducting formal inquiries—not even the most enthusiastic ECT providers can oppose these efforts without raising questions”
“It is important that we get as much momentum with this open letter as possible” she states.
For that reason, Sarah encourages other activists to send the attached media release to your favorite media outlets, reporters, bloggers, podcasters, etc. Feel free to share this Facebook post or this Tweet. She asks If you are on social media at all, please use the #AuditECT hashtag to discuss the open letter and raise awareness of ECT patient safety and informed consent issues.
MindFreedom International has vigorously opposed the use of ECT for many years. MFI activists organizing to end shock sometimes called their their efforts ‘Zap Back’. You can read about some of the many MFI-sponsored protests involving Shock HERE or view one of MFI’s petition campaigns HERE. The results have been discouraging as ECT arguably continues to be as popular today as it was twenty years ago.
There have been some small victories along the way such as the January 2011 legislative hearing in which a small ‘who’s who’ of psychiatric survivor/activists/allies testified before Congress, resulting in Congress advising the FDA to require more testing. You can read about this campaign HERE.
Furthermore, MFI members chose to ‘Zap Back’ by offering ‘Shield’ protection to individuals, drawing international attention to the atrocious practice of subjecting individuals to harmful shock without their expressed consent. MFI Shield members vigorously and SUCCESSFULLY shielded individuals on many occasions, such as Elizabeth Ellis HERE and Ray Sanford HERE from involuntary shock.
More recently, MFI issued an alert for 18-year old Charles Helmer HERE
If you would like more information about Sarah’s efforts, you can listen to her podcast (below) or view here website
Emotional Self-Reliance Podcast
