Feel Bad ? simply place your forehead on a live high-voltage electricity wire somewhere. One could practically guarantee that any of your ill feelings would instantly go away. (Caution : there may be side effects).Dr. Zigmond M. Lebensohn, an ECT pioneer and former chief of psychiatry at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, ... books.google.com/books?isbn=1583332650...
"The psychiatrist who still administered ECT was often viewed with the same gaze that gynecologists used to reserve for their colleagues who performed abortions in the days before legalization. In some centers, a double standard seemed to exist. I have known analysts who condemn ECT in public but who have privately recommended it for individual patients and even for the members of their own family."
(Z. Lebensohn, in Shock: The Healing [yah] Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy By Kitty Dukakis, Larry Tye, 2006)Comment the abortion thing can immediately get some people going. It seems that this has been a very apt choice of metaphor by "Dr." Lebensohn.
The Abortion People : whether pro or anti. Please Note that your issue can serve for some other parties' "red herring". Mark well : I am not saying that your issue is a red herring : I am saying that any controversy can be use to some madmen with some kind of unholy agenda.
What does abortion have to do with electroshock ? Either has been claimed to amount to a sort of murder. I do not know enough about abortion, but the modus operandi by those criminals, anyway, is to spread confusion and upset.
That may be why "Dr." Lebensohn had made just such a connection, justified by nothing except perhaps what I have indicated above.
Then : Why should any analysts condemn ETC in public — who would privately recommend it, "Dr." Lebensohn ?
Why should anyone publicly condemn ETC and privately recommend it ?
Why was it the analists who would have done so ?
Was it really so, "Dr." Lebensohn ?
."In the face of growing world concern about the publicized cases in the USSR, several psychiatric organizations, the WFMH among them, issued statements denouncing the practice of misusing psychiatric diagnosis to suppress dissent.But their belated protests sounded a little hollow when measured against the lavish praise they had earlier accorded Russian institutional psychiatry in their professional journals, lectures and reports.
It was precisely this argument, in fact, that was used by Dr. Andrei Snezhnevsky, chief psychiatrist of the Soviet Ministry of Health, in keeping the topic off the agenda of the World Psychiatric Association conference, held in Mexico City in the autumn of 1971.
Dr. Snezhnevsky pointed out that in 1967 a group of American mental health officials who had toured Russian mental hospitals, found nothing to condemn in the Russian system. According to an article by Dr. Zigmond M. Lebensohn, in the American Journal of Psychiatry (November 5, 1968) the "mission team" to which Dr. Snezhevsky referred was composed of "seven seasoned experts ... a prominent jurist, a public health administrator, a wellknown mental-health lobbyist and four highly experienced psychiatrists". "Prior to Stalin's death in 1953," wrote Dr. Lebensohn, "American psychiatrists had little first-hand knowledge of what was going on in Soviet medicine - even less in Soviet psychiatry. Since 1956, however, psychiatric pilgrims travelling singly or in groups have been wending their way in a steady stream to the main fonts of Soviet psychiatry."
Dr. Lebensohn's choice of the word pilgrim - commonly understood to mean a religious devotee who journeys to a shrine reveals much.
(
The Crafty Art of Psychopolitics / 109
http://www.freezone.org/timetrack/data/Hidden_Story/chapter5.htm)
Electroconvulsive therapy : report of the Task Force on Electroconvulsive Therapy of the American Psychiatric Association / Fred H. Frankel, chairperson ... [et al.]. Publisher Washington : The Association, 1978. Paging xi, 200 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. Series Task force report (American Psychiatric Association) ; 14 Notes Includes bibliographical references. Subject Headings Electroconvulsive therapy.— that text does not list Zigmond Lebensohn among its "Task Force on Electroconvuslive Therapy of the American Psychiatric Association", Fred H. Frankel, Chairperson, etc. etc. (page [i]).
The text has no index, each chapter has "References" : I have examined two of these, no mentions of Zigmond Lebensohn are found in them ; Whether this be significant I could not tell at the moment. Perhaps Z. Lebensohn had been done with his contributions by 1978 ; but, why should his "work" be dug out in the publication in 2006 on the alleged 'healing power' of this 'therapy' ?