Taking a break...

I’m taking a vacation. One week. I feel I need it.

My two recent posts on ECT, DBS, VNS, rTMS for TRD required a great deal of research and generated some very heated reaction in my email box – but not in public comments.

I spent the whole weekend writing personal emails and fielding insults from angry and hurting people who don’t agree with what I wrote, and have had very different experiences from mine.

Disagreement is fine. I want you to disagree with me. That’s what comment boxes are for and what blogging is all about. It’s turns an opinion into a dialogue or as the headline said, “A Charged Debate.”

This was different. The public debate I expected fizzled. It went into my in-box where it dies.

Only one person, Susan, had the courage to comment. She is an award-winning journalist from New jersey, with her own excellent blog and her own horror story about ECT.

Yet she thought my story “was good” and that I “did a good job,” she wrote in her comment.

None of the others would post publicly, and what I really couldn’t understand is how they refused to acknowledge my own personal experience with ECT. In the 1960s and 1970s I had several courses of between six and 12 treatments of bilateral ECT administered at The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry.

Here's the problem I think these people had with me. Those ECT treatments did not damage my brain.

It was all on the record.

I always joke to my husband, that if it had damaged my brain, beforehand, I must have been absolutely brilliant – and I wasn’t. My only side effect was a tiny bit of temporary memory loss. It all returned within a few months.

One person, who will remain nameless, insulted me, attacked my journalism and then in his response to my email to him, admitted that he had never even read my blog.

This man is a leader in the anti-psychiatry movement. I’m speechless.

I asked my good friend Tanya Shute her thoughts on all this.

Tanya is an activist, “survivor” – a label I don’t like but will settle for here because it’s relevant – and executive director of The Krasman Centre for Community Mental Health in Richmond Hill.

Here’s what Tanya said: “ECT is one of those topics that really fires people up. I think that people think the consumer survivor movement is all anti-ECT. The people who I have a lot of respect for in the mental health community have spoken about the positive outcomes for them with ECT, as well as many who have had negative experiences.

“The point for us is that people have informed consent and choice, not whether we agree with the modality. Many people who I have seen have serious criticisms of the mental health system but are positive about their experiences of ECT.

“I think it is one of the most controversial topics in our field – and you became a scapegoat for this guy’s anger about ECT. Don’t forget, just because people are psychiatric survivors doesn’t mean that there aren’t assholes among us. Recovery is about dissent, resilience, rebellion -- keep yours up, and your chin too just in case you get sucker-punched again.”

Thank you, Tanya. I knew I could rely on your support and wisdom.

One more thing… I made a mistake in my July 25 post when I wrote that ECT was invented in Germany in the 1930s. It was invented in Italy in 1938. I spotted it yesterday.

Curiously, in all the criticism I received by email, no one pointed this mistake out to me.

Have a great week and stay well.

Cheers,
Sandy

Comments

[Sonia]

Dear Sandy,

I am sorry to hear that people responded so poorly. While I had nothing to add to the DBS / ECT columns, I did read them and then did some research of my own.

As to those who responded with anger, while not exactly surprised, I must say I am a bit disappointed. Afterall, you found professionals to help you understand the acronyms, you presented facts, then you talked of your own experience and that of Susan. Nothing in what you said gave the slightest inkling that "this" is the only way things happen.

As an educator listening to students who have been less than pleased with events as they happened, I often listen to / for emotions without responding to them, allowing the learner the freedom to feel their development as they live it, and re-directing them after their energy is spent, or if, in the heat of the moment, it "feels right" to cut them off with pertinent details of which they might have been less aware than needed.

As a blogger, I feel you find yourself in this situation regularly. Enjoy your time away, focus on the sunshine, rainbow, scents of flowers, grasses and trees, sounds of birdsong and furry scuttling in the trees.

As for those who flooded your email box: rather than attacking a brave person who puts herself in the line of fire, share your story - hell it may have been at the time, hell it may be since, but alone is not required on this journey of healing. In sharing - even as much energy as anger packs in every word - you develop a support network of compassion for your personal walk through life. I speak from experience (about 20 yrs of it) and I would not wish the loneliness and aloneness on anyone, not even those responsible. Silence of this nature only makes sure that the cycle of wrongness continues (whether we're talking about professionals who made mistakes / wrong diagnoses, or private individuals who chose to not get involved, or adult survivors of childhood abuse taking their first steps in the dark cycle of abuse).

Know that no one deserves to suffer alone; PTSD is not just for soldiers returning from The Front Lines, or for civilians caught in The War Zone, but also for any who have suffered repeatedly over an extended period of time, and whose ability to cope with day to day life is seriously affected.

Hope is affordable; despair requires no effort. It takes courage to start believing that life is worth the energy to be happy, healthy and free (from our personal hell; to enjoy the beauty of our world, to take action when needed, to appreciate gifts as presented).

[susan]

Hi Sandy. Thank you for the kind comments. You made my day!

Unfortunately ECT is a sore point for people. I'm reminded of something Rutgers Professor Paul Fussell noted in his seminal book, "Class". When asked by a peer what he was writing over summer vacation, he replied "A book on social class in America', his peer responded "You would be better off writing about clubbing baby seals".

ECT is a baby seal. We don't agree on the subject but we have the right to do so.

[Mike]

Deep transcranial magnetic stimulation is another new invention. Regular TMS can only reach 1-2 centimeters into the brain, but deep TMS can excite/inhibit practically any brain area.
See these two blog posts for more information:
http://brainstimulant.blogspot.com/2008/02/deep-transcranial-magnetic-stimulation.html
and
http://brainstimulant.blogspot.com/2008/04/uses-of-deep-tms.html

[Betty]

Sadly, you've probably noticed that any time you write about mental health issues, people with mental health issues come out to comment. These comments are not always helpful, or nice, or even sensible. Unfortunately by writing on this topic, you expose yourself to people who are very likely going through their own drama/trauma.

But presumably you know this, and shouldn't be surprised that a bunch of cowards would choose to attack you privately when they don't agree with you. It would be great if people could detach enough while reading a story, to just appreciate the author's point of view and not immediately apply it to their own experience - but that isn't likely to happen any time soon.

Keep writing, and don't let the turkeys get you down.