Ted Chabasinski

Last updated
Ted Chabasinski
Juris Doctor
Born
Theodore Chabasinski

(1937-03-20) March 20, 1937 (age 87)
New York City, U.S.A.
NationalityAmerican
OccupationFormer Directing Attorney for Mental Health Consumer Concerns
Years active1971-present
Known forPsychiatric survivor activist
Leading successful campaign to ban the use of ECT in Berkeley, California (1982)
Board member ofFormer President, Support Coalition International
Spouse Judi Chamberlin (1972-1985) [1]

Ted Chabasinski (born March 20, 1937) is an American psychiatric survivor, human rights activist and attorney who lives in Berkeley, California. At the age of six, he was taken from his foster family's home and committed to a New York psychiatric facility. Diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia, he underwent intensive electroshock therapy (now termed electroconvulsive therapy or ECT) and remained an inmate in a state psychiatric hospital until the age of seventeen. He subsequently trained as a lawyer and became active in the psychiatric survivors movement. In 1982, he was a leader in an initially successful campaign seeking to ban the use of electroshock in Berkeley, California. [2] [3]

Contents

Early life

Chabasinski was born in New York to a Polish-born immigrant woman. His father was of Russian descent. In the period just before and after Chabasinski's birth, his birth-mother, who was poor, unmarried and had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, was committed to a psychiatric facility. [4] He was subsequently placed in the care of a foster family in the Bronx, New York. [5] While an intelligent child, his social worker from the Foundling Hospital, a Miss Callaghan, [4] thought him withdrawn and suspected that he was exhibiting the initial signs of an incipient schizophrenia. [5] Chabasinski himself attributes this diagnosis to the then widespread opinion that mental illness was hereditary [5] and thus, he contends, the social worker supervising his foster home placement was "looking for symptoms". [6]

In 1944, at six years of age, Chabasinski, then a shy and withdrawn child, was taken from his foster family and committed to the children's ward of the psychiatric division of the Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, New York. [6] While in this ward, known as Unit PQ6, [7] he was brought under the care of the celebrated child psychiatrist Lauretta Bender, now deceased, who is the clinician commonly credited with founding the study of childhood schizophrenia in the United States. [8] She formally diagnosed Chabasinski as suffering from schizophrenia. He was one of the first children ever to receive ECT, which was then given in its unmodified form without either anaesthetic or muscle relaxant. Despite the strenuous protests of his foster parents against the treatment, [9] he underwent ECT under a regressive and experimental protocol where the treatment was given at a more intensive frequency than was the norm for shock therapy. [10] Chabasinski received ECT daily for a period of about three weeks, comprising approximately twenty sessions of the procedure. [5] [8] [11] [12]

Recalling the experience, Chabasinski stated:

I was one of 300 children involved in an experimental program ... I remember being dragged down a hallway, thrown on a table and having a handkerchief stuffed in my mouth. [13]

It made me want to die ... I remember that they would stick a rag in my mouth so I wouldn't bite through my tongue and that it took three attendants to hold me down. I knew that in the mornings that I didn't get any breakfast that I was going to get shock treatment. [5]

I wanted to die but I didn't really know what death was. I knew that it was something terrible. Maybe I'll be so tired after the next shock treatment I won't get up, I won't ever get up, and I'll be dead. But I always got up. Something in me beyond my wishes made me put myself together again. I memorized my name, I taught myself to say my name. Teddy, Teddy, I'm Teddy ... I'm here, I'm here, in this room, in this hospital. And my mommy's gone ... I would cry and realize how dizzy I was. The world was spinning around me and coming back to it hurt too much. I want to go down, I want to go where the shock treatment is sending me. I want to stop fighting and die...and something made me live, and go on living. I had to remember never to let anyone near me again. [10]

In 1947, Bender published on 98 children aged between four and eleven years old who had been treated in the previous five years with intensive courses of ECT. These children received ECT daily for a typical course of approximately twenty treatments. [14] This formed part of an experimental trend amongst a cadre of psychiatrists to explore the therapeutic impact of intensive regimes of ECT, which is also known as either regressive ECT or annihilation therapy. [8] In the 1950s Bender abandoned ECT as a therapeutic practice for the treatment of children. In the same decade the results of her published work on the use of ECT in children was discredited after a study showing that the condition of the children so treated had either not improved or deteriorated. [5]

Commenting on his experience as part of Bender's therapeutic program Chabasinski said that, "It really made a mess of me ... I went from being a shy kid who read a lot to a terrified kid who cried all the time." [15] Following his treatment, he spent ten years as an inmate of Rockland State Hospital, a psychiatric facility now known as the Rockland Psychiatric Center. [11]

Chabasinski was discharged from the Rockland State Hospital at the age of seventeen. He eventually went to college where he qualified as a lawyer. [9]

Activism

Chabasinski has been active in the psychiatric survivors movement since 1971. [4]

The Berkeley ban

Chabasinski was Chairman of the Coalition to Stop Electroshock which in 1982 qualified an initiative measure, titled Initiative T., [15] for municipal ballot to make the application of electroconvulsive therapy a misdemeanour in Berkeley, California, punishable with a $500 fine or up to six months imprisonment. [11] [16] Chabasinski was the author of the ballot question [12] [16] and, along with fellow psychiatric survivor Leonard Roy Frank, he was a leader in the campaign. [17] The campaign group, supported by human rights organisations such as the Berkeley-based ex-patient group Network Against Psychiatric Assault, [12] [13] consisted of some 250 people approximately half of whom were former psychiatric patients with the majority of the remainder consisting of students from Berkeley and individual doctors who were opposed to ECT. [11] The coalition's entire campaign fund was in the region of $1,000. [11] The American Psychiatric Association provided funds of $15,000 to campaign against the initiative. [11] 2,500 people petitioned in support of the initiative exceeding the 1,400 signatures required to put the motion on the ballot. [16]

At the time Chabasinski argued that the enforcement of the law governing consent to ECT in psychiatric facilities in the state of California was so lax that a total ban on the procedure was required. [18] He and his fellow campaigners also claimed that ECT was a dangerous and barbaric treatment that could cause either long or short term memory loss, brain damage and that the procedure could even result in death. They also charged that when resident in a psychiatric institution the very concept of informed consent is meaningless. [19]

During the campaign dozens of ex-psychiatric patients gave testimony against electroshock at a Berkeley City Council hearing. [12] Protests were also held outside the Herrick Hospital, then the only facility in Berkeley where ECT was provided. [15] In 1981 that facility administered ECT to 45 individuals. [13] In order to collect and exceed the requisite number of signatures required to place Initiative T. on the ballot paper, members of the coalition campaigned outside supermarkets and went from door to door soliciting support. [15]

The ballot was held on Tuesday 2 November 1982 [12] and the measure passed with 25,380 voters, or 61.7 percent, supporting the ballot calling for a ban on ECT while 15,756 residents, or 38.2 percent, voted against the measure. [16] Giving his perspective on why the measure had passed so resoundingly, Chabasinski stated that: "I think it's a very sympathetic issue ... Basically, they're going ahead and causing brain damage just to subdue people." [12] Speculating on the possibility of extending the ban across the state of California [20] and alluding to the wider aims behind the campaign he also said: "To be honest, this is one way of having a referendum on mental patients' rights and the way they are treated". [12]

In response to the passage of the initiative the American Psychiatric Association asserted that plebiscite was not an appropriate means to arrive at a medical judgement on a complex issue. A spokesman for the association stated: "The voters have passed a law we believe is unnecessary, probably unconstitutional and ... dangerous ... We hope it will be overturned before doing harm by denying a seriously ill person access in Berkeley to treatment that could be lifesaving," [20] One of the two doctors who administered ECT at Herrick Hospital, Dr. Martin Rubinstein, contended that the vote to ban the procedure reflected "pathological consumerism" and constituted "another case of the inmates trying to run the asylum". He further epitomised the ballot result as stemming from "an uninformed electorate [deliberating] on esoteric matters." [20]

In June 1983 Donald McCullom, an Alameda County Superior Court Judge, issued an injunction on the implementation of the ban on ECT. [21] Initiative T. was overturned shortly thereafter following a successful legal challenge initiated by the American Psychiatric Association, on the constitutionality of the measure. [5]

Other roles

Chabasinski is the former directing attorney for Mental Health Consumer Concerns, (MHCC), and a former president of the board of Support Coalition International (SCI). He was also a board member of the successor organisation to the SCI, MindFreedom International and for which he acted as an attorney. [22]

Eli Lilly and Zyprexa

In January 2007 Chabasinski acted as the attorney for the late psychiatric survivor activist and author Judi Chamberlin, the medical journalist and author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic , Robert Whitaker, and the director of MindFreedom International David Oaks in opposing a motion by Eli Lilly to extend an injunction to conceal documents that revealed that the company had known for the previous decade of the potentially lethal effects of Zyprexa and had engaged in an illegal off-label marketing campaign. [23]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electroconvulsive therapy</span> Medical procedure in which electrical current is passed through the brain

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) or electroshock therapy (EST) is a psychiatric treatment during which a generalized seizure is electrically induced to manage refractory mental disorders. Typically, 70 to 120 volts are applied externally to the patient's head, resulting in approximately 800 milliamperes of direct current passing between the electrodes, for a duration of 100 milliseconds to 6 seconds, either from temple to temple or from front to back of one side of the head. However, only about 1% of the electrical current crosses the bony skull into the brain because skull impedance is about 100 times higher than skin impedance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ugo Cerletti</span> Italian neurologist

Ugo Cerletti was an Italian neurologist who discovered the method of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) used in psychiatry. Electroconvulsive therapy is a therapy in which electric current is used to provoke a seizure for a short duration. This therapy is used in an attempt to treat certain mental disorders, and may be useful when other possible treatments have not, or cannot, cure the person of their mental disorder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ladislas J. Meduna</span> Psychiatrist and neuropathologist (1896-1964)

Ladislas Joseph Meduna was a Hungarian neuropathologist and neuropsychiatrist who initiated convulsive treatment, the repeated induction of grand mal seizures, as a treatment of psychosis. Observing the high concentration of glia in post-mortem brains of patients with epilepsy and a paucity in those with schizophrenia, he proposed that schizophrenia might be treated by inducing "epileptic" seizures. Thus, chemically induced seizures became the electroconvulsive therapy that is now in worldwide use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Breggin</span> American psychiatrist

Peter Roger Breggin is an American psychiatrist and critic of shock treatment and psychiatric medication and COVID-19 response. In his books, he advocates replacing psychiatry's use of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy with psychotherapy, education, empathy, love, and broader human services.

MindFreedom International is an international coalition of over one hundred grassroots groups and thousands of individual members from fourteen nations. Based in the United States, it was founded in 1990 to advocate against forced medication, medical restraints, and involuntary electroconvulsive therapy. Its stated mission is to protect the rights of people who have been labeled with psychiatric disorders. Membership is open to anyone who supports human rights, including mental health professionals, advocates, activists, and family members. MindFreedom has been recognized by the United Nations Economic and Social Council as a human rights NGO with Consultative Roster Status.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Sargant</span> British psychiatrist

William Walters Sargant was a British psychiatrist who is remembered for the evangelical zeal with which he promoted treatments such as psychosurgery, deep sleep treatment, electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock therapy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Insulin shock therapy</span> Psychiatric treatment

Insulin shock therapy or insulin coma therapy was a form of psychiatric treatment in which patients were repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin in order to produce daily comas over several weeks. It was introduced in 1927 by Austrian-American psychiatrist Manfred Sakel and used extensively in the 1940s and 1950s, mainly for schizophrenia, before falling out of favour and being replaced by neuroleptic drugs in the 1960s.

Deep sleep therapy (DST), also called prolonged sleep treatment or continuous narcosis, is a discredited form of ostensibly psychiatric treatment in which drugs are used to keep patients unconscious for a period of days or weeks. The controversial practice led to the death of 25 patients in Chelmsford Private Hospital in New South Wales, Australia, from the early 1960s to late 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lauretta Bender</span> American neuropsychiatrist

Lauretta Bender was an American child neuropsychiatrist known for developing the Bender-Gestalt Test, a psychological test designed to evaluate visual-motor maturation in children. First published by Bender in 1938, the test became widely used for assessing children's neurological function and screening for developmental disorders.

Child and adolescent psychiatry is a branch of psychiatry that focuses on the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders in children, adolescents, and their families. It investigates the biopsychosocial factors that influence the development and course of psychiatric disorders and treatment responses to various interventions. Child and adolescent psychiatrists primarily use psychotherapy and/or medication to treat mental disorders in the pediatric population.

Electroconvulsive therapy is a controversial psychiatric treatment in which seizures are induced with electricity. ECT was first used in the United Kingdom in 1939 and, although its use has been declining for several decades, it was still given to about 11,000 people a year in the early 2000s.

Maximilian Fink is an American neurologist and psychiatrist best known for his work on ECT. His early work also included studies on the effect of psychoactive drugs on brain electrical activity; his later work has included books about the syndromes of catatonia and melancholia, published in the 2010s.

Linda Andre was an American psychiatric survivor activist and writer, living in New York City, who was the director of the Committee for Truth in Psychiatry (CTIP), an organization founded by Marilyn Rice in 1984 to encourage the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) machines.

Leonard Roy Frank was an American human rights activist, psychiatric survivor, editor, writer, aphorist, and lecturer.

Yang Yongxin is a Chinese psychiatrist who advocated and practiced a highly controversial form of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) without anesthesia or muscle relaxants as a cure for video game and Internet addiction in adolescents. Yang is currently deputy chief of the Fourth Hospital of Linyi, in the Shandong province of China. He runs the Internet Addiction Treatment Center at the hospital.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David J. Impastato</span>

David John Impastato was an American neuropsychiatrist who pioneered the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in the United States. A treatment for mental illness initially called "electroshock," ECT was developed in 1937 by Dr. Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini, working in Rome. Impastato has been credited with the earliest documented use of the revolutionary method in North America, administered in early 1940 to a schizophrenic female patient in New York City. Soon after, he and colleague Dr. Renato Almansi completed the first case study of ECT to appear in a U.S. publication. Impastato spent the next four decades refining the technique, gaining recognition as one of its most authoritative spokesmen. He taught, lectured widely and published over fifty articles on his work. He called on ECT practitioners to observe the strictest protocols of patient safety, countered resistance to ECT from both the medical and cultural establishments, and met later challenges to electroconvulsive therapy from developments in psychopharmacology. Impastato would live to see ECT recommended by the American Psychiatric Association for a distinct core of intractable mental disorders. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration took longer to respond to the treatment's potential. But in 2016 the FDA drafted guidelines for ECT similar to those of the APA, as well as proposing regulations for treatment with Class II and Class III devices. Though still not free of controversy, electroconvulsive therapy is the treatment of choice for an estimated 100,000 patients a year in the United States.

Psychiatry is, and has historically been, viewed as controversial by those under its care, as well as sociologists and psychiatrists themselves. There are a variety of reasons cited for this controversy, including the subjectivity of diagnosis, the use of diagnosis and treatment for social and political control including detaining citizens and treating them without consent, the side effects of treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy, antipsychotics and historical procedures like the lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery or insulin shock therapy, and the history of racism within the profession in the United States.

Shock therapy describes a set of techniques used in psychiatry to treat depressive disorder or other illnesses. It covers multiple forms, such as inducing seizures or other extreme brain states, or acting as a painful method of aversive conditioning.

The Montreal experiments were a series of experiments, initially aimed to treat schizophrenia by changing memories and erasing the patients' thoughts using the Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron's method of "psychic driving", as well as drug-induced sleep, intensive electroconvulsive therapy, sensory deprivation and Thorazine. The experiments were conducted at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University between 1957 and 1964 by Cameron and funded by the CIA as part of Project MKUltra, which lasted until 1973 and was only revealed to the public in 1975.

References

  1. ↑ Chabasinski and Chamberlin separated in 1974, two years after their marriage, and remained close friends. They divorced in 1985 when Chabasinski wanted to remarry.
  2. ↑ Ellen Goodman. The Free Lance-Star - Nov 20, 1982
  3. ↑ City's electroshock vote affecting treatment. The New York Times. 5 November 1982
  4. 1 2 3 Anon. "Personal stories (interview)". MindFreedom International. Retrieved 25 March 2011.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Boodman, Sandra G. (24 September 1996). "Shock therapy: it's back". Washington Post.
  6. 1 2 Isaac, Rael Jean and Armat, Virginia C. (1992). Madness in the streets : how psychiatry and the law abandoned the mentally ill (1st Free Press pbk. ed.). New York: Free Press. p. 167. ISBN   0-02-915381-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. ↑ Chess, Stella (1995). "Lauretta Bender, M.D., 1899-1987". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 192 (3): 436. doi:10.1176/ajp.152.3.436.
  8. 1 2 3 Shorter, Edward, and Healy, David (2007). Shock therapy : a history of electroconvulsive treatment in mental illness (1. publ. ed.). New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. p. 137. ISBN   978-0-8135-4169-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  9. 1 2 Stone, Gene (14 November 1994). "Short, Sharp, Shock". New York Magazine: 56. Retrieved 24 March 2011.
  10. 1 2 Young, Mary de (2010). Madness : an American history of mental illness and its treatment. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. p. 218. ISBN   978-0-7864-3398-8.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Hill, Gladwin (31 October 1982). "Now therapy by the ballot". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 March 2011.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Rice, John (24 August 1982). "Berkeley to vote on banning electroshock therapy". Associated Press.
  13. 1 2 3 Clark, Matt (25 October 1982). "Voting on electroshock". Newsweek.
  14. ↑ Rey, Joseph M., and Walter, Gary (May 1997). "Half a century of ECT use in young people". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 154 (5): 596. doi: 10.1176/ajp.154.5.595 . PMID   9137112.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  15. 1 2 3 4 Sullivan, Valerie (30 October 1982). "General news: Berkeley, California". United Press International.
  16. 1 2 3 4 Altman, Laurence K. (5 November 1982). "City's electroshock vote affecting treatment". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 March 2011.
  17. ↑ Supeene, Shelagh Lynne (1990). As For The Sky, Falling : a Critical Look at Psychiatry and Suffering. Toronto, Canada: Second Story Press. p. 234. ISBN   0-929005-09-0.
  18. ↑ Anon. (9 November 1982). "Psychotherapy by ballot". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 March 2011.
  19. ↑ Sherlock, Richard K.; Haykal, Radwan F.; Dresser, Rebecca (Dec 1982). "Case studies: saying 'no' to electroshock". The Hastings Center Report. 12 (6): 19. doi:10.2307/3561358. JSTOR   3561358.
  20. 1 2 3 Anon. (3 November 1982). "Berkeley bans electroshock". The Associated Press.
  21. ↑ Anon. (14 January 1983). "Electroshock ban sponsors react to injunction". The Associated Press.
  22. ↑ Anon. "Interview with Ted Chabasinski". MindFreedom International. Retrieved 23 March 2011.
  23. ↑ Pringle, Evelyn (8 January 2007). "Lilly's legal battle over Zyprexa documents continues". LawyersandSettlements.com. Retrieved 25 March 2011.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.