SHOCK!
A Novel
by
Donald P. Ladew
Shock!
by
Donald Ladew
Copyright 2011 Donald Ladew,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0329-8
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
| This book is dedicated to the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who have been massively drugged, frozen, electrocuted, tortured and abused by the pseudo physicians and pill dispensers of the Psychiatric profession. Tragically, these most abysmal crimes and abuses continue in every so-called civilized country on this benighted planet. Too many countries use their mental facilities as prisons or re-education camps. These uses are regrettably a natural extension of the profession’s intent – control by force. To those who have taken the thankless task of bringing these so-called therapists under control, or to justice, I send my sincerest support and affection. |
Chapter 1
Primum non nocere
Above all do no harm.
—The Hippocratic Oath (The physician’s oath)
At 2:00 AM the Cabrillo Springs Psychiatric Hospital & Clinic, unlike its state or metropolitan counterparts, was quiet. Inside, from a small treatment room near the center of the complex, an occasional murmur of sound could be heard above the hum of machinery and air conditioning.
On a good day, or night, as many as one “treatment” might be given every ten minutes. In the language of the Harvard Business School, the treatment room was a profit center.
| Finding that the patient has insurance seemed the most common indication for giving electro-shock.” —David S. Viscott, The Making of a Psychiatrist |
It wasn't surprising that the patients in the back wards of the clinic were quiet. Under the watchful eye of ward nurses and attendants, the prisoner-patients had been given their evening ration of mind-numbing drugs, some powerful enough to buckle the knees of an elephant. This is how psychiatric health care professionals “subdue and control difficult, uncooperative and unruly patients.” Not surprisingly, all patients are deemed in need of subduing. The issuance of drugs is another profit center.
There were four people in the treatment room: a burly male attendant to subdue and control uncooperative and unruly patients; a psychiatric intern, a psychiatric nurse skilled in the administration of anesthetics and the operation of treatment room equipment; the psychiatrist, who diagnosed the patient's medical-mental illness, and thus prescribed the treatment; and finally, the victim of this medieval ritual, this twentieth-century Auto da Fe.
| An Auto da Fe is literally a “judicial sentence or act of faith,” usually ending with the public burning of heretics. Those who refused to admit wrongdoing, or those who defiantly clung to their "heresies" were burned alive. |
The woman on the gurney near the entrance lay still except for an occasional twitch of fingers and toes. The age given on her chart was fifty-five. She looked older. Her eyes were open.
To look there was to sink into a well of terror, a terror the drug-paralyzed muscles of her throat could not articulate. And if she could have spoken, what might she have said?
"Why do you torture me? What have I done? Why am I being punished? Won't someone please listen?
| “Terror acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and should be employed in the cure of madness.” —Benjamin Rush The Father of American Psychiatry. |
She hadn't been allowed any food for eight hours in order to effect full bowel and bladder elimination. As happens frequently in torture, psychiatric therapy and death, the muscles of the bladder and bowels relax, and uncontrolled elimination occurs adding to the degradation. The victim's misery is thought less important than the offended sensibilities of the practitioners.
| "...The major task in nursing care (after shock therapy) is resocialization through habit training. Incontinence (uncontrolled urination) exceedingly common, gradually comes under control through regular toilet periods." —Psychiatric Nursing Multheny & Topalis 4th Ed. |
The attendant picked her up like a child and transferred her to the treatment table with practiced ease. It resembled an operating table, though less complex; the more obvious differences being the straps placed over the woman's legs, waist and shoulders. The Neanderthal quickly strapped her to the table.
Two large tears hung motionless in the corners of her desperate eyes.
| "It is impossible to keep a shred of human dignity when you are strapped to a table, convulsing and slobbering like an idiot, reduced to a hunk of will-less flesh. My body was no longer mine - they could make it jerk and froth at will. For many years afterward, I tried to remember what it was like to be a person, not a thing, but I couldn't." —Jonika Upton |
The psychiatrist stood to one side, a modern day Torquemada waiting for his acolytes to prepare the way.
Their movements were precise, choreographed, filled with prediction and consequence. The tortured always remember the agony of waiting.
The nurse pulled the old woman's wispy hair away from her temples, soaked a ball of cotton in acetone and proceeded to scrub her temples methodically. The powerful odor washed over the sensitive nasal tissues of everyone in the room.
Only the old woman, aware of its acrid bite, was beyond comment or question, a prisoner in a dark chemical cell. Yet even there the smell registered on the delicate receptors of the central nervous system, which then transmitted their message to her brain. There, this new data, unevaluated, undifferentiated, added to her increasing sense of doom.
Acetone, besides being a fingernail polish remover, is used in electronic circuits to clean electrical contacts. It is considered helpful as it improves the flow of electric current through such circuits. There, on the altar stone of psychiatric sacrifice, it served the same purpose.
The nurse efficiently removed the woman's wedding ring from her bony finger and tossed it casually into a metal tray. She checked for other articles of jewelry. As the nurse's hand touched the patient's face, it unknowingly triggered a memory from the old woman's youth.
After the birth of her first and only child, she had lain in the hospital room, weary and dazed. She remembered feeling depressed and resentful. It had been a long and difficult delivery.
Then like an essence of peace and validation, two large brown hands, smelling faintly of cigars and cologne, had clasped her face with such tenderness she wept.
Her husband's voice was as clear in her memory as it had been then.
"My princess, we have a son. I am so very, very proud of you." And she felt his lips warm on hers.
Does memory lie? Where is his face? She opened her eyes then and smiled, and he was there, but now...
The nurse turned away and pulled a low cart covered with a nest of black, plastic-coated cables ending in silver-tipped electrodes toward the operating table: An electro-encephalograph