Coloradans joined concerned citizens from around the nation on May 14 in a march organized by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) to protest the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) recent push to get the FDA to approve electroshock (ECT) for children and to get electroshock devices reclassified into the same category of risk as electric wheelchairs and hearing aids.
ECT shoots as much as 460 volts of electricity through the brain in order to produce a seizure. Every year 100,000 Americans are electroshocked, even though no one has ever been able to explain exactly how this barbaric practice “works” as mental health treatment. In fact, neither the effectiveness nor the safety of ECT devices has ever been clinically proven, and never will be if the APA gets its way.
The APA is pushing for ECT to be given to children who are “treatment resistant” to psychiatric drugs. Eight million American children are on psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs – one million of them as young as 0-5 years old. Many of them will get worse and will be labeled “treatment resistant,” instead of the treatment itself being labeled harmful and ineffective.
ECT is already a $1.2 billion a year industry. If the APA gets its way, that industry will be growing by shocking the still-developing brains of children and subjecting their young bodies to convulsions.
The protest march is an annual event of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), timed to deliver a strong message of opposition to harmful psychiatric practices when psychiatrists attend the APA annual conference, this year in Atlanta. Click here to read CCHR International’s press release on this year’s march.