If human rights include freedom from brutality and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, then there is no doubt that contemporary psychiatrys major treatment fixations are human rights abuses.

Two of the main treatments used by psychiatrists today—psychosurgery and electroshock, also known as electroconvulsive therapy, shock treatment and ECT—rely for their “effectiveness on overwhelming and damaging the individual.” As they never address the causes of “mental illness” —a cause is something that psychiatry has never come close to discovering—these treatments do not “cure” the individual’s troubles.

Their action is to interfere, in a hit-and-miss way, with the individual’s current physical, emotional and thought processes. When the treatment “works,” it commonly means the problem or its manifestations are mechanically suppressed; the trouble with this is that, to varying degrees, so is the patient and his awareness of life. Meanwhile, the underlying problem remains, and in due course, the individual will find himself less able to cope with life than before.

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