WHY I MUST TRY TO HAVE ECT BANNED

I have spoken to the Nationwide Health and Disability Advocacy Service about my concerns; they have suggested I put my complaint in writing to you.

 as I have tried many times to do this but with little or no success due to my condition or sending to the wrong place and being sent in circles 

so I will try my best to explain how I feel about my treatment in the Connally unit of Auckland hospital in November 1999 when I became unwell again as it happened so many times after being abused by my Teacher and again in Lake Alice NZ.  I didn’t ask for or want ECT but felt I had no choices and I would have thought that Auckland hospital would have known that I was in lake Alice and that ECT was used to torture the patience and not even suggested it as a treatment. It is important to appreciate how powerless and vulnerable psychiatric patients Perceive themselves to be in relation to the professionals. The apparent willingness to consent to ECT may merely be a case of Desperation and compliance temporarily overcoming terror and reluctance. Similarly, what seems like a successful outcome may simply be conformity and a fear of confiding one's true feelings to professionals, I was unable to tell psychiatrists or other professionals of the strength of my feelings about ECT, for the same reasons that prevented me refusing to have it in the first place. It is perhaps not surprising that the experience of ECT had left me with a lasting distrust of mental health professionals and hospitals even today I am still having counselling for PTSD so your ECT did nothing but destroy my memory other forms of help would have been more appropriate instead of ECT. Although at that particular time I was very psychotic, I needed to be allowed to be mad, but be somewhere with human decency and not be so restricted I needed someone to talk to more than anything, just to know someone cared what happened to me that i was a worthwhile human being that there was a chance of a normal life without fear nightmares and flashbacks someone cared what happened to you Somebody sitting down with me in a room on your own, 

talking to you when you needed it There were so many people on the ward and only three nurses, so you didn't get a lot of attention It is not justifiable to give people something that harms their brains and gives them an epileptic fit on the NHS. It's just not, in my view, an ethical way to proceed.

The following are some of the things I forget: the names of people and places. When the title of a film is mentioned I may have a vague idea that I have seen it, but cannot remember what it is about. I don’t like reading much as by page two or three I start to lose what is happening in the book and have to reread it. It all just gets too frustrating.  My family tells me the outlines And I am able to remember other things at the same time  70% of the time and the rest just can’t recall any of what they are saying.  I put things away in such safe places that when they are needed it takes hours to find them. It did seem that after the ECT there was only the present, and the past had to be recalled a little at a time. There are many faces I see that I know I should know quite a lot about, but only in a few cases can I recall incidents connected with them. I find I can adjust myself to these Circumstances by being very careful in making strong denials, as fresh personal incidents constantly crop up. Some of the things I tried to study was like trying to read a book written in Japanese no matter how hard I tried I could not get the sense of what the words and diagrams meant.  I forced myself to concentrate but I couldn't understand what I read or put ideas together analyze, draw conclusions, make comparisons. Things continued to appear gibberish, and if I kept it up for too long it felt like my head would explode and i would get very short tempered even driving from A to B if the radio was on the kids and wife all talking I couldn’t work out where I was or where I was supposed to be going and would get confused and yell please shut up so I can think or would come close to running someone over or running a red light. 

Sometimes I had to pull over have a walk around the car a few times drawing deeply on my cigarette to settle down and regain my bearings.  The psychiatrists and GPs alike have been insisting that my problem is not ECT-related but is a side effect of my post-traumatic stress disorder. I have yet to see a severely depressed person fight so hard to regain their ability to think clearly, and at work, I get told You are an AIR-BRAIN! 

How can I explain to my work mates that my struggles are due to ECT? 

It has been a constant battle to hold down jobs because of this and stress at work because of it has become unbearable so no longer work. So what I would like to see happen is people warned before undergoing ECT that their is a chance of permanent irreversible brain damage and cognitive functioning  as stated by the USAs leading authority on ECT treatment in federal court case that this is the case with some patients and he now warns of the dangers so why don’t we?? that is all i want from this is you warn everybody about to have ECT I do not wish this to happen to anymore people without their knowledge if required i can send you statements from 150+ people in my support group of the same damage i say it has caused me one of those people was a GP i say was as 12 years ago she had ECT thought she knew all the side effects and her memory and cognitive functioning was so damaged she still can not return to her practice 

now you may think this letter is to wall written for someone who says they have brain damage from ECT well you are correct I have had a lot of help to put this together 

and this is the reply how does this address my concerns that people are not fully informed of all the side effects from ECT before they consent to the treatment 
and I keep getting sent around in circles 

no DHB warns you of this before you have ECT and when left brain dammaged ACC will refuse to cover you

 New Zealand Government: BAN THE USE OF ECT IN NEW ZEALAND - Sign the Petition! https://www.change.org/p/new-zealand-government-ban-the-use-of-ect-in-new-zealand?recruiter=108623255&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=share_twitter_responsive … via @Change