"I wanted it ... I begged for it... I craved it."

He wanted shock treatment - demanded to have volts of electricity charging through his body, convulsing muscles and disrupting brain functioning in an artificially induced seizure. They call it therapy but they admit that they don't even know how it really works. Epileptics are given medication to suppress naturally occurring seizure activity because of potential damage yet psychiatric patients are given electroshock convulsive therapy (ECT) to cause the same effect.

It is still legal and is currently used for many different reasons. Lobotomies were also used similarly in past years until experience showed that this form of brain mutilation served the institution's purpose more than any other. Similar dynamics have formed around ECT. Fear of shock treatment has kept many patients in line and cooperative when the going got tough. Recovering from electroshock convulsive therapy takes so much energy that inmates didn't have anything left to fight against perceived power abuses. The brain may be left physically intact but research indicates an unexplained permanent volume loss. Survivors of shock know of other losses--losses that can't be measured in clinical studies. Shock affects brain functioning. Thinking abilities are altered until even the intrinsic identity of its victim is threatened. It steals the memories that tie a life together in a cohesive whole. For one man, 25 years of his life were taken from him, lost within a system that denies responsibility for the repercussions of his prescribed treatment.

"There was a freak snow storm in April. It was blowing hard and cold. I was a taxi driver and the storm was good business for me. People call for a cab instead of risking driving under those conditions and I was working it for all I could get because I had a family to support. My younger brother Allan was home from the Navy. We had talked earlier in the evening but I went out to work. Later, he left a message for me. I worked through the night and in the morning I went over to my parent's place to see what my brother had wanted."

Regret catches in Wayne's throat He looks down before drawing a fortifying breath to speak through a pain that is as present as it was a quarter of a century ago.

I saw my brother's car in front of the house. Snow had drifted around it in a shroud. As I ploughed through the snow to reach the vehicle, my father came out to help shovel out. We cleared the windows and saw my brother still behind the wheel. He seemed to be asleep against the window. I thought that maybe he had too much to drink and was sleeping it off. As we pulled open the door, he fell out... and he didn't wake up.... My brother was dead." Sadness lays heavy as he pauses to draw together the strength he needs to push past his relived sorrow.

"There had been a hole in the floor of his old clunker. The carbon monoxide would have killed him within five minutes--less than the time it would take to warm up a cold car. The Coroner ruled it accidental but that was soon forgotten as others misinterpreted what happened. " He shakes his head in an effort to negate the maliciousness of others. "Would you believe that a social worker from LPH called my poor old mother years later and said that I was just trying to copy my brother's suicide. She hit her with this opinion which was based on wrong information without even caring of the effect on my mother. Can you imagine how my mother felt? She's going about her business in her own home and the phone rings. She picks it up and hears someone she's never met dumping this garbage which was based on gossip on her. It was bad enough that I didn't know what I was doing but my brother's death was not a suicide!" Anger flashes against a system which labeled and mislabeled himself and members of his family until the paper people created by consecutive diagnosticians bore no resemblance to the humans who had entered the mental health maze.

"I missed my brother. We had been close and now he was gone in a stupid accident that I tortured myself over. If I had not chosen to chase bucks that night, we would have been together. He wouldn't have been alone in that death trap of a car. I would have driven him. We would have talked. He would still be alive. It was all preventable and I blamed myself. He was only 24 years old."

It was grief. Now you'd go to grief counseling and talk it out. Back then, a man drank it out and I could drink pretty good. Then the drinking got pretty bad "

"I remember driving a bunch of Americans up to Minaki. They liked me and invited me to stay for some drinks. I drank and I drank some more. The cab was parked because I never did drive taxi when I had been drinking. It was my one good habit." He glances up with a quick smile of remembrance in appreciation of the small measure of self-control that kept him from drunk driving while working. No matter how much of his world spun out, he was committed to road safety in his own way. "Anyways, about three in the morning, they found me under the cab, trying to hook a hose up to the exhaust so that I could join my brother. They took me in to the hospital and I was admitted. My first diagnosis was reactive depression. I won't argue that-4 was depressed because my brother died. Drinking didn't help and I'm not making excuses for that. I found out years later that booze is a depressant. I could have avoided a lot of pain if I had known that then. I was diagnosed in January 1967 and got my first course of shock treatments because they said that it would help with the depression. I just wanted the pain to end so I would have agreed to anything. I trusted the medical profession and never questioned what they were doing to me. I just followed their prescriptions and it was all downhill from there."

"Each time I was released there were more drugs. One year I was on 17 different medications. The LPH kept sending more and more pills. My mother couldn't keep up with sorting the mailings so she started dumping them down the drain. it was a never-ending supply. By this time I was a binge drunk-a drunk who downed more prescription pills than most junkies. I never covered it up. The doctors all knew of my boozing. I'd overdose and they'd send me home with more pills to replace what I wasted when they pumped out my stomach. It was craziness."

"Hospitals were like home for me. Everything was taken care of There was nothing to worry about when you're in there-except for wondering how your family was making out. Except for the shame you lived with every time you had to shower in front of others because inmates don't have privacy. I trusted doctors and nurses to know what was best for me. Looking back I remember their sarcasm and threats when we didn't behave like good patients."