By Fiona Marshall
Yukon News Reporter
February 9, 1996

Eleanor Velarde slowly turned to face the 40-odd people carrying placards and wearing buttons opposed to the use of ECT.

She was crying and unable to speak for a moment. When she did open her mouth, it was to apologize.

"This is an emotional issue for me, as you can see," she told the demonstrators gathered in the lobby of the legislative building to protest the recent arrival of an ECT machine at Whitehorse General Hospital.

"My association with ECT (electro-convulsive treatment) is through my mother, who was suicidal for 45 years of her life and who had electroshock throughout those 45 years, and who ended up taking her life," she said, wiping her red eyes and swallowing hard.

"I was five years old when I went to see my mother after she had had electroshock. The shock for me was that my mother didn't recognize me."

Velarde paused, choking back her tears.

"The last shock treatment she had was when I was about 17. I remember visiting her at the hospital and she was just like a zombie. It's awfully hard to look at your mother and see a zombie. (ECT) is really inhumane. It's giving people Alzheimer's."

For the next hour, people with similarly harrowing stories spoke to the crowd. While she listened, Velarde cried and hugged her friends. Nurses told tales of their experiences with the treatment, which is widely used by psychiatrists to treat severely depressed patients of all ages.

Leonard Roy Frank was once one of those patients.

The San Francisco resident is in Whitehorse this week to help raise public awareness about the dangers of ECT, which he called "cruel, dehumanizing, brainwashing, brain-damaging and life-threatening."

He has had 85 electroshock and insulin-coma treatments since 1962, when his parents committed him to a hospital mental ward because they didn't approve of his lifestyle.

The doctors recommended he be admitted to the care of a state mental hospital because he "grew withdrawn and asocial, couldn't or wouldn't work and spent most of his time reading or doing nothing, grew a beard, ate only vegetarian food and lived the life of a beatnik -- to a certain extent," he said.

He spent nine months in the mental ward during which time he underwent extensive electroshock therapy.

"It left gaping holes in my memory, reduced my energy level. My university education was totally obliterated."

"My high school education was totally obliterated. The years after I spent holed up in my apartment, trying to relearn everything I had lost."

Since his release, he has devoted all his time and energy to abolishing the use of electroshock therapy.

His 30-year fight brought him to Whitehorse at the invitation of the Second Opinion Society. It is determined to see the device removed from Whitehorse General Hospital.

"If the same voltage applied to the brain in electroshock was applied to the heart, it would kill a person," he said.

Frank has devoted his life to researching the procedure, reading studies, and writing books and articles.

He has developed some theories about why the treatment he calls barbaric is still so widely used.

Electroshock reinforces the biological model of mental illness that psychiatrists survive on, he said.

"And it is very, very profitable for them. A psychiatrist now can do five or six treatments in a morning. That means a lot of money for him."

In the U.S., a psychiatrist who uses ECT makes about twice as much as one who won't use it, he said.

ECT is almost always covered under people's medical insurance. One study he cited shows that nearly 80 per cent of the people were covered under Medicaid or some other insurance.

Three years ago, a series of about 10 ECT treatments would cost about $54,000, he said.

"It also creates a revolving door in the system. Once they get shocked, these patients go back time and again.

"The relapse rate of people (who were shocked), who are not followed up with drugs or maintenance electroshock, is 50 to 60 per cent. And that was cited in a pro-ECT article!

"This is really a treatment of last resort for depressed persons who are resistive to anti-depressive drugs.

"If they don't work, then the next step is electroshock. It's a way of shutting up the patient...

"Unfailingly, at least for a while, it works. This person can no longer remember what they were complaining about.

"The memory loss is a direct result of the shock. It makes them forget why they were depressed."

And many ECT `survivors' actually fake being happy because they are so terrified of being shocked again, he said.