Updates: Forced ECT in the Media, My Memoir, New Medication Documentary, Human Rights Complaint to the UN

Edited with Google Gemini and Claude. Voiceover by Lyra at Evernote.

Content note: Discusses forced medical treatment, torture, medication-induced suicide and murder.

It’s been a while since I’ve shared any updates, and I have several to share.

At a Glance

* Media Coverage: In response to Jim Flannery’s report about increasing petitions for involuntary ECT, I've been interviewed by several reporters.

* Memoir: I’m now writing it myself, at my own pace, to ensure accuracy.

* CCHR Documentary: A new film on psychiatric drugs and violence is worth watching, with caveats.

* Activism: The Stop ECT campaign and the Written Informed Consent Act both warrant attention.

* UN Complaint: I formally submitted a human rights report to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Media Coverage

Over the last several months, I had the honor of being interviewed by five reporters about my experience with forced electroshock treatment — commonly known by the medical euphemism “electroconvulsive therapy” or ECT. For an in-depth discussion of my experiences as a psychiatric patient and what I’ve learned about psychiatry, see my written testimony for a Connecticut state bill in 2025.

The articles published so far:

* Mad in America (Dec. 6): Fellow psychiatric survivor Jim Flannery obtained official state data on forced ECT petitions filed to Connecticut probate courts from 2012 to 2024, graphed it, and published his analysis. The numbers are startling: a huge jump in petitions beginning in 2015, with an increasing trend through 2024.

* CCHR (Dec.): The first interview of me, by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International — more on CCHR below.

* Connecticut Examiner (Feb. 8): Reporter Amy Wu interviewed me and my mother, as well as Dr. Javeed Sukhera (current chief of psychiatry at the Institute of Living), history professor Jonathan Sandowsky, Kathy Flaherty of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, and Jim Flannery.

* Freedom (Feb. 16): An article by John Blosser in Scientology’s magazine.

* Inside Investigator (March 1): Marc Fitch’s piece for this nonprofit investigative newsroom, also drawing on Flannery’s data.

One more reporter’s story is still pending release.

I’m grateful to all the reporters for their time and effort. That said, all the published articles contain minor inaccuracies or misleading statements — nothing too important, but worth noting.

I also wish Amy Wu and Marc Fitch had given more space to some related issues I tried to raise in my interviews: psychiatry’s diagnostic unreliability, prescribing cascades, and why psychiatric diagnoses are flawed — specifically, how adverse psychiatric drug effects have often been misinterpreted by mental health professionals as worsening of underlying disorders. These fundamental flaws in mental healthcare have led to unwarranted prescribing and increased use of more invasive interventions like ECT. I understand that professional journalists are constrained by deadlines, word limits, and the breadth of what they’re covering. I’m still grateful.

The CCHR and Scientology’s Freedom magazine articles also contain minor inaccuracies, but they provide the fullest descriptions of what I experienced and allude to the dangers of psychiatric medications, which were pivotal in my suicide attempts.

Traditional psychiatry, based on faulty biomedical reductionism, often pathologizes normal and healthy mental states. Beyond overdiagnosis and overprescription, it also overlooks and misdiagnoses valid physical disorders that present with psychological symptoms. The best discussion I’ve seen of why traditional psychiatric diagnosis is flawed — though long and highly technical — is the 2019 report by Belgium’s Superior Health Council: DSM (5): The use and status of diagnosis and classification of mental health problems.

Status of My Memoir

I stopped working with the professional writer who had been hired to help me with a memoir of my experiences with ECT. I’m now working on a rough outline on my own. Writing it myself at my own pace seems the only way to accurately describe what I went through — no one else really knows all of it, and it’s so easy to misinterpret or fail to understand another person’s experiences without having lived through them.

But it’s not currently my top priority. I have significant personal issues I’ve been dealing with: continuous pain from my neurological disorder since 2018, getting ready to move back to my hometown of Middletown by May, and being tired of having this body and this life. But the outline continues.

CCHR’s New Documentary on Psychiatric Drugs and Violence

In December, CCHR released a new documentary: Prescription for Violence: Psychiatry’s Deadly Side Effects. It’s unlikely to interest people who support traditional mental healthcare, but I found it very good and highly recommend it — with the warning that it discusses (with some graphic detail) suicides, murders, and mass murders. You can watch it at CCHR’s website or on the Scientology Network.

The documentary contains disturbing revelations by attorneys, healthcare professionals, and doctors working for government and the pharmaceutical industry, including Dr. Alastair Benbow of pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, Dr. Thomas Laughren who oversaw psychotropic drug approval at the FDA, and Dr. Thomas Insel, former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

While it can be difficult for some people to believe that psychiatric drugs cause suicides and murders, I was already familiar with several of the suicide cases, and they are quite credible. These are people who were dealing with relatively ordinary or mild-to-moderate stressors, who were pathologized as “mentally ill” and prescribed psychotropic drugs with devastating results — including Natalie Gehrki, Richard Fee, Candace Downing, Stewart Dolin, and Woody Witczak, whose widow Kim I met at the 2025 Inner Compass Initiative conference in West Hartford.

As for the documentary’s claims that mass murders have been caused by psychiatric drugs — I think those claims are more speculative. But I know traditional psychiatry and mainstream media (also corrupted by pharmaceutical money) have been overly dismissive of the possibility that psych drugs have contributed to mass violence. For some other credible examples of individual cases of medication-induced psychotic violence, see the cases of David Carmichael, who killed his son while in Paxil-induced psychosis, and Corey Baadsgaard, who held his high school classmates at gunpoint while in Effexor-induced psychosis.

What Do I Think About CCHR and Scientology?

CCHR is controversial because of its affiliation with the Church of Scientology, by which it was co-founded, and because it is largely anti-psychiatry. I first learned about CCHR around 2006, not long after I was released from my torturous stay at the Institute of Living.

I made a decision then — which I still don’t regret — to seek help from CCHR. What I went through was horrific and my eyes had begun to open to how much darkness existed in psychiatry. Although Scientology was controversial and strange, I decided to take a chance and see if they could help me. The director of a small local Connecticut branch met with me and, though she determined no lawsuit could be made in my case, was very professional and kind. Years later, I formally joined CCHR with a small donation. In 2018, I was interviewed for an electroshock documentary by a CCHR filmmaker and by psychologist Linda Lagemann, who appears in the recent documentary, also professional and kind. A few years ago, I did online meetings with a director from the Florida branch, and most recently I was interviewed for the December CCHR article and for the Freedom magazine piece.

I’m not a Scientologist and becoming one doesn’t really interest me. I’m not a fan of religion in general, though I respect religious freedom. As for the allegations of abuse by people working for the Church, I won’t deny them, and I think they should be investigated with legal redress and apologies issued if true. But I don’t see Scientology in black-and-white terms. Just as major abuses committed by people working in the Catholic Church don’t mean everyone in the Church is corrupt, or that the Church is incapable of reform, the same applies here. CCHR’s activism to expose psychiatric abuse is genuinely good, and I’m grateful for it. I don’t know of any other organization doing this work with comparable funding and organization.

Scientology does have aspects that fit the definition of a cult — but the same can be said of most organized religions, and of psychiatry. In fact, I consider psychiatry, with all its dogma and corruption causing widespread iatrogenic harm, to be the most dangerous cult of all. I recognize that psychiatry sometimes helps people, sometimes enormously. But the scale of harm psychiatry has caused and continues to cause is much greater than all the allegations against Scientology, even if all of those allegations are true. And despite having a few celebrity members like Tom Cruise, psychiatry is far better funded, more influential, and more powerful than Scientology. It is the greater danger — and I’m thankful CCHR exists to take it on.

Activism Updates

A few months ago, a campaign website called Stop ECT was released by a coalition of survivors, advocates, and organizations, including CCHR, Global Wellness Forum, Stand for Health Freedom, and World Council for Health. The campaign’s goal is to ban ECT, and it includes a detailed, well-referenced white paper. Personally, I stopped calling for a total ban a while ago — but the material is worth reading for anyone interested in ECT debates. (Note: the buttons inviting people to email U.S. Congress have been removed without explanation, and no contact information is provided for the site’s creators, though the individual coalition organizations can be found easily online.)

On psychiatric medications: there has been a push to pass the Written Informed Consent Act, with versions introduced in both the U.S. House (H.R.4837) and Senate (S.3314). I created a Change.org petition in support. The bills haven’t gained enough traction to pass through congressional committees, but you can view their statuses and find contact info for the bills’ sponsors at MAHA Action (HR 4837 | S 3314). The Senate bill page still has a form to easily message U.S. Senators in support of it. Sponsors of the bills include Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Democratic sponsor Rep. Cleo Fields of Louisiana.

If you want to support the bills:

1. Sign the petition.

2. Message your Senator using the form on the MAHA Action website.

Human Rights Complaint to the UN

I don’t expect to ever receive a legal victory or financial compensation for the forced electroshock I endured at Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living more than 20 years ago — “treatment” that was both psychologically traumatizing and left me more cognitively disabled. But in March, I was moved to make an online submission reporting my human rights violations to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations.

The UN has little direct power over U.S. law or regulations, but it can apply international pressure for legislative and regulatory change. For example, in 2019 and 2022, the UN Committee against Torture concluded that involuntary ECT used on children at New Zealand’s Lake Alice psychiatric facility — combined with failure to investigate or provide redress — constituted violations of the UN Convention against Torture.

I was inspired by one of the Lake Alice survivors, my friend Malcolm Richards, who is still seeking compensation and rehabilitation from the New Zealand government. It’s worth noting that CCHR helped bring about official investigations into the abuse at Lake Alice.

Yet there are clear differences between the Lake Alice cases and mine: ECT was used on children there in clearly abusive ways inconsistent with medical treatment standards, while the doctors who orchestrated my forced ECT (mostly) followed common standards of care — despite how barbaric it still was, and no one should be treated like that. So, I’m not confident the UN will conclude my case constitutes torture under international law, even though it functionally was, by any common definition. Still, I’m encouraged by progressive reports from UN Special Rapporteurs in the last fifteen years, including declarations that mental healthcare has been plagued by outdated practices and human rights violations, and that involuntary medical treatment alone may constitute torture.

I also emailed attorneys connected to Carol Levesque, an elderly patient at Connecticut Valley Hospital who was forced to have ECT approximately 500 times and was mentioned in Marc Fitch’s article, as well as an article by Michael Simonson for Reason magazine. I encouraged those attorneys to consider making a human rights report to the UN on Carol’s behalf.

Closing

Although I continue to struggle personally, it’s remarkable how far activism has come in fighting back against incompetence, corruption, and abuse in psychiatry. I look forward to having a mental healthcare system in the future that is no longer dominated by pharmaceutical and medical device funding, the dogma of biomedical reductionism, and disregard for human rights.