ECT and Feminism
For reasons that only a few of my close friends are aware of, it’s pretty difficult for me to discuss electroshock therapy (aka “ECT,” electroconvulsive therapy) without becoming upset and emotional. (As readers might ascertain from my last post, I’m pretty much against it.)
But I did want to mention something that has been brought up in several blogger’s responses to the case of Simone D: the question of ECT — and more specifically, its abolishment — as a feminist issue. Alas, A Blog has written about it, as has Writhe Safely (also here), a blog I’d never read before but am thinking I will return to in the future. There’s also an academic paper called “Understanding and Ending ECT: A Feminist Imperative,” which can be found as a PDF here. The latter is interesting, and raises some good points, but ends on a moralistic cry to aid our sisters in need, and to make ECT abolishment a part of the official Feminist Party platform. That’s how I read it, anyway.
There seem to be a few basic statistics behind the assertion that ECT is something that should be of particular concern to feminists. First, women are more frequently diagnosed with the mental illnesses ECT is used for (depression, in particular), and therefore are treated far more often (two to three times) than men. (Other studies have shown that the diagnosis is not a major factor in this skewed gender ratio; women are still given shock treatment two to three times more often than men are.) Add to that the fact that 95% of the time, ECT is administered by men. (Taken from J. Grobe, 1995.) The latter statistic can be partially explained, I would expect, by a higher percentage of male psychiatrists and doctors, period — but that’s still pretty damn high.
Much more compelling than dry statistics, I think, are the actual case stories of women who have been forced or coerced into shock treatment. Read “Understanding and Ending ECT,” and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about: women pressed into electroshock by doctors and husbands desiring a more docile, manageable person — or as punishment, whether actual or perceived, for disobedience. In that article, to give one example, a doctor explains to a woman that her mental problems were the result of not caring for her husband and home well enough, and stemmed from “feminist-type thinking.” This took place in 1989.
Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to women and the treatment of “mental disorders”; for every case of a woman coerced into ECT, there are who-knows-how-many more diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and many other “illnesses” that are subsequently treated with drugs — often in a similar manner and for similar reasons as stated earlier.
All of this is not to say that we need only look at the problems of psychiatry because it affects women; we need to be critical of the institution for people of all genders, obviously, and the suffering of a man at the hands of a psychiatrist is no less important than that of a woman. But there are a few specific ways in which psychiatry, and especially psychiatric treatment intended to dull emotions and “relieve” stress or depression, have been systematically used by men to control women, and it’s this system, this pattern, that deserves greater attention by feminists, or by anyone interested in individual liberty, for that matter.
For a wider variety of men and women’s experiences with electroshock, head over to the 1st Person Project, dedicated to collecting first-person accounts of ECT.
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