Aftershock: Raised Consciousness Crumbles SHAM Psychiatric System

Threatened for the second time after fifty years of freedom with forced electroshock, I wrote my 57,361-word non-fiction ‘AFTERSHOCK’ on psychiatry’s expanding portals that include elder restraint and the DSM inroads that characterize as mental illness our natural life events.
This is my experience with forced shock treatment, my activist battle to ban ECT, and my recovery of mental balance. Readers can dock in a safe harbour of lessons in native teachings, shamanism, Buddhism and meditative magical healings. My quest led me through a smorgasbord of spiritual risky challenges: UFO contact; past lives; ghosts; and the greedy legal system that angered me, a condition for which psychiatry offers “gentle, safe and effective” brain damage. With this threat to my retired years I re-activated my anti-psychiatry activist gene to discover what evil psychiatry spawns today. With CAPA (Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault) I wrote a street theatre script to illustrate Toronto’s part in the May 16/15 largest international protest – 30 cities in nine countries – against ECT and the APA (American Psychiatric Association) meeting across from City Hall. I was the featured speaker.
In this survivor report I offer what works to restore balance with compassion, instead of the present distanced psychiatric system. Most stories, like the classic One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, deal accurately with the institution scenes, but fall short of a strong viable response. Mental professionals take an elitist perspective. The growing psychiatric trend to present ECT as the best, first, gentle solution to depression – not just to me when I ran into anger issues, but to every family I spoke with – alarms me. And who believes a crazy person that this is abuse? Every fifth Canadian who faces brain damage from the tortures of ECT.