God, I’m so happy. (And God’s happy too! She just dropped by the Spirit Smoking Lounge to do a round of tequila shots and She’s totally stoked about Simone D.).

From MindFreedom:

Simone D. is a psychiatric inmate in the Creedmoor psychiatric institution in New York State.

New York State’s Office of Mental Health (OMH) aggressively pursued obtaining a court order to give Simone D. forced electroshock over her expressed wishes.

Simone D. had clearly said electroshock caused her pain and suffering. She knew what she was talking about. Simone D. had previously had 200 electroshocks.

Making it worse, Simone D. speaks only Spanish, but for years she’s been denied counseling or even staff fluent in Spanish, except for a few week period.

Today, Simone D.’s attorneys announced that she won!

This morning a court ruled that the two-year-old order to give her forced electroshock had been set aside.

Said Kim Darrow, one of her attorneys, “I was able to get the original judge to order a hearing, on the ground that his main reason for granting the shock order — that Simone might not eat and starve — no longer applies.”

Kim explained, “The hearing was held this morning before a different judge. He ruled that Creedmoor failed to carry its burden of proof.” The judge canceled out OMH’s court order for Simone D.’s forced electroshock, that has hung over her head these past two years, since 2005.

This is the second person to win a victory in one month over forced electroshock by the New York State Office of Mental Health following a campaign of public alerts and court battles.

David Oaks, director of MindFreedom International said, “Thank you to Simone D. and her great attorneys, Dennis Feld and Kim Darrow. And thank you to the many people who spoke out against her forced electroshock. The fact that John Kelly and now Simone D. have both been able to stop their planned forced electroshock shows there is hope! Keep up the pressure. Let’s end all forced electroshock!”

From me and all the spirits and God too: a huge thanks to everyone who e-mailed, called, filled out web forms, blogged about the case, spread the word, and kept the pressure on. Way to go.

The original Simone D. post: Why isn’t the feminist blogosphere all over this?

And two follow-ups:
Simone D. story makes the Carnival of Feminists
Forced electroshock: what’s good for the goose is totally unacceptable for the gander

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Simone D. on September 1, 2007, 8:50 pm EST

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Remember the Simone D. story? There’s been a disturbing twist.

Another patient in New York, this one a man by the name of John Kelly, has also waged a battle this summer to be spared forced electroshock treatment. Neither John Kelly nor Simone D. has been helped by ECT; both feel that they have been damaged by the treatment. Both have retained attorneys to fight the state’s attempt to force more electroshock on them. And in both cases, activists picked up the story and issued an alert, leading to a public outcry.

The difference? The state backed off with John Kelly after barely one week of public attention. Not so with Simone D., who’s still locked in her little electroshock hell.

As FlawedPlan writes (emphasis mine):

How is this possible? Simone D generated so many email complaints the state health director shut down his contact page (if you go there to complain the page says it’s temporarily disabled). Her story had much more traction than John Kelly and went on for a month, and she didn’t win her battle. It took less than one week of activism to get the same state to change its mind for the man. Is electroshock a feminist issue or not?! Same situation, but her wishes were denied, his were honored, how anyone can miss the sexism is beyond me.

I’m immensely happy for John Kelly. What I want to know is why the State of New York doesn’t show Simone D. the same respect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Violet under Simone D. on August 8, 2007, 1:58 am EST

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The 41st Carnival of Feminists is up over at Cruella-blog and the Simone D. post is included. Thank you, Cruella, for helping to spread the word about this situation.

Please, everybody, take a moment if you haven’t already to email or call the New York State officials listed in the post. Also, there are now public hearings scheduled in New York over the next month so citizens can speak out on the state’s practice of forcing electroshock on patients. This is a good time for us to be lobbying state officials on this issue, even those of us who aren’t New Yorkers. Every call and email helps.

Posted by Violet under Simone D. on July 20, 2007, 12:02 pm EST

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That’s the question that faced me earlier this week when I went over to Writhe Safely to see what FlawedPlan was up to. She’d blogged about the case of Simone D., a Hispanic woman who has lost her appeal for mercy — yes, mercy — from the New York Court of Appeals. Simone D. had begged the court to spare her the torture of forced electroshock, and the court said no.

The trivial answer to the question of why we in the feminist blogosphere aren’t on this case is that most of us probably haven’t heard of it. I hadn’t. But the larger question is why: why isn’t this kind of thing on our radar?

Electroshock treatments are a barbarity, a form of medical assault that should have gone the way of the ice-pick lobotomy. I knew that already; what I didn’t know was that it is particularly targeted at women.

But let me back up a minute, because if you’re reading this you may not know that first thing, that electroshock (ECT for short) is a travesty. So a quick run-down:

ECT belongs with that class of psychiatric treatments that includes lobotomies, ice-baths, and insulin shock, all of which certainly have a number of effects on patients, though curing illness isn’t one of them. What all of these treatments do (if we can even dignify them with the word “treatment”) is basically shatter the human organism. It’s like curing a headache by cutting off someone’s head. Lobotomies destroy the brain, insulin shock causes brain and other physical damage, ice-baths terrorize people, and ECT does it all: brain damage, emotional terror, physical harm.

So why do some doctors keep giving shock treatments? For the same reason that doctors kept giving lobotomies and inducing insulin comas: if you can’t cure someone’s headache, at least you can cut off her head.

I knew all that, but what I didn’t know was this singular, terrifying fact which I now call to your attention:

Throughout the history of ECT, one statistic remains constant: Women are subjected to electroshock two to three times as often as men.

That’s from the paper Understanding and Ending ECT: A Feminist Imperative, by Dr. Bonnie Burstow, and I would like everyone reading this to stop now and go read that. Please.

If you’re like me, you will read that paper and the blood will drain from your head and your stomach will knot up and you will think Why didn’t I know this? I should have known it; I should have known all about it. As I said to FlawedPlan, I knew (separately) that ECT was a crime, and I knew (separately) that women have been disproportionately diagnosed as mentally ill, very often simply for failing to conform to patriarchal values. But I had never put those two things together. Hadn’t thought about it. I did not know that ECT has always been overwhelmingly targeted at women and that it is still, today, being used to bully women into obedience.

Go read the paper.

Women being shocked to control their behavior, women being shocked for failure to be “good” wives and mothers, women being shocked for post-partum depression, daughters being shocked on their fathers’ say-so after reporting that their fathers sexually abused them, wives being shocked on their husbands’ say-so because of “feminist-type thinking.”

Women in the hospital for depression caused by a lifetime of physical and emotional abuse, being subjected to a “treatment” that is, in itself, physical and emotional abuse.

Women being shocked by male doctors — 95% of shock doctors are male, 70% of shock patients are female — to keep them in line.

Women being shocked, shocked, shocked, shocked. Even when they go to court and beg to have the torture stopped.

Which brings us back to Simone D., whose appeal for mercy has been rejected.

This is from the dissenting opinion of one of the appellate judges on the case:

Simone D. claimed that ECT inflicted pain on her. So, counsel tried to focus on the pain a patient undergoing ECT might suffer. On a prior petition that did not result in court-ordered ECT, Simone D. had been examined by an independent expert who suggested the alternative of psychotherapy with a Spanish-speaking therapist. [Simone D. does not speak English. –V.S.] This therapy was tried, but for only a few weeks. In an effort to show that this alternative to ECT deserved a longer testing period, Simone D.’s counsel attempted to cross-examine Dr. Brodsky on this subject. In addition, Simone D. had experienced cognitive impairment from ECT, resulting in its discontinuance in 1996. Her attorney, therefore, tried to cross-examine Dr. Brodsky on the extensive course of ECT administered to his client over the years without permanent improvement.

When Simone D.’s counsel tried to ask questions about the physical pain ECT causes, and also about grand mal seizure, the court interceded and proclaimed that it was familiar with the workings of ECT. When counsel sought to elicit information about hemorrhages and the rupture of the blood/brain barrier caused by ECT, the court sustained the petitioner’s objections. Likewise, the court thwarted counsel when he inquired about the dosage and duration of ECT, the Food and Drug Administration risk classification of ECT machines, and the identification of succinylcholine. These were but a few of the limitations the court placed on counsel as he attempted to show that Simone D. should not be forced yet again to undergo ECT. At the conclusion of Dr. Brodsky’s testimony, Simone D. renewed her application for an independent examination. The court denied the application as unnecessary. After closing arguments, the court found that it was in Simone D.’s best interest to administer ECT even though it acknowledged that she would probably never “get better”: “she perhaps could die. Perhaps she wants to die. But that’s not for us to determine. We must prevent her from dying.”

The “court,” you see, knows all about it.

One could almost wish that the “court” would find itself in a mental hospital where no one speaks the court’s language, being subjected to forced shock treatments despite repeated protestations that they don’t work, that they hurt, that they’re destroying the court’s brain, that the court is terrified every time it is strapped to the gurney, that maybe it would be better just to have someone the court could talk to instead, someone who could actually speak the court’s language…

Ahem. Back here in the real world, the Wittenberg Center has a list of New York State officials you can contact to help Simone D.:

** Gov. Eliot Spitzer:
Complete the web form at: http://161.11.121.121/govemail
Phone: (518) 474-8390. Fax: 518-474-1513.

** Lieutenant Gov. David Paterson:
He is legally blind and has been charged by the Governor with dealing with disability issues.
Complete the web form at: http://161.11.121.121/emailltgov
Phone: (518) 474-4623. Fax: (518) 486-4170

** Office of Mental Health Commissioner Michael Hogan:
Phone: (518) 474-4403. Fax: (518) 474-2149.

** Peter M. Rivera, Chair, New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities:
Email: riverap@assembly.state.ny.us
Phone: (718) 931-2620.
Write: 1973 Westchester Avenue; Bronx, NY 10462 USA.

The Wittenberg Center also has some sample comment text you might use and some more background on Simone D.’s case.

Beyond the Simone D. case, there is the larger issue of ECT as something feminists need to address. Dr. Bonnie Burstow writes about the need for us to, first of all, educate ourselves so we can get past the shock doctors’ smug assurance that ECT works. We need to understand that shock treatments are a form of violence against women; we need to deconstruct the medical mythology to see what is really going on.

Some feminists have already done this; I don’t mean to imply that everyone out there is as oblivious as I was. But the modern-day situation with ECT has been largely overlooked by the feminist movement, and that needs to change. The women who find themselves strapped to a gurney with electrodes on their heads are our most violated and vulnerable sisters. That they’re there in the first place — because of post-partum depression, because of sexual abuse, because of a society that condemns non-conforming women — is our business as feminists. And what’s being done to them as “treatment” — strapped down and tortured so they’ll shut up and behave, their pleas for mercy falling on deaf ears — that’s our business too.

A few links on the ECT issue in general:

Electroshock as a Form of Violence Against Women, another paper by Dr. Bonnie Burstow
Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault: Academic Papers
Forced Electroshock, from ECT.org

Posted by Violet under Recommended, Simone D. on July 12, 2007, 1:35 pm EST

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