They Can't Do Any Harm Without Their Memory

            On Saturday from around 10:15 I started getting ready to go to the annual Stop Shocking Our Mothers and Grandmothers rally at Queen’s Park. Last year they only had one microphone and no mic stand and so I decided to bring mine. I also brought my guitar stand, my tuner and my guitar.

            It was a cooler day than I’d expected and the metal of the mic stand was cold in my left hand as I both held it and my left handlebar to College and University. I was wishing that I’d been conscientious enough to put my gloves on before heading out. I was pretty sure they were in my backpack but my backpack was under my guitar and it would have been too much trouble to take everything off to get them.

            There was a fence around the entrance to the legislature building that hadn’t been there last year. There were also more cops around than before as well.

One of the organizers and one of the speakers were just arriving as I got there. The speaker was Connie Neil, who is an 80-year-old survivor of ECT. She started chatting with me right away and took her camera out to take pictures of me unpacking my guitar. She told me that her Buddhist name is Constance, which she said has a musical meaning but I couldn’t find anything to confirm that. It’s from the Latin “Constantia” and from “constare” where "com" means “together" and "stare" means "stand".

            Connie said that the musical meaning of her name connects with her birth name of “Mavis", which she said means "song bird". It is actually the name of a particular songbird as it comes from the Middle English “Mavys” which means “thrush”. “Mavis” as a name for a person has only existed for 125 years as it was popularized by a character in Marie Corelli's 1895 novel, "The Sorrows of Satan”. It’s about a man named Geoffrey who becomes a successful author after forming an association with a man who helps him rise from poverty. The character of Mavis Clare is a successful, self assured, independent and beautiful author of Christian novels. She is represented as a perfect human being. She recognizes right away that the man that has raised Geoffrey from poverty is an Earthly incarnation of Satan. The novel was considered to be trash but it was a best seller and so it popularized the name "Mavis" for a while.

            The person that seemed to be most involved in setting up the event arrived. She said hi to me and remembered my name from last year, although I didn’t remember hers or ask for it this time. I offered the use of my mic stand and microphone and while I was setting it up, Tom arrived. He was late because the subway was closed for installing a new signalling system.

           Tom and I went to a bench in front of the left side of the Vegislature building to rehearse. Like the year before I had trouble seeing my tuner because the brightness of the outdoors, even when it’s cloudy washes out the screen. The screen is blue when out of tune and turns green when the string is on the note it’s supposed to be, but I couldn’t see the change from blue to green. I could see the needle hit the middle and so I went by that but it’s not what I’m used to. Maybe for next year I’ll try to find a tuner that’s more visible in sunlight.

            We started practicing my song, “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy”. I restarted after a couple of verses when I realized that I’d left out a line.  We went through it once and I decided it was enough, since we’d rehearsed it several times at my place the day before and also because the rally was about to start.

            The woman who’d remembered my name from last year officiated over the event and told us that this was the thirteenth year that it had been held. She said that there was an anti-shock rally being held in Montreal at the same time and she would try to connect with it later. She added that there was another rally against ECT going on in Trafalgar Square in London, England as well.

             The first speaker was former member of provincial parliament, Cheri DiNovo. When she was in the legislature she was very active in getting the bill passed that banned sexual orientation conversion therapy. The federal government has said conversion therapy is immoral but won’t ban it nationally because it's a provincial and territorial issue. DiNovo said that if conversion therapy can be banned then so can electro convulsive therapy. Shock therapy has been recently proven in a United States court to damage the brain. On September 11 2017 a class action lawsuit was filed against the manufacturers of ECT devices on behalf of everyone that has received ECT in California since May 1982. In the fall of 2018 the ECT device manufacturers had to settle and admit that their machines cause brain damage, they will be required to place a warning of that fact on their devices and there was also an undisclosed financial settlement for the victims. The case has paved the way for more suits against ECT device manufacturers.

            Electroshock therapy is administered to mainly women.

Our MC connected with the leader of the Montreal rally and the conversation was picked up by the mic.

            Another speaker whose name I did not catch is a teacher at George Brown College.

            While she was speaking, Connie approached me and said she would be speaking next and asked if I would use her camera to take pictures of her during her talk. I don't know why she singled me out instead of one of several people that she knew, but I agreed. 

            People are often surprised to hear that ECT is not some diminishing vestige of a past era and that its use is in fact increasing.

            It is not only a treatment given to mostly women, but among females it is administered more often to seniors and women with post partum depression. It is also being used on people with severe autism. It is inflicted on people with severe anxiety but one would have to be mad to not be experiencing anxiety today.

            ECT is being used as a shortcut.

            The argument is, “We know what we are doing now”.

            While Connie Neil was speaking I took about twenty photographs of her from several angles and distances. Sometimes I included the legislature building in the shots and sometimes the banners that were being held up to her left.

            She told the story of how she had gone for professional help after giving birth to her daughter because she was suffering from post partum depression. After many treatments she had brain damage and she said it caused her to be a horrible mother and estranged her from her daughter.

            The next speaker was a very flamboyantly dressed heavyset elderly man with a wide brimmed straw hat with an earthy orange hatband and a big and thick multi-earth-toned woollen scarf. He had been standing and wearing his black guitar with the rainbow guitar strap not far away from the microphone and ready to play throughout the time that the last two people had been speaking. With his full, snow white beard he looked like Santa Clause on a San Francisco holiday.

            He was introduced as “The Dude”. He started off by playing his own version of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”: “We don’t need no medication / We don’t need no thought control / No dark sarcasm n the wardrooms / He shrinks leave those kids alone...”

            He told us his name is Dr. Stephen Ticktin. He said he is a psychiatrist and that since psychiatry is not covered by OHIP he has a family medical practice in which he treats people as a psychologist.

            Early in his career he was fired for refusing to administer electroshock treatment. He graduated from U of T in 1973 and went to work in a hospital in London, Ontario. He administered electroshock therapy for six months. There he met Ross Laing. Not R. D. Laing whom he later studied with in London. He told us that he and Ross Laing are the two most radical psychiatrists in the history of Canada. He said he and Ross were tripping on acid when a guy knocked on their door. The guy had been arrested for streaking and taken to the psychiatric hospital. Ticktin said he had refused to give him electroshock treatment. He said he was told to do the ward rounds and was led to the locked ward where the streaker was being held. Stephen asked him what he was trying to do and he answered, “I’m trying to deinstitutionalize psychiatry.”

            Stephen said he was fired for having poor clinical judgement.

            He then sang “Dr. Freud” by David Lazar with Tom joining in on harmonica: “ … Dr. Freud, how I wish you had been otherwise employed / for the set of circumstances sure enhances the finances / of the followers of Dr. Sigmund Freud // He forgot about sclerosis but invented the psychosis … He adopted as his credo ‘Down repression, up libido’ … Now he analyzed the dreams of teens and libertines / and he substituted monologues for pills / He drew crowds just like Wells Sadler, then along came Jung and Adler / who said by god there’s gold in them thar ills // They encountered no resistance when they served as Freud's assistants / as with ego and with id they deftly toyed / and instead of toting bedpans thy wore analytic deadpans … Now the big three have departed but not so the cult they started … and to trauma, shock and more shock someone went and added Rorschach ...”

            The next speaker was the founder of this event, Don Weitz, who was looking a lot feebler this year than last. During his speech he referred to the politicians that work in the building behind him and said, “These sadistic bastards ignored us and don’t want to listen!" He said, "The corporate media are complicit in perpetuating the silence ... Stop calling it a treatment!" His said that big pharma is behind the continued pushing of ECT that sends between 200 to 400 volts into the brains of 85 to 90 year old women.

            Don recounted how he had been given 110 sub-coma insulin shocks.

            He told us that a nurse in Madison Wisconsin lost her licence for speaking out against ECT. He was speaking of Stacie Neldaughter, who as a psychiatric nurse at St Mary’s Hospital. She got fired and lost her licence in the 90s for speaking out against the shocking of elderly female patients. She was accused of coercing patients to refuse consent.

            Don kept drifting away from the microphone while talking because he would turn his head or look down at his papers. People kept moving the mic towards where his head had moved and at one point he got testy and said, “I’m talking into the mic!”

            He declared that the CBC gets money from drug companies. He didn't elaborate at that time and I can't find any evidence from online interviews with Don that back up that claim. I can't really see how or why the CBC would take money from drug companies other than when drug companies pay for ads. Don's statement that that the CBC is complicit in the silence is somewhat ironic given that the place where I read a detailed interview with Don Weitz talking about that issue was on the CBC Ombudsman’s website. Also the only media that showed up for the rally that day was the CBC.

Connie came to the mic again and talked about the class action lawsuits that were launched early this year by the relatives of people who were subjected to depatterning between 1948 and 1964. The experiments, administered without informed consent, left hundreds of patients with permanent psychological damage. The CIA actively supported these experiments.

            It was announced that Mel Starkman, an anti-psychiatry activist and psychiatric survivor who was a regular attendant of this rally, has died.

            The MC led the audience in a chant: “1234 We don’t want your shock no more / 5678 Smash the psychiatric state!”

            Then it was time for Tom and I to perform. I began by recounting that in 1989 I had been working as a furniture mover for the Ontario government and while removing a desk from an office in the old Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital I found in the drawer a manual entitled, "Instructions for Electroshock Therapy”. I took the manual home, turned it into a poem and it eventually became a song. Tom played electric guitar while I sang:

“Plug the female end of the cord into the place where it’s meant to go

Plug the Male end into any old available electric hole

now flick the switch

the light is green

We just wait now to warm up the machine

We’re wearing white and we’re feeling clean

for shock therapy

We’ll strap their legs and their arms

for shock therapy

They can’t do any harm without their memory

Shock therapy

And if you think someone’s insane

why don’t you drive some lightning through their brain?

They won’t remember who to blame

for shock therapy

Undress the patient and then lay them down just like a sacrifice

To avoid any bruises let no metal touch the skin, that’s my advice

Now take a razor to shave the hair

around the temples and rub electrode-jelly there

put some on the electrodes and we’re soon prepared

for shock therapy

Under fluorescent glow

Shock therapy

You know their flesh looks so cold under that phantom gleam

for shock therapy

We dance some sparks through twisted wires

and randomly black out the stars

Best of all it doesn’t leave any scars

Shock therapy

Insert and fasten the mouthpiece so the patient won’t bite their tongue

slip a pillow underneath the back to reduce the spinal motion

Now turn the shock-power switch on

and rotate the dial to choose the voltage you want

and serve another cold meal in the restaurant

of shock therapy

Let’s fry some frontal lobes with shock therapy

Add some gelled electrodes to the recipe

of shock therapy

But the best way it will work

is with a tight rubber belt to hold those spastic jerks

Let’s burn up the temples and raise the church

of shock therapy

Keep in mind that every patient has a different convulsive threshold

so start at three-tenths of a second at ten or twenty volts

But the voltage on the screen

is not the voltage in the human being

so let’s meditate upon the golden mean

of shock therapy"

            At this point I went into a slow intrumental and some people began to applaud because they thought it was the end of the song. But it wasn’t:

“Multiply the patient’s current by the machine’s resistance

then subtract from the meter voltage

Is all of this making sense?

Now push the start-shock button on

and keep your finger there until the shock is done

secure the jaw and force the shoulders down

for shock therapy

We’re looking for the threshold

in shock therapy

but if convulsive codes have not been breached

with shock therapy

either the threshold has not been found

or a delayed attack is coming around

in ten to twenty seconds on the killing ground

of shock therapy

If unconsciousness follows the charge a delayed attack will come

but if you’re looking for a grande mal seizure just raise the voltage some

Two-hundred and fifty volts

at point-one seconds could deliver some jolt

so it helps us to remember it’s the patient’s fault

in shock therapy

To get a grande mal seizure

shock therapy

you know it couldn’t be easier, reach it right away

Shock therapy

Just two hundred volts

at point-fifteen seconds makes them shake like Jell-O

though for the rest of their lives they might be walking slow

from shock therapy

For details on injections of amytal and other drugs

just in case you want to reduce the violence of these convulsions

refer to current literature

Let’s open our books to page thirty-four

as we all join together now to sing a prayer

to shock therapy!"

            The MC pointed out that 90% of doctors that administer ECT are men. My research found that in 1995 95% of shock doctors were male. I can’t find the 90% figure but if the percentage of male shock doctors is 5% less in 2019 then it is decreasing. If the use of ECT is increasing it suggests that female doctors may be just as likely to administer shock as men, or more so. Right now 60% of young psychiatrists are female. Time will tell if that has any relevance or if in the future it will just mean that the gender of the ECT doctors will balance out and so one will no longer be able to make the sexy declaration, “95% of all shock doctors are men!”

            Stephen Ticktin sang one more song called “Doctor Knows Best”: “Doctor … this cold’s getting worse, I can hardly breathe … I can see from your demeanour that you’re depressed … that you have suicidal grief … I can give you electroshock …”

            In closing we were reminded that the next day, Mothers day, Connie Neil would be leading a hunger strike and encouraged people to join her at noon to not have lunch. I remember that Don Weitz had announced last year that he would be participating but we were told this year that Don’s doctor had advised against it.

            As I was packing up one of the people involved with the rally approached me and said that he’d told me last year but he wanted to say again, “That is some song!”

The persona that had been in charge of the event apologized to Tom for there having not been time for him to do any of his own songs. She declared, “I’m not the best at this”. I started singing, to the tune of “The Best” by Mike Chapman and Holly Knight, “You’re simply not the best / You’re not better than all the rest”.

            The rally had a pretty small turnout. There were only about thirty people there specifically for the event, but of course there was a steady flow of tourists there to take pictures of the legislature building and so they might have picked up something.

            Tom and I were the last to leave. He had a lot of stuff to pack up and I waited for him. Before we left he wanted to take some pictures of the cherry blossoms at the southeast corner of the building. There was a busload of Latin American tourists doing the same and enjoying posing for one another in front of the Japanese cherry trees.

            I walked Tom down to the shuttle bus at College and University.  I waited with him there and noticed on a pole near the bus stop a poster for a concert of bands from Montreal with names like Sledgehammer and Diamond Weapon. I said they sound like names that teenagers came up with. I could fill a book with all the much better band names I’ve invented like, “Not Your Mother’s Penis”.

I rode down University but because of all the busses it was pretty jammed. I was waiting behind a bus but the driver was standing outside of it smoking a cigarette. There was a space of less then a meter between her vehicle and the sidewalk. When she saw me she motioned for me to come along that little corridor. She explained, “Nothing is moving!”

            I went to Queen and found there was a Falun Dafa parade walking west all in yellow and each person with a drum. I got off my bike and tried to get ahead of them by walking but there were lots of people to get around on the sidewalk and the parade seemed to go on forever. I walked as far as Beverley, rode up to the nearest street and crossed over to Spadina. When I got back down to Queen there was no trace of the parade, so I don’t know where they’d gone.

            When I got back to Parkdale I had to deal with more heavy traffic because of the annual Spring Into Parkdale Festival.

            When I got home I unloaded myself of my guitar and mic stand and took a pee. I noticed when I washed my hands and looked up in the mirror that I’d gotten my first sunburn of the year.

I rode down to No Frills and bought some grapes, strawberries, yogourt, coffee and mouthwash. My grape fetish is very expensive and kind of embarrassing. My bill for those items was $70.

I had cheese and crackers for a late lunch and took a siesta. I ended up sleeping for almost two hours.

I started writing my review of the anti shock rally.

            I had an egg and toast with a beer for dinner and watched two episodes of Sea Hunt. The first one was the stupidest so far. A Greek sponge diver named Tom who uses the old style scuba equipment with the helmet, the suit and the long airline has gotten his line caught at the bottom of the sea. Mike happens to be nearby and he rescues him. Tom invites him home for dinner and his daughter Elena takes an immediate liking to Mike and begins seductively dancing with him. In walks Elena’s recently ex-boyfriend Johnny who Tom had beaten up and fired. He apologizes for making Tom angry and asks for his job back. Elena rejects him because he doesn’t want to fight with her father for her. He is kicked out. Tom goes to bed and Elena tries to seduce Mike but though he’s tempted he says goodnight. Outside Johnny attacks Mike with a knife but since Mike says he doesn’t have a knife Johnny puts his knife away. They fist fight but Johnny can’t land a punch. Mike only needs one to stop Johnny. Mike takes pity on Johnny and offers him fighting lessons and he also wants to try an experiment. He teaches Johnny how to both fight and skin dive and then they begin experimenting with harvesting sponges with skin diving gear. There are some underwater caves rich with sponges that helmeted divers can’t reach while a skin diver can. They make quite a haul. They decide to both pursue Elena and flip a coin for who gets the first shot. Mike wins but when he arrives for the date Tom shows him a photo album. One picture is of Sophie’s older sister when she was slim and beautiful at Elena’s age but when Mike sees Sophie as she is now he suddenly wants to get away because he imagines that a family tendency must be for the women to gain weight. Mike leaves and tells Johnny that Elena is all his. At first Elena rejects him and Tom wants to fight with him. Mike’s boxing lessons have paid off and Johnny beats Tom. Then although Elena resists, when Johnny says, “I love you and I want to marry you!” she starts kissing him and they head off for the church. The plot was like something out of an Archie comic.

            Elena was played by Regina Gleason who appeared in 500 TV shows.

            The second story begins with Mike helping a scientist test an underwater communication device. He is approached by the representative of a diamond company who says a river mouth near the coast of Latin America is rich with diamonds and he wants Mike to train his two geologists to dive. He agrees and after teaching the men they encounter an anaconda. The men panic and head for the surface, leaving Mike to try to slip from its grip. Mike learns that these people don’t have a permit and they are stealing the diamonds. He begins to use his friend’s communication device to listen to their conversations on the ship while he is in the water. He hears they are plotting to kill him the next time they dive together but Mike lures them near the anaconda’s cave and it attacks them. Mike captures their leader, calls the authorities and saves the men at the last minute.