Question:
And beyond that it's a worthless treatment. I consider it a form of male violence against women, because it's primarily given to women, especially older women. I don't think that in a sane and ethical society people would do it to each other.

There are two ways of looking at shock, and they are not metaphors. One is that it's an electrical lobotomy, because at least one electrode is always over the front lobe. It should also be considered an electrical closed-head injury, because it fits every criteria of a closed-head injury.

During the period of the shock the person is either apathetic, in which case the hospital records read: "Patient is no longer complaining." Or the person gets a mild euphoria, a silliness, in which case the record reads: "Mood elevated." I've seen this in dozens and dozens of records, and I saw it when I performed electroshock.

When it comes to controlled studies, even the 1985 task force report . said there was no evidence in controlled studies that treatment worked after four weeks.

The use of shock treatment is not empirically driven, it's driven by the desire to do it.

Now, why would people do it? Well, it's a very good way to make money. Many psychiatric units would go broke without it. You can make more money doing a few shock patients a day than you could with a full-time psychotherapy practice.

The treatment requires no wisdom, no empathy, no understanding. You just plug them in and shock them. It fits with the fact that modern psychiatrists know virtually nothing about human beings--how to help them, how to love them, nurture them or understand them. It's a way of making believe that human beings are broken machines

Answer: I have been delving deep in the area of research that concerns the correlation between closed head injury and the emergence of hearing loss, Meniere's and Meniere's like syndromes, dizziness, etc in an attempt to formulate some theoretical basis for connecting injury with tinnitus and hyperacusis.

This week I was able to locate several very good research documents and I will be writing an essay soon pulling all these threads together.

Initially, though, as a little warm-up, I did want to mention that even a MILD head injury, say, in an auto accident of less than 8 miles per hour, has been shown to result in these conditions as long as 3 YEARS following the incident.

That piece of data was quite astonishing to me as it could easily explain why so many folks SUDDENLY develop these symptoms, which APPEAR to be random, but are not....and there are very sound physiologic reasons why this is so.