A revolution took place in Cuba, the Cold War was in full throttle, the Eisenhower
era was drawing to a close, and I moved to San Francisco where I would soon find
myself in a hellish world of imprisonment
and torture. It was 1959.
A revolution took place in Cuba, the Cold War was in full throttle, the Eisenhower
era was drawing to a close, and I moved to San Francisco where I would soon find
myself in a hellish world of imprisonment
and torture. It was 1959.
Born in Brooklyn 27 years earlier, I had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. After a two-year hitch in the Army, I managed and sold real estate in New York City and southern Florida for several years. Despite a poor record, I continued working in real estate in San Francisco.
A few months into my new job, things began to change for me, more internally, at least at first, than externally. Like so many of my generation, I was highly conventional in thought and lifestyle, and my goal in life was material success—I was a Fifties Yuppie. But I began to discover a new world within myself, and the mundane world, seemed, comparatively speaking, drab and unfulfilling. I lost interest in my job and, not surprisingly, soon lost the job itself. Thereafter, I spent long hours reading and reflecting.
The book that influenced me most at that time was An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas K. Gandhi. I adopted for myself his principles of nonviolent resistance, his interest in religion, and his practice of vegetarianism. In that book and other of his writings, Gandhi referred to the works that had helped shape his life. I was soon reading the Bhagavad Gita, the New Testament, Henry David Thoreau's “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You, and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In keeping with the subtitle of Gandhi's autobiography, I started my own experimenting. This led to a complete reevaluation of my previously held values. Towards this end I broadened my reading to include, among many others, the Old Testament, Lao-tzu (Way of Life), William James (Varieties of Religious Experience), Henri Bergson (Two Sources of Religion and Morality), Joseph Campbell (Hero with a Thousand Faces), and the writings of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Jung, Arnold Toynbee, and Abraham Heschel.
During this exciting, wonder-filled time, the learning I acquired advanced my self-awareness and my understanding of the world. During this period, however, my parents visited me several times and became concerned with the changes they perceived in me. That I was living on my meager savings and was not “gainfully employed” upset them. My newfound spiritually centered beliefs and vegetarian practices challenged them in ways they couldn't handle. We were at loggerheads: if one side was right, the other had to be wrong; neither side was willing to compromise.
The situation seemed to call for a parting of the ways, at least for a time. But my parents weren't willing to back off. They attributed the rift between us to my having a mental disorder. The changes I regarded as positive they regarded as symptomatic of “mental illness.” They urged me to consult a psychiatrist. I had done some reading in psychology but, while finding a number of valuable ideas, had rejected its overall approach as being too narrow. Psychotherapy was not for me.
Over a period of more than two years, the struggle between
my parents and me intensified. Eventually, because I wouldn't see a psychiatrist,
my parents
decided to force the psychiatrists on me. The way that was and still is being
done in
our society is by commitment, a euphemism for psychiatric incarceration. I
was locked up at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco on October 17, 1962.
While the world’s attention was focused on the Cuban Missile Crisis
and the possibility of nuclear war, two physicians in a San Francisco hospital
were focused on me and the possibility of my being
mentally
ill. They decided I was and gave me what they called a tentative diagnosis
of schizophrenic reaction. The case history section of the Certificate of Medical
Examiners they signed reads in full as follows: “Reportedly has been
showing progressive personality changes over past 2 or 3 years. Grew withdrawn
and asocial,
couldn't or wouldn't work. Grew a beard, ate only vegetarian food and lived
life of a beatnik—to a certain extent.”
On October 20 I was sent to Napa State Hospital and from there, on December 15, to Twin Pines Hospital in a suburb south of San Francisco, where I remained through the first week of June 1963. Early on, I was diagnosed as a “paranoid schizophrenic,” a label reserved not only for serial killers but for almost anyone else in a mental institution who refuses to knuckle under to psychiatric authority. Scattered through my medical records, 143 pages of which I obtained in 1974, were the “symptoms” and observations which, according to psychiatric ideology, supported the diagnosis. These included, and I quote, condescending superior smile; vegetarian food idiosyncrasies; apathetic, flat affect; has a big black bushy beard and needs a haircut, he is very sloppy in appearance because of his beard; refuses to shave or to accept inoculations or medication; patient declined to comment on whether or not he thought he was a mentally ill person; no insight; impaired judgment; stilted, brief replies, often declines to answer, or comment; autistic; suspicious; delusions of superiority; paranoid delusions; bizarre behavior; seclusive; withdrawn, evasive and uncooperative and delusional; negativism; passively resistive; piercing eyes and religious preoccupations.
Soon after being imprisoned, psychiatrists tried to gain my consent to shock treatment—at first electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) but after I was transferred to Twin Pines, “combined insulin coma-convulsive treatment.” When I was “extremely resistive” to undergoing the latter procedure, the hospital filed for a court order authorizing force in administering the procedure. At the end of the seven-paragraph letter to the court, the treating psychiatrist wrote, “In my professional opinion, this man is suffering from a Schizophrenic Reaction, Paranoid Type, Chronic, Severe, but it is felt he should have the benefit of an adequate course of treatment to see if this illness can be helped. In view of the extremes to which the patient carries his beliefs it is felt that the need of hospitalization and treatment under court order is a necessity as he is dangerous to himself and others under these circumstances.”
On January 10, 1963, after a hearing at which I was present, the Superior Court of California in San Mateo County “ordered [me] committed to Twin Pines Hospital.” The next day, the series began; there were in all 50 insulin coma treatments (ICT) and 35 electroconvulsive treatments (ECT).
Combined insulin coma-convulsive treatment was routinely administered to “schizophrenics” in the U.S. from the late 1930s through the mid-1960s. ECT was sometimes applied while the subject was in the coma phase of the ICT; sometimes the procedures were administered on separate days. Individual insulin sessions lasted from four to five hours. Large doses of injected insulin reduced the blood's sugar content triggering a physiological crisis manifested in the subject by blood pressure, breathing, heart, pulse, and temperature irregularities; flushing and pallor; incontinence and vomiting; moans and screams (referred to in the professional literature as “noisy excitement”); hunger (“hunger excitement”); sobbing, salivation, and sweating; restlessness; shaking and spasms, and sometimes convulsions.
The crisis intensified as the subject, after several hours, went into a coma.
Brain-cell destruction occurred when the blood was unable to provide the sugar
essential to the brain's survival; the sugar-starved
brain then began feeding on itself for nourishment. The hour-long coma phase
of the procedure ended with the administration of carbohydrates (glucose and
sugar) by mouth, injection or stomach tube.
If the subject could not be restored to consciousness by this method, he or
she went into what was called “prolonged coma,” which resulted
in even more severe brain damage and sometimes death. According to the United
States
Public Health Service Shock Therapy Survey (October 1941), 122 state hospitals
reported an insulin coma treatment mortality rate of 4.9 percent—121
deaths among 2,457 cases.1
After gaining my freedom, I tried to find out how psychiatrists justified their use of ICT. One of the clearest statements I uncovered came from Manfred Sakel, the Austrian psychiatrist who introduced the insulin method in 1933 and, after arriving in the United States a few years later, became its most active promoter. He “claimed to be a direct descendent of the twelfth-century rabbi, physician, and philosopher Moses Maimonides.”2
In a popular book on the state of psychiatry published in 1942, Dr. Sakel was quoted as follows: “With chronic schizophrenics, as with confirmed criminals, we can’t hope for reform. Here the faulty pattern of functioning is irrevocably entrenched. Hence we must use more drastic measures to silence the dysfunctioning [brain] cells and so liberate the activity of the normal cells. This time we must kill the too vocal dysfunctioning cells. But can we do this without killing normal cells also? Can we select the cells we wish to destroy? I think we can.” (italics in original).3
I didn't see it that way. Combined insulin coma-convulsive treatment was an attempt to break my will, to force me back to an earlier phase of my spiritual and intellectual development. It was also the most devastating, painful and humiliating experience of my life.
Afterwards, I felt that every part of me was less than it had been. Except for memory traces—some titles of the many books I had read, for example— my memory for the three preceding years was gone. The wipe-out in my mind was like a path cut by an eraser across a heavily chalked blackboard. I did not know that John F. Kennedy was president although he had been elected two and a half years earlier. There were also big chunks of memory loss for experiences and events spanning my entire life; my high school and college education was effectively destroyed. I came to believe that shock treatment was a brainwashing method.
Some years later, I found corroboration for this opinion in a professional journal describing ECT's effect on patients by two psychiatrist-proponents of the procedure: “Their minds are like clean slates upon which we can write.”4
Aside from being a flat-out atrocity, the use of combined insulin coma-convulsive treatment necessarily involved the violation of certain human rights; some are proclaimed in the Bill of Rights, all are cherished in a free society.
1. Freedom from cruel and unusual punishment (Eighth Amendment). If insulin coma treatment is not a torture, nothing is. Readers of the professional literature, however, receive barely a hint of this reality. The barbaric aspects of the procedure, if mentioned at all, are glossed over in understatement and euphemism; for example, one psychiatrist cautioned against allowing new insulin patients to see other patients further along in their treatment, thus saving them “the trauma of sudden introduction to the sight of patients in different stages of coma—a sight which is not very pleasant to an unaccustomed eye.”5
I recall the horror of coming out of the last coma: severe hunger pains, perspiration, overwhelming fear and disorientation, alternating phases of unconsciousness and consciousness, strangers hovering over my strapped-down body (none of whom I recognized although I had been thrown in with them months before), being punctured with needles, drinking heavily-sugared orange juice ravenously, and later being held up by one or two attendants in a shower where the filth was washed away. Brain damage caused by the treatments destroyed my memory of what the previous sessions had been like.
However, I remember what happened a week or two after completing my series when, having returned for lunch from “occupational therapy,” I was sitting in the day room which was separated from the insulin-treatment area by a thick metal door. Suddenly I heard an indescribable, other-worldly scream. The metal door had been left slightly ajar and one of the new patients, a young musician, was undergoing insulin coma down the corridor on the other side of that door, and he was expressing his pain. Almost immediately an attendant shut the door tight, but the scream, now muffled, lingered on for another few seconds. I don't recall any of my own screams; I will never forget his.
2. Freedom of thought (implicit in the First Amendment). The words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., ring as true today as when he first wrote them in 1860: “The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.”6 The brain-damaging force of insulin coma is second only to the lobotomy operation; it impedes the ability to think, to create, and to generate ideas. Every ICT survivor experiences impaired thinking and knows what it means to lose memories, words (you have the idea but can't call to mind the word to fit it) and trains of thought not just once in a while, but repeatedly hour after hour, day after day. I have keenly felt these losses.
3. Freedom of religion (First Amendment). As noted above, the phrase “religious preoccupations” was among the symptoms recorded in my psychiatric records. One of these preoccupations concerned my beard, which the staff at both Napa State and Twin Pines Hospitals had been urging me, without success, to remove. In the midst of the series—after I had undergone 14 insulin comas and 17 electroshocks—the treating psychiatrist wrote my father, “In the last week Leonard was seen by the local rabbi, Rabbi Rosen, who spent a considerable period of time with him discussing the removal of his beard. I felt it was desirable to have the rabbi go over it with him, as Leonard seems to attach a great deal of religious significance to the beard. The rabbi was unable to change Leonard's thinking in this matter.”
At this point, the San Francisco psychiatrist who had been advising my father was brought in to interview me. After noting in the Report of Consultant that I was “essentially as paranoid as ever,” he recommended that “during one of the comas his beard should be removed as a therapeutic device to provoke anxiety and make some change in his body image. Consultation should be obtained from the TP attorney as to the civil rights issues—but I doubt that these are crucial. The therapeutic effort is worth it—inasmuch that he can always grow another.” On March 11, the Doctor's Orders, signed “REJ,” read: “Pts beard to be shaved off & to be given hair cut — observe very carefully today & tonite for any unpredictable behavior re suicidal or elopement [escape].” The same psychiatrist wrote my father ten days later, “Leonard's beard was removed this last week which caused him no great amount of distress....” The shock therapy in combination with the beard-shaving therapy “worked.” I was soon shaving on my own. I have no direct memory of the struggle over my beard or of even having had a beard during this period.
4. Right to be let alone. In a 1928 Supreme Court decision, Olmstead v. United States, Associate Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote, “The makers of our Constitution... conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” Without having been proved guilty of violating anyone else's rights, I had been deprived of my freedom and made to undergo corporal punishment disguised as medical treatment. In the truest sense of the term, I was minding my own business, exercising my right to be let alone. I thought that in the United States this right was protected; I was wrong. That was 40 years ago, but it's still happening as literally millions of innocent people every year are being locked up, for short and long periods of time, in psychiatric facilities where their rights are trampled on and they are subjected to psychiatric treatment against their will or without their fully informed consent.
Aside from the serious and permanent memory loss, other
effects of those nearly eight months of confinement and forced treatment include
a general slowing
of my thought processes and a loss of drive and stamina. But by psychiatric
standards,
I am still “essentially as paranoid as ever.” I still have my “vegetarian
food idiosyncracies.” I have regrown my “big black [now graying]
bushy beard.” And, what is more, I have maintained all my “religious
preoccupations.”
1. Franklin G. Ebaugh, “A Review of the Drastic Shock Therapies
in the Treatment of the Psychoses,” Annals of Internal Medicine, March
1943, p. 294.
2. Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental
Hospital (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), p. 78.
3. Marie Beynon Ray, Doctors of the Mind: The Story of Psychiatry (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1942), p. 250.
4. Cyril J.C. Kennedy and David Anchel, “Regressive Electric-Shock in Schizophrenics
Refractory to Other Shock Therapies,” Psychiatric Quarterly, vol. 22,
1948, p. 318.
5. Alexander Gralnick, “Psychotherapeutic and Interpersonal Aspects of
Insulin Treatment,” Psychiatric Quarterly, vol. 18, 1944, p. 187.
6. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., The Professor at the Breakfast Table (New York:
E.P. Dutton, 1931 [1860]), ch. 5.
After being released from Twin Pines Hospital in 1963, Leonard Roy Frank spent the next six years in study, reeducating himself.
Since the early 1970s he has been active in the psychiatric survivors movement, first as a staff member of Madness Network News (1972) and then as the co-founder of the Network Against Psychiatric Assault (1974)—both dedicated to ending abuses in the psychiatric system.
He is the editor of The History of Shock Treatment (1978) and several books of quotations: Influencing Minds: A Reader in Quotations (1995), Random House Webster's Quotationary (1998), Random House Webster's Wit & Humor Quotationary (2000), and Freedom: Quotes and Passages from the World's Greatest Freethinkers (2003). [See that one in our Attitude Catalog, p. 45. — ed.
Last month, Random House released five more of his books: Inspiration, Love, Money, Wisdom, and Wit, each with the subtitle The Greatest Things Ever Said.
He has resided in San Francisco since 1959 and may be reached at lfrank@igc.org.
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