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Abuse Of Electroshock Found In Turkish Mental Hospitals

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  • Abuse Of Electroshock Found In Turkish Mental Hospitals

    ABUSE OF ELECTROSHOCK FOUND IN TURKISH MENTAL HOSPITALS
    By Craig S. Smith

    New York Times
    Sept 29 2005

    PARIS, Sept. 28- Turkey's psychiatric hospitals are riddled with
    horrific abuses, including the use of raw electroshock as a form of
    punishment, according to a human rights report issued in Istanbul on
    Wednesday, just days before Turkey begins formal talks to join the
    European Union.

    Photo: Mental Disability Rights International Patients languished on
    the grounds of Bakirkoy Psychiatric Hospital

    Photo: Mental Disability Rights International At the Saray
    Rehabilitation Center, investigators from a human rights group saw
    children with plastic water bottles taped over their hands to keep
    them from biting their fingers. The group found abuses in Turkish
    mental hospitals to include use of electroshock, without anesthetics,
    as punishment.

    The report, by Mental Disability Rights International, a
    Washington-based group, came after several visits in the past year
    by the group's investigators to psychiatric hospitals and other
    facilities for people with developmental or mental disabilities.

    While the report details many types of abuses, it said the most
    disturbing involved the use of electroconvulsive therapy without
    anesthesia to treat a wide range of illnesses in adults and children.

    The World Health Organization has called for a ban on "unmodified" or
    "direct" use of the treatment and states that children should never
    be subjected to it in any form.

    The therapy, in which an electrical current is passed through the
    brain, was developed in the 1930's and continues to be used in
    mainstream psychiatry to treat a limited number of ailments. But it
    is normally administered with anesthesia and muscle relaxants.

    Without them it can be painful, terrifying and dangerous. Patients
    can break jaws or crack vertebrae during the induced seizures. The
    report quotes a 28-year-old patient at Bakirkoy Psychiatric Hospital
    in Istanbul as saying, "I felt like dying."

    The Health Ministry, which is responsible for psychiatric hospitals,
    said it had not yet read the report and declined to comment, other
    than to say that the director of the electroconvulsive therapy center
    at Bakirkoy denied administering unmodified electroshocks there.

    But on one day in April when the rights group's staff visited the
    center, 24 people received such treatments, the report said.

    Technicians at the center told the group that only patients who
    had broken bones, presumably from previous treatments, were given
    anesthesia.

    The human rights group estimated that unmodified shock treatment was
    used on nearly a third of patients undergoing psychiatric crises at
    the government-run hospitals, including children as young as 9. The
    treatment is also administered for many illnesses, like postpartum
    depression, that are not generally considered by the international
    psychiatric community to warrant electroshock.

    The investigators also found that the treatment was used as
    punishment. The report describes patients being dragged to electroshock
    therapy in straitjackets and forcibly held down during the procedure.

    "If we use anesthesia the E.C.T. won't be as effective, because
    they won't feel punished," the report quotes the director of the
    electroconvulsive therapy center as saying.

    Referring to that statement, Eric Rosenthal, the founder of the rights
    group, said in a telephone interview from Istanbul, "That was one
    of most horrifying statements I've ever heard in 12 years of doing
    this work."

    Turkey has been criticized for using unmodified electroshock before.

    In 1997 the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture called on
    Turkey to stop the practice, and the Health Ministry promised to do so.

    Now, the new report is likely to complicate Turkey's talks with the
    European Union, because of the organization's strict human rights
    requirements for membership.

    "There's no question that what's described in the report counts as
    torture under the European convention and shouldn't exist in Turkey
    or anywhere in Europe," said Richard Howitt, a British member of
    the European Parliament who sits on the joint European Union-Turkish
    parliamentary committee.

    He said he would bring up the report as part of the membership
    negotiations, because to join, a nation must be judged to follow
    democratic principles, respect human rights and be on its way to
    meeting certain economic and institutional standards.

    The report, which includes testimony from former patients and videos
    taken inside some institutions, reported other abuses as well.

    Much of the documented abuse took place in orphanages and
    rehabilitation centers for children with developmental or intellectual
    disabilities. Investigators saw emaciated and neglected children,
    many of whom had behavioral problems that were likely to have
    been the result of mistreatment rather than pre-existing illness,
    Mr. Rosenthal said.

    "We saw children who were essentially abandoned, starving, tied down to
    their beds," he said, adding that investigators had not been allowed
    to see the worst wards.

    Photographs and videos taken at the Saray Rehabilitation Center,
    the largest of Turkey's government-run rehabilitation centers, show
    skeletal children, some with plastic water bottles taped over their
    hands to prevent them from biting their fingers. Other children with
    only minor disabilities are mixed in with the rest.

    Although the center keeps no mortality records, a footnote in
    the report notes that the large number of admissions without a
    corresponding number of discharges suggests that many children die
    at the center.

    "We believe there's a very high death rate in these facilities," Mr.

    Rosenthal said.

    Officials at Turkey's Directorate for Social Services and Child
    Protection could not be reached for comment.

    The report said that there were no enforceable laws in Turkey to
    protect mentally ill people from arbitrary detention or forced
    treatment and that there were virtually no community services that
    might keep them out of institutions. As a result, according to the
    report, thousands are institutionalized for life.

    Mr. Rosenthal founded Mental Disability Rights International in 1993.

    It now has a staff of nine people, including one in Turkey.

    Massacres of Armenians Recalled

    STRASBOURG, France, Sept. 28 (Reuters) - The European Parliament gave
    only a grudging blessing on Wednesday to membership talks with Turkey
    starting next week and said Ankara must recognize the massacres of
    Armenians during the years around 1915 as genocide before it can join
    the Euopean Union.

    The resolution, which is nonbinding, was a political slap for Turkey,
    which insists that the killings, carried out by the Ottoman Empire,
    did not constitute genocide.
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