Stop the forceful use of Electroshock

As a young boy I was a patient at Willmar Regional Treatment Center. I remember seeing adult patients walking the yard or in the canteen from the adult units. Some of them were there permantly because of ECT many years behavior and the damage it did to their brains. They were mentally "vegatative."I was afraid of them. I feard becoming like them one day. And early this year I was civilly commited to the Minnesota DHS at Anoka Regional Treatment Center where I met and lived in the same unit as a young man who had been through a year or so of ECT. He was given ECT to both sides of his brain. In todays use of ECT one sider is almost always the way it is done. The patient was a zombie-he could not function mentally. He couldn't talk well, nor remember almost anything Some times he spent days forced to lay in hs bed most of the day. He drulled, stared blankly infront of him, and was hard to be around out of empathy. Other patients said he was not like that when he came their. They said he was always talking, making trouble, and joking around. He was a behavioral problem for the staff. After almost a year of his ECT treatment he was lost- he was like a ghost struggling to attach to this world. I will never forget him. I will never forget that a psychiatrist can get a judge to sign papers that give them power to take away our minds either. I am afraid that my own depression will one day lead to.