Shock!

Donald Ph.D. Ladew

Description

A group of powerful industrialists control key members of government agencies who disburse funds .

They handle any dissent through a network of psychiatric clinics around the country. Their solutions end in death.

Mrs. Hariett Piers, an older woman and a financial investigator catches on. She is incarcerated and killed in one of the clinics.

Her son, Gilbert Piers investigates and finding no legal solution provides his own. Two of the people involved in her murder are killed in electrically spectacular ways.

Lt. Edward Swinburne, Homicide investigator, discovers that it is Piers but before he can proceed has to join Gilbert for the safety of his own family. Together they pursue those involved in the conspiracy with every weapon they can muster.

Sujets

• Detective
• Mystery
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456603298
• Langue: English

Extrait

SHOCK!
 
A Novel
 
by
Donald P. Ladew
 


Shock !
by
Donald Ladew
 
Copyright 2011 Donald Ladew,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0329-8
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 


 
This book is dedicated to the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who have been massively drugged, frozen, electrocuted, tortured and abused by the pseudo physicians and pill dispensers of the Psychiatric profession. Tragically, these most abysmal crimes and abuses continue in every so-called civilized country on this benighted planet. Too many countries use their mental facilities as prisons or re-education camps. These uses are regrettably a natural extension of the profession’s intent – control by force.
To those who have taken the thankless task of bringing these so-called therapists under control, or to justice, I send my sincerest support and affection.
 
Chapter 1
Primum non nocere
Above all do no harm.
—The Hippocratic Oath (The physician’s oath)
 
 
A t 2:00 AM the Cabrillo Springs Psychiatric Hospital & Clinic, unlike its state or metropolitan counterparts, was quiet. Inside, from a small treatment room near the center of the complex, an occasional murmur of sound could be heard above the hum of machinery and air conditioning.
On a good day, or night, as many as one “ treatment ” might be given every ten minutes. In the language of the Harvard Business School, the treatment room was a profit center.
  Finding that the patient has insurance seemed the most common indication for giving electro-shock.” —David S. Viscott, The Making of a Psychiatrist
 
It wasn't surprising that the patients in the back wards of the clinic were quiet. Under the watchful eye of ward nurses and attendants, the prisoner-patients had been given their evening ration of mind-numbing drugs, some powerful enough to buckle the knees of an elephant. This is how psychiatric health care professionals “ subdue and control difficult, uncooperative and unruly patients .” Not surprisingly, all patients are deemed in need of subduing. The issuance of drugs is another profit center.
There were four people in the treatment room: a burly male attendant to subdue and control uncooperative and unruly patients; a psychiatric intern, a psychiatric nurse skilled in the administration of anesthetics and the operation of treatment room equipment; the psychiatrist, who diagnosed the patient's medical-mental illness, and thus prescribed the treatment; and finally, the victim of this medieval ritual, this twentieth-century Auto da Fe.
  An Auto da Fe is literally a “judicial sentence or act of faith,” usually ending with the public burning of heretics. Those who refused to admit wrongdoing, or those who defiantly clung to their "heresies" were burned alive.
 
The woman on the gurney near the entrance lay still except for an occasional twitch of fingers and toes. The age given on her chart was fifty-five. She looked older. Her eyes were open.
To look there was to sink into a well of terror, a terror the drug-paralyzed muscles of her throat could not articulate. And if she could have spoken, what might she have said?
"Why do you torture me? What have I done? Why am I being punished? Won't someone please listen?
  “Terror acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and should be employed in the cure of madness.” —Benjamin Rush The Father of American Psychiatry.
 
She hadn't been allowed any food for eight hours in order to effect full bowel and bladder elimination. As happens frequently in torture, psychiatric therapy and death, the muscles of the bladder and bowels relax, and uncontrolled elimination occurs adding to the degradation. The victim's misery is thought less important than the offended sensibilities of the practitioners.
  "...The major task in nursing care (after shock therapy) is resocialization through habit training. Incontinence (uncontrolled urination) exceedingly common, gradually comes under control through regular toilet periods." —Psychiatric Nursing Multheny & Topalis 4th Ed.
 
The attendant picked her up like a child and transferred her to the treatment table with practiced ease. It resembled an operating table, though less complex; the more obvious differences being the straps placed over the woman's legs, waist and shoulders. The Neanderthal quickly strapped her to the table.
Two large tears hung motionless in the corners of her desperate eyes.
  "It is impossible to keep a shred of human dignity when you are strapped to a table, convulsing and slobbering like an idiot, reduced to a hunk of will-less flesh. My body was no longer mine - they could make it jerk and froth at will. For many years afterward, I tried to remember what it was like to be a person, not a thing, but I couldn't." —Jonika Upton
 
The psychiatrist stood to one side, a modern day Torquemada waiting for his acolytes to prepare the way.
Their movements were precise, choreographed, filled with prediction and consequence. The tortured always remember the agony of waiting.
The nurse pulled the old woman's wispy hair away from her temples, soaked a ball of cotton in acetone and proceeded to scrub her temples methodically. The powerful odor washed over the sensitive nasal tissues of everyone in the room.
Only the old woman, aware of its acrid bite, was beyond comment or question, a prisoner in a dark chemical cell. Yet even there the smell registered on the delicate receptors of the central nervous system, which then transmitted their message to her brain. There, this new data, unevaluated, undifferentiated, added to her increasing sense of doom.
Acetone, besides being a fingernail polish remover, is used in electronic circuits to clean electrical contacts. It is considered helpful as it improves the flow of electric current through such circuits. There, on the altar stone of psychiatric sacrifice, it served the same purpose.
The nurse efficiently removed the woman's wedding ring from her bony finger and tossed it casually into a metal tray. She checked for other articles of jewelry. As the nurse's hand touched the patient's face, it unknowingly triggered a memory from the old woman's youth.
After the birth of her first and only child, she had lain in the hospital room, weary and dazed. She remembered feeling depressed and resentful. It had been a long and difficult delivery.
Then like an essence of peace and validation, two large brown hands, smelling faintly of cigars and cologne, had clasped her face with such tenderness she wept.
Her husband's voice was as clear in her memory as it had been then.
"My princess, we have a son. I am so very, very proud of you." And she felt his lips warm on hers.
Does memory lie? Where is his face? She opened her eyes then and smiled, and he was there, but now...
The nurse turned away and pulled a low cart covered with a nest of black, plastic-coated cables ending in silver-tipped electrodes toward the operating table: An electro-encephalograph machine. Across the top a roll of chart paper waited for needle-like pens to inscribe incomprehensible lines: For what purpose? For what science? Were they there to validate that electro shock destroys the electrical circuits of a healthy body and the spirit that is really a man or woman?
The nurse connected the electrodes to various points of the woman's body to monitor both brain and heart activity.
Up to this point no one spoke. No order had been given, no questions asked. The chief inquisitor had brought the heretic to the stake; her satanic possession would be purged. He stood to one side, empty of emotion, empty of humanity, as empty as the machines of his abysmal trade.
 
As to the use of confessions, Father Spee remarks... "The result is the same whether she [the accused] confesses or not. If she confesses, her guilt is clear; she is executed. All recantation is in vain. If she does not confess, the torture is repeated - twice, thrice, four times... She can never clear herself. The investigating body would feel disgraced if it acquitted a woman; once arrested and in chains she has to be guilty, by fair means or foul.”
—1631 Father Friederich Von Spee Cautio Criminalis (Precautions for prosecutors) The Inquisition
 
You see? How simple. She has to be mad. Her psychiatric inquisitor can never admit that she might be sane…not ever.
The attendant stepped back from the table. The nurse set up an intravenous solution. Finally, something in the environment offered sufficient resistance to provoke a human response on her features. She frowned and muttered something unintelligible, and then quite clearly, "The old bag hasn't any veins." At this point she turned to the high priest.
"Does she get pentothal?" she asked.
He seemed to be considering something, some significant technical point. He didn't look at the patient's chart; he just stared at her with narrow, vulpine eyes.
"No, I don't think so," he said. "We'll do an unmodified bilateral treatment".
Modified ECT is effected by first rendering the patient unconscious and then administering a paralytic drug, such as succinycholine in conjunction with Pentothal sodium. It is also necessary to provide mechanical means for breathing, as with the onset of these drugs, the patient is unable to breath unassisted. Unmodified treatment is done without any of these so-called precautions.
The nurse's head came up a fraction. She hesitated for less than a heart beat.
"This should be interesting," she murmured.
She pushed the mechanical breathing aid away from the table, and then inserted a mouth gag of rubber covered with