Ted Chabasinski

In January 2007 Chabasinski acted as the attorney for the late psychiatric survivor activist and author Judi Chamberlin, the medical journalist and author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, Robert Whitaker, and the director of MindFreedom International David Oaks in opposing a motion by Eli Lilly to extend an injunction to conceal documents that revealed that the company had known for the previous decade of the potentially lethal effects of Zyprexa and had engaged in an illegal off-label marketing campaign.

In June 1983 Donald McCullom, an Alameda County Superior Court Judge, issued an injunction on the implementation of the ban on ECT. Initiative T. was overturned shortly thereafter following a successful legal challenge initiated by the American Psychiatric Association, on the constitutionality of the measure.

Chabasinski was Chairman of the Coalition to Stop Electroshock which in 1982 qualified an initiative measure, titled Initiative T., for municipal ballot to make the application of electroconvulsive therapy a misdemeanour in Berkeley, California, punishable with a $500 fine or up to six months imprisonment. Chabasinski was the author of the ballot question and, along with fellow psychiatric survivor Leonard Roy Frank, he was a leader in the campaign. The campaign group, supported by human rights organisations such as the Berkeley-based ex-patient group Network Against Psychiatric Assault, consisted of some 250 people approximately half of whom were former psychiatric patients with the majority of the remainder consisting of students from Berkeley and individual doctors who were opposed to ECT. The coalition's entire campaign fund was in the region of $1,000. The American Psychiatric Association provided funds of $15,000 to campaign against the initiative. 2,500 people petioned in support of the initiative exceeding the 1,400 signatures required to put the motion on the ballot.

The ballot was held on Tuesday 2 November 1982 and the measure passed with 25,380 voters, or 61.7 percent, supporting the ballot calling for a ban on ECT while 15,756 residents, or 38.2 percent, voted against the measure. Giving his perspective on why the measure had passed so resoundingly, Chabasinski stated that: "I think it's a very sympathetic issue ... Basically, they're going ahead and causing brain damage just to subdue people." Speculating on the possibility of extending the ban across the state of California and alluding to the wider aims behind the campaign he also said: "To be honest, this is one way of having a referendum on mental patients' rights and the way they are treated".

During the campaign dozens of ex-psychiatric patients gave testimony against electroshock at a Berkeley City Council hearing. Protests were also held outside the Herrick Hospital, then the only facility in Berkeley where ECT was provided. In 1981 that facility administered ECT to 45 individuals. In order to collect and exceed the requisite number of signatures required to place Initiative T. on the ballot paper, members of the coalition campaigned outside supermarkets and went from door to door soliciting support.

Chabasinski has been active in the psychiatric survivors movement since 1971.

In 1947, Bender published on 98 children aged between four and eleven years old who had been treated in the previous five years with intensive courses of ECT. These children received ECT daily for a typical course of approximately twenty treatments. This formed part of an experimental trend amongst a cadre of psychiatrists to explore the therapeutic impact of intensive regimes of ECT, which is also known as either regressive ECT or annihilation therapy. In the 1950s Bender abandoned ECT as a therapeutic practice for the treatment of children. In the same decade the results of her published work on the use of ECT in children was discredited after a study showing that the condition of the children so treated had either not improved or deteriorated.

In 1944, at six years of age, Chabasinski, then a shy and withdrawn child, was taken from his foster family and committed to the children's ward of the psychiatric division of the Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, New York. While in this ward, known as Unit PQ6, he was brought under the care of the celebrated child psychiatrist Lauretta Bender, now deceased, who is the clinician commonly credited with founding the study of childhood schizophrenia in the United States. She formally diagnosed Chabasinski as suffering from schizophrenia. He was one of the first children ever to receive ECT, which was then given in its unmodified form without either anaesthetic or muscle relaxant. Despite the strenuous protests of his foster parents against the treatment, he underwent ECT under a regressive and experimental protocol where the treatment was given at a more intensive frequency than was the norm for shock therapy. Chabasinski received ECT daily for a period of about three weeks, comprising approximately twenty sessions of the procedure.

Ted Chabasinski (born March 20, 1937) is an American psychiatric survivor, human rights activist and attorney who lives in Berkeley, California. At the age of six, he was taken from his foster family's home and committed to a New York psychiatric facility. Diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia, he underwent intensive electroshock therapy (now termed electroconvulsive therapy or ECT) and remained an inmate in a state psychiatric hospital until the age of seventeen. He subsequently trained as a lawyer and became active in the psychiatric survivors movement. In 1982, he was a leader in an initially successful campaign seeking to ban the use of electroshock in Berkeley, California.