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Mental Health Bill [HL]

I also support the amendment. My mother would have been enormously grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, had she lived. From the late 1940s through to 1960 she was regularly given ECT. Initially she used to be strapped down on to a bed with no sedatives or tranquillisers. She bore the scars of the terminals on her forehead for the rest of her life. She also bore the wounds from a leucotomy. The barbarism of psychiatrists in those days is hard to believe. The actual treatments themselves did her no good whatever and, indeed, impaired her memory. Fortunately she was a very doughty lady—I loved her dearly, though we used to have awful fights sometimes—and in the end her last four years were peaceful and calm. She said that those years were the happiest of her life. In those years she had absolutely no medical treatment as far as psychiatrists were concerned.