Ted Chabasinski
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Ted Chabasinski Juris Doctor |
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|---|---|
| Born |
Theodore Chabasinski March 20, 1937 New York City, U.S.A. |
| Residence | Berkeley, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Former Directing Attorney for Mental Health Consumer Concerns |
| Years active | 1971-present |
| Known for | Psychiatric survivor activist Leading successful campaign to ban the use of ECT in Berkeley, California (1982) |
| Board member of | Former President, Support Coalition International |
| Spouse(s) | Judi Chamberlin (1972-1985) |
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 led a successful campaign seeking to ban the use of electroshock in Berkeley, California.
Chabasinski was born in New York to a Polish-born immigrant woman. His father was of Russian descent. In the period just before and after Chabasinski's birth, his birth-mother, who was poor, unmarried and had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, was committed to a psychiatric facility. He was subsequently placed in the care of a foster family in the Bronx, New York. While an intelligent child his social worker from the Foundling Hospital, a Miss Callaghan, thought him withdrawn and suspected that he was exhibiting the initial signs of an incipient schizophrenia. Chabasinski himself attributes this diagnosis to the then widespread opinion that mental illness was hereditary and thus, he contends, the social worker supervising his foster home placement was "looking for symptoms".
In 1944, at six years of age, Chabasinski, then a shy and withdrawn child, was taken from his foster family and committed to the children's ward of the psychiatric division of the Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, New York.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.
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