They strap you down to a special table that flips over. So that you don't choke on your own vomit. Then they inject you with a muscle relaxant. Then they tape electrodes to your forehead and then turn up the juice. When your toes starts twitching, that means you're having a major convulsion, which is what they want. It's what they call "healing".
Why did they do this procedure?
Because...they said I was psychotic depressive.
And, in fact, didn't you attempt suicide three weeks prior to your parents committing you?
It was a mistake.
You took enough pills to cause permanent brain damage.
And the cure for that was for them to pass huge amounts of electric current through my brain. ECT fried my memory. Huge chunks of my childhood gone! It was painful, dehumanizing torture. I'll never know how much damage they did to me.
That sounds like a terrible ordeal. But tell me, after you got out of the hospital, did you ever attempt suicide again?
No.
And now you're a rich, successful musician with millions of fans. Isn't it possible that psychiatry didn't ruin your life...it saved it?
More from this episode
All quotes from this episode →More Law & Order: Special Victims Unit quotes · These quotes come from Wikiquote's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.