You Don't Know Jack

I implore you to stop reading at any point and not follow the link. What I'm showing here is much more benign than the rest of the story.

There but for the grace...

The things that have been done to Colleen Kelley's brain sound like scenes out of a retro psych ward where ice-pick lobotomies are still the norm and Nurse Ratched doles out electroshock. Her brain has been scanned, doused in experimental drugs, magnetized, and electrified. She has been cut open, prodded, and implanted with foreign objects. Her memory has been erased.

But Kelley isn't a "psychiatric survivor" fighting to ban electroshock, or a memoirist detailing her horror stories of a time long ago. She is an educated woman, never hospitalized or locked in a mental ward, who has spent the last decade volunteering for treatments that her doctor calls the "experimental edge of psychiatry." Kelley has submitted willingly and continues to offer her brain up for experimentation. "I want my brain drained," she wrote to the Voice during a series of e-mail and phone interviews detailing her years as a guinea pig for psychiatric experiments in Maryland and New York. She suffers from a severe, stubborn depression that doesn't respond to medication. Her doctor of 15 years describes her as chronically suicidal, and Kelley talks about offing herself as easily as others might speak about trouble with their in-laws.

Sometimes I think eclectic is not so good.

Via Village Voice.