At this point, it appears that I may never receive an answer to my additional requests for data from the State of Connecticut Office of the Probate Court Administrator’s records on forced electroshock treatment.
Unfortunately, amidst all the confusion created by my learning about the faults in their Biennial Reports regarding patient conservatorship status, missing forms, missing data points, and under-reporting in the early years, it is difficult to draw undeniable conclusions about the State of Connecticut’s district-by-district forced electroshock data I obtained last summer without further data being provided.
And, it would seem from the public’s lacking response that there is nothing at all to be concerned about the fact that forced electroshock is happening in their state.
However, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, and while I hold my breath at the thought of expressing any pleasure in spotting an undeniable concern from age old data, there is no disputing that the question must be answered: what the fuck happened at Connecticut’s West Haven VA?
Forced electroshock requests filed in Connecticut’s West Haven Probate Court District between 2012 and 2024 according to district-by-district data released by the State of Connecticut Office of the Probate Court Administrator last year.
Before the accusations of sensationalism roll in, it is not a presumption at all that 100% of the requests filed in the West Haven Probate District came from the West Haven Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center. It would be best described as an obvious guess since the VA appears to be the home of the one and only inpatient mental health facility in all of West Haven Probate District.
Now that the sensationalism has subsided, the arrival: though my FOIA request to obtain the patient medical records demonstrating any harm from involuntary electroshock at the West Haven VA was rejected, my follow-up was not. I’m now patiently awaiting the documentation that should finally reveal the full story of what happened at the West Haven VA which caused them to turn away from forced electroshock treating their patients (though I, like most people, honestly care not to read shit like this).
Time for the confusion: the psychiatric unit at the West Haven VA is operated by Yale-New Haven Health (see under “Acute Care Firm”). You already don’t know who to “blame”, so I will help clarify. Connecticut state law requires the signature of two physicians and the head of the facility requesting permission from the probate court to perform electroshock involuntarily on a patient (see C.G.S. 17a-543(c) and Form PC-805). It may require me to assert that, in all likelihood, it was the head of the hospital who decided to cut down on how much forced electroshock was happening at the West Haven VA rather than Yale-New Haven Health psychiatrists since there was not a subsequent reduction in the data for New Haven Probate District. As for whether it was Yale-New Haven Health or the VA who was pushing for this thing to happen in the first place, I don’t think that’s much of a question (YNH).
And, for the fault in my ways: I sincerely apologize to those veterans who are survivors of forced electroshock in Connecticut at the West Haven VA who will have their personal medical records released in such a public manner. While I do fully expect they will redact your names, I still believe it to be a willful violation between human beings since I did not ask your permission (anymore than they asked your permission to forcibly shock you). For this (and only for this), I am sorry. I will add additional redactions to the best of my ability to prevent your identities from being inferable, but obviously I cannot prevent another person from making the same FOIA requests and revealing everything themselves.
May we all have a better Memorial Day next year.
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You can dig into the issues with patient conservatorship status, missing forms, missing data points, and under-reporting in the early years by reviewing the CT Shock Data in the public stoptheshockct folder.