Ted Chabasinski was born on March 20,1937 and is an American psychiatric survivor, human rights activist and attorney who lives in Berkeley, California.
13 Facts About Ted Chabasinski
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Ted Chabasinski subsequently trained as a lawyer and became active in the psychiatric survivors movement.
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Ted Chabasinski was born in New York to a Polish-born immigrant woman.
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Ted Chabasinski was placed in the care of a foster family in the Bronx, New York.
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Ted Chabasinski was one of the first children ever to receive ECT, which was then given in its unmodified form without either anaesthetic or muscle relaxant.
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Ted Chabasinski received ECT daily for a period of about three weeks, comprising approximately twenty sessions of the procedure.
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Ted Chabasinski was discharged from the Rockland State Hospital at the age of seventeen.
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Ted Chabasinski eventually went to college where he qualified as a lawyer.
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Ted Chabasinski has been active in the psychiatric survivors movement since 1971.
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Ted Chabasinski was the author of the ballot question and, along with fellow psychiatric survivor Leonard Roy Frank, he was a leader in the campaign.
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At the time Ted Chabasinski argued that the enforcement of the law governing consent to ECT in psychiatric facilities in the state of California was so lax that a total ban on the procedure was required.
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Ted Chabasinski and his fellow campaigners claimed that ECT was a dangerous and barbaric treatment that could cause either long or short term memory loss, brain damage and that the procedure could even result in death.
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Ted Chabasinski was a board member of the successor organisation to the SCI, MindFreedom International and for which he acted as an attorney.