Leonard Roy Frank, born in Brooklyn in 1932, graduated from the
WhartonSchool of the
University
of Pennsylvania in 1954. While
committed to a private psychiatric facility near
San Francisco in 1963, he was forced to undergo 50
insulincoma and 35 electroconvulsive procedures, which caused him severe memory
loss, wiping out the preceding three-year-period and effectively destroying his
high school and college educations.Following years of study reeducating himself, he became
active in the psychiatric survivors movement first by becoming a staff member of
Madness Network News (1972) and then
co-founding Network Against Psychiatric Assault(1974), both based in San Francisco and
Berkeley
and opposed to all forms of coercive, fraudulent psychiatric interventions. He’s
currently a member of the Eugene (Oregon)
based MindFreedom International.In
1978 he edited and self-published The History of Shock Treatment. Since
1995, he has edited Influencing Minds: A Reader in Quotations (Los
Angeles, Feral House), Random House Webster's
Quotationary (New York, Random House, 1998), and seven other collections of
quotations for Random House. In 2006, he edited The Electroshock
Quotationary, an e-book (http://www.endofshock.com/102C_ECT.PDF).
In September 2011, he co-published with Thomas Szasz and edited,
The Szasz Quotationary: The Wit and Wisdom
of Thomas Szasz, a Kindle e-book. He began tweeting in October 2012 (https://twitter.com/FrankAphorisms).
Since 1959, he’s resided in San Francisco.
Leonard passed away in mid-January, 2015 at age 82 following a fall. The
cause of the fall is not known as of this writing, but the doctor thinks it was
the result of some "event" such as a stroke. For remembrances of
Leonard see,
In
Memoriam: Leonard Roy Frank at
MadInAmerica.Com.
