PREPARE TO BE SHOCKED

That's the answer. The question: what do Turkish mental patients hear most frequently from their doctors?

Turkey's psychiatric hospitals are riddled with horrific abuses, including the use of raw electroshock as a form of punishment, according to a human rights report issued in Istanbul on Wednesday, just days before Turkey begins formal talks to join the European Union.

The report, by Mental Disability Rights International, a Washington-based group, came after several visits in the past year by the group's investigators to psychiatric hospitals and other facilities for people with developmental or mental disabilities.

While the report details many types of abuses, it said the most disturbing involved the use of electroconvulsive therapy without anesthesia to treat a wide range of illnesses in adults and children. The World Health Organization has called for a ban on "unmodified" or "direct" use of the treatment and states that children should never be subjected to it in any form.

"If we use anesthesia the E.C.T. won't be as effective, because they won't feel punished," the report quotes the director of the electroconvulsive therapy center as saying.

Looks like Turkey has its own abu Ghraib thing going here, run by highly trained professionals instead of amateurs.