Leonard roy frank biography

Leonard Roy Frank gets waylaid on the path to self-discovery

A revolution took place in Cuba, the Cold War was in full throttle, the Eisenhower era was drawing to a close, and I moved to San Francisco where I would soon find myself in a hellish world of imprisonment and torture. It was

Born in Brooklyn 27 years earlier, I had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. After a two-year hitch in the Army, I managed and sold real estate in New York City and southern Florida for several years. Despite a poor record, I continued working in real estate in San Francisco.

A few months into my new job, things began to change for me, more internally, at least at first, than externally. Like so many of my generation, I was highly conventional in thought and lifestyle, and my goal in life was material success&#;I was a Fifties Yuppie. But I began to discover a new world within myself, and the mundane world, seemed, comparatively speaking, drab and unfulfilling. I lost interest in my job and, not surprisingly, soon lost the job itself. Thereafter, I spent long hours reading and reflecting.

The book that influenced me most at that time was An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas K. Gandhi. I adopted for myself his principles of nonviolent resistance, his interest in religion, and his practice of vegetarianism. In that book and other of his writings, Gandhi referred to the works that had helped shape his life. I was soon reading the Bhagavad Gita, the New Testament, Henry David Thoreau's &#;Essay on Civil Disobedience,&#; Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You, and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In keeping with the subtitle of Gandhi's autobiography, I started my own experimenting. This led to a complete reevaluation of my previously held values. Towards this end I broadened my reading to include, among many others, the Old Testament, Lao-tzu (Way of Life), William Jam

I was raised in Brooklyn, New York. I went to a private high school, and then went on to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, where I graduated with a major in marketing in I then went on to serve in the Army, stationed at Fort Myers in Virginia in a presidential honor guard. Following that, I returned to New York City, where I obtained a real estate license and was in real estate sales for two or three years in that area and in Florida. In , I came out to San Francisco. I had in mind at that time that I would continue my career as a real estate salesman.

I was working for a real estate firm in downtown San Francisco. During that period, I became interested in reading, particularly in subjects that previously had not interested me all that much: politics, history, religion, psychology and philosophy. Suddenly these things seemed just illuminating. I remember the book that really turned me around was Mohandas Gandhi’s autobiography, subtitled “My Experiment With the Truth.” That book led me to become a vegetarian and to get interested in religion, spirituality, and nonviolence.

My whole outlook and attitude changed. Previously I had been very business oriented and materialistic. I had now become much more idealistic and much more interested in spirituality. I became more and more interested in reading and studying, and less and less interested in real estate. I soon lost my job; I had lost all interest in brick and mortar. I was determined to get at the core of these new ideas and to put them into practice in my own life.

My parents did not appreciate the changes that I was going through. While I saw these changes as an indication of progress, they saw these changes as a step backward for me. They were very, very concerned, urging me to see a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist to get some help. I proceeded to tell them that I didn’t need that kind of help.

Well, that went on for about two years and my parents

From The Files of
Leonard Roy Frank
()

Leonard Roy Frank, born in Brooklyn in , graduated from the of the in While committed to a private psychiatric facility near in , 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 () and then co-founding Network Against Psychiatric Assault  (), both based in and and opposed to all forms of coercive, fraudulent psychiatric interventions. He’s currently a member of the () based MindFreedom International.  In he edited and self-published The History of Shock Treatment. Since , he has edited Influencing Minds: A Reader in Quotations (, Feral House), Random House Webster's Quotationary (New York, Random House, ), and seven other collections of quotations for Random House. In , he edited The Electroshock Quotationary, an e-book (). In September , 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 (). Since , he’s resided in .  Leonard passed away in mid-January, 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

Articles, Etc., By Leonard Roy Frank

• The Journey of Transformation, by Leonard Roy Frank, Street Spirit, April,   (5 Megabytes)
• Electroshock Quotationary, June
• Leonard Roy Frank exchange with Eli Wiesel -- American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting
• Electroshock Abuses, AHP Perspectives, Association for Humanistic Psychology, January

For the photographer, see Leonard Frank (photographer).

Leonard Roy Frank (July 15, – January 15, ) was an American human rights activist, psychiatric survivor, editor, writer, aphorist, and lecturer.

Frank lived in San Francisco from until his death, where he managed an art gallery before he began collecting quotations. It was Leonard Roy Frank who discovered notable artist G. Mark Mulleian in and displayed his work at the Frank gallery.

Frank graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in He then served in the US Army and later sold real estate. In , in San Francisco, Frank was committed to a psychiatric hospital for being 'paranoid schizophrenic' and given insulin shock therapy treatments and dozens of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments.

By , Frank worked at Madness Network News. In December , he and Wade Hudson founded Network Against Psychiatric Assault (NAPA), a patients' and survivors' advocacy group.

Of ECT, Frank wrote: "Over the last thirty-five years I have researched the various shock procedures, particularly electroshock or ECT, have spoken with hundreds of ECT survivors, and have corresponded with many others. From all these sources and my own experience, I have concluded that ECT is a brutal, dehumanizing, memory-destroying, intelligence lowering, brain-damaging, brainwashing, life-threatening technique."

Due to his years of anti-ECT testimony and activism, Linda Andre wrote in Doctors of Deception, "If Marilyn Rice was the Queen of Shock, Leonard Roy Frank was the King."

The author Peter Lehmann called Frank "one of the important people who helped to develop the theory and practice of French: humanistic antipsychiatry" and mentioned him in Lehmann's "Expression of Gratitude on the Occasion of the Award of an Honorary Doctoral Degree by the School of Psychology of