THE HIDDEN SIDE OF PSYCHIATRY
By Gary Null, Ph.D.
Mental illness is at an all-time high, with 40 million Americans affected, according to reports emanating from organized psychiatry . But just how accurate is this account? As you will see, people seeking help from the mental health industry are often misdiagnosed, wrongfully treated, and abused. Others are deceptively lured to psychiatric facilities, or even kidnapped. No matter how they arrive, though, once they are there, inmates lose all freedoms and are forced to undergo dangerous but sanctioned procedures, such as electro convulsive therapy and treatment with powerful drugs, that can leave them emotionally, mentally, and physically marked for life. Some psychiatric patents are physically and sexually abused. Millions more are told that they need harmful medications, such as Prozac and Ritalin, but are not told of the seriously damaging side effects of these.
Add to all this a mammoth insurance fraud--which we all pay for--and what we have, in sum, is the dark side of psychiatry. Millions of individuals are being grievously harmed by the mental health profession, and it's time that we as a society faced this.
Fraudulent Practices in Mental Health
Fraud in the mental health industry goes beyond being a problem; it's more like an all-pervasive condition. By way of introductory illustration, let's look at the recent legal problems of a company that owned several chains of psychiatric hospitals , National Medical Enterprises (NME) . As author Joe Sharkey reported in his book Bedlam [1 ,2) , in 1993 the FBI completed its investigation of fraud in NME's psychiatric hospitals and raided several NME facilities, in Texas, Colorado, Indiana, Arizona, Missouri, California, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Sharkey described the extent of the morass into which this enterprise had sunk:
"An estimated 130 lawsuits were filed against NME's psychiatric hospitals by patients . Between 1 992 and early 1993 , three major suits were filed by insurance companies against NME for insurance fraud. These suits identified more than $1 billion in claims paid to NME's psychiatric hospitals. One month after the FBI raids, NME agreed to pay $125 million to settle two of the large insurance company lawsuits . Soon after, they settled the third suit--bringing the total costs in legal fees and settlements to about $3 15 million...
"In April 1994, NME paid almost $375 million in fines to the U.S . Department of Justice for violations of Federal law. NME had announced that it would completely divest itself of its psychiatric hospitals and reserved $237 million to cover the write-offs for selling them. All told, NME's settlements and fines have totaled $927 million."
The NME case was part of a massive investigation which began in 1991 and uncovered systematic fraud within the for-profit psychiatric industry. Insurance company investigators went through 50,000 cases, examining them for fraud, and what they found was startling. 32.6% contained a fraudulent diagnosis to match insurance coverage, while 43.4% of the cases were billed for services not rendered. [New York Times, Nov. 24, 1991, Mental Hospital Chains Accused of Much Cheating on Insurance]
The Washington Post reported that psychiatric hospitals were participating in nationwide “money-making schemes that milked insurance companies, but offered little in the way of treatment...” One of the most obscene aspects of these “schemes” was the targeting of children. Using manipulative advertising campaigns strategically ran when school report cards were issued, Nevada hospitals suggested to parents that poor grades might be the product of mental illness. Psychiatric hospitals would also place “volunteers” in school counseling offices in order to funnel children into the facilities. [Washington Post, Wednesday, April 29, 1991, Mental Health System Abuses Cited in Care of Adolescents]
In testimony presented to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families on April 28, 1992, Texas State Senator Mike Moncrief related a large number of chilling stories from former psychiatric patients and their family members in his state:
“In Texas, we have uncovered some of the most elaborate, aggressive, creative, deceptive, immoral, and illegal schemes being used to fill empty hospital beds with insured and paying patients.” [CCHR Publication, Psychiatry’s Multi-Billion Dollar Fraud, 1993, p. 16]
Testifying before the same Committee, psychiatrist Charles Arnold said a Houston facility asked him to sign admission forms and provide unneeded tests totaling $900,000 per year. Arnold summed up what Representative Patricia Schroeder called “one of the most disgraceful and scandalous episodes in the history of health care in America.”:
“Tragically, a large number of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, therapists, and psychiatric hospitals...have betrayed the public trust...to benefit themselves financially.” [USA TODAY, April 29, 1992, Psychiatric Center’s Shady Tactics Probed]
Building the Machine of Broken Promises
In the wake of WWII, leading psychiatrists testified before the United States Congress that the country needed more psychiatrists so that the world could be delivered from delinquency and unhappiness. In 1962, the same group influenced New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller to support a “master plan for dealing with mental illness” that would provide “more modern care, research and community care” -which was expected to cost New York $20 million for the first year alone. How could he deny such a caring call? Thus, the Governor announced that the “challenge of major mental illness must be met through expanded and improved programs.”
And expand they did - although the amount of improvement could be strenuously debated. The following year, in 1963, swayed by psychiatrist William Menninger, President John F. Kennedy called for a national mental health policy that “relies primarily upon the new knowledge and new drugs...which make it possible for most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities.” He passed a law implementing Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs) which were altruistically passed off by psychiatrists in a calculated campaign as an alternative to the “snake pits” of mental institutions. America thus set the scene for the new wave of “expanded mental health care” that many other countries would follow.
It also set the scene for a massive increase in government funding.
According to Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Thomas Szasz, “The miracle cure Kennedy offered was simply the psychiatric profession’s latest snake oil: Drugs and de-institutionalization.... It sounded grand. Unfortunately, it was a lie. The forces that actually propelled the change were economic and legal, specifically, the transfer of funding for psychiatric services from the states to the federal government, and the shift in legal-psychiatric fashions from long-term hospitalization to long-term drugging.”
During the next 30 years, the cost of running the CMHCs and psychiatric outpatient clinics skyrocketed more than 6,800% - from $140 million in 1969 to $9.75 billion in 1994. And the national mental health budget soared from $3.2 billion in 1969 to $33.1 billion in 1994 - a 934% increase. In 1999, it was $80 billion. To meet this created demand, the 1950s through the ‘70s saw federal grants for the training of psychiatrists exceed $2 billion.
In Henry Foley and Steven Sharfstein’s Madness and Government, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the authors candidly state: “Naturally, the public expected a return on its investment.... The extravagant claims of enthusiasts - that new treatments were highly effective, that all future potential victims of mental illness and their families would be spared the suffering, that great economies of money would soon be realized - were allowed to pass unchallenged by the professional [psychiatric] side of the professional-political leadership. Promising more than could reasonably be delivered became a way of life for this [APA] leadership.”
A further boon to the industry was the introduction of Medicare insurance (for the elderly) and Medicaid (for the poor) in 1965. Medicare reimbursements for mental hospitalization in general hospitals were unlimited. And the heavily lobbied State legislatures began compelling the health insurance industry to cover the cost of hospital treatment for mental illness. By 1985, a majority of states had enacted mandatory mental health coverage laws. This caused a boom in the number of “for-profit” psychiatric hospitals.
Joe Sharkey, author of Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy points out, “In 1965, when Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, the total U.S. health-care bill was $65 billion; in 1993, it would be $939 billion.”
A significant portion of these proceeds made its way into psychiatric pockets. In 1984, there were 220 private psychiatric hospitals; by 1990, there were 466. By the end of the 1980s, four psychiatric-hospital corporations controlled about 80% of the industry and as Sharkey points out, their “focus in treatment was decisively on customers with insurance.”
The growth of private for-profit psychiatric hospitals directly parallels the increase in mental health coverage mandates. In 1991, Richard Lamm, the former Governor of Colorado called psychiatric hospitals “the new cash cow,” adding, “There are so many bloodsuckers in this. When we talk about psychiatric hospitals, we’re not talking about health care, we’re talking about gaming the system.” Likewise, Representative Schroeder in 1992 found “a systematic plan to bilk patients of their hard earned dollars, strip them of their dignity, and leave them worse off than they were before they went for help.” [CCHR, Psychiatry: Committing Fraud, 1999, p.7-9]
Community Mental Health Fraud These are not the only avenues open for psychiatric fraud to take place. In 1990, a congressional committee issued a report estimating that Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs) had diverted between $40 million and $100 million to improper uses, and that a quarter of all CMHCs had so thoroughly failed to meet their obligations as to be legally subject to immediate recovery of federal funds. Various CMHCs had built tennis courts and swimming pools with their federal construction grants and, in one instance, used a federal staff grant to hire a lifeguard and swimming instructor.
In another case, federal mental health funds, which were supposed to build centers and provide services to the poor, were diverted to volleyball courts, computer rooms, and for unrelated services that made the hospitals’ illegal profits.
The misuse of funds continues despite the congressional report. In September 1998, Medicare barred 80 CMHCs in nine states from serving the elderly and disabled after investigators found patients had been charged $600 to $700 a day while watching television and playing bingo, instead of receiving any care.
In the United States alone, between $20 billion and $40 billion a year is defrauded in the multi-billion-dollar mental health field. Put this into human terms. This is a shocking waste. This is enough money to hire between 500,000 and 1.1 million new teachers; 1 million poor families could enjoy the warmth and security of owning their own home, or hot meals could be provided to each of the country’s 33.8 million elderly citizens over the age of 65 for nine months out of that year.
While the financial waste is grim, the cost in human lives and misery is much more appalling. As you will see, the mental health industry commits not only financial fraud, but even destructive fraud in the areas of diagnosis and treatment. And in this game the stakes are considerably higher than dollars. [CCHR, Psychiatry: Committing Fraud, 1999, p. 9]
Insurance Scams
The wrongdoings of NME are not the exception; indeed, insurance fraud seems to be the bread and butter of the mental health industry . Scams occur whenever a psychiatrist or a psychiatric institution bills Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance companies for work they didn't do, for unnecessary or bogus treatments, or for patients confined against their will. Here are a few examples.
Patient Brokering
Consider this story, carried by the Los Angeles Times in 1994 [3].
"Michael quickly realized that A Place For US wasn't a place for him. Overweight and suffering from stress , the New Yorker had flown cross country to attend what was advertised as a weight loss clinic in southern California. The airfare was free and the treatment, he was told, was fully covered by his Blue Cross plan. But when Michael reached Los Angeles, he was shocked to see himself booked into a psychiatric hospital in a rundown section of [town) where he was diagnosed as suffering from psychotic depression and bulimia, conditions he denies ever having. Then he was told he couldn't leave. Michael is one of many stories emerging from federal and state lawsuits in Los Angeles in which insurers accuse A Place For Us of enlisting doctors and hospital staff to falsify diagnosis and medical records in order to obtain payment for treatment that, whatever its value to patients, was not covered by their health plans."
Michael's story is not an isolated incident. Overweight people are frequent targets of insurance scams. Patient brokers fraudulently advertise 1-800 numbers on television, and people call in thinking that they are talking to health spa representatives. In actuality, they are speaking to sales agents of psychiatric facilities whose only motive is to determine whether or not potential clients have insurance, since the size of their commission depends upon how many patients they can get into the hospital and how long they can keep them there.
It's hard to believe that this is going on in America, but the reality is that, as a result of gross deception by sales agents , people are frequently unaware of the fact that they are about to enter psychiatric institutions . If an unsuspecting party has coverage , the person is flown free to a facility , usually located in Florida or California. A limo awaits at the airport, and the place seems very accommodating until the person actually arrives at the facility and is locked up against his or her will. Once the person realizes what is going on, it's too late. People who become upset and attempt to leave can be threatened or diagnosed as combative.
Civil litigation attorney Randy Lakel works pro bono to represent patients who were voluntarily committed to psychiatric facilities by deceptive patient brokers. He describes a case involving two men from eastern Pennsylvania who were approached by people in the crowd at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting and taken aside. [4] The brokers suggested to them that maybe they needed a little extra help, which could be offered by professionals at overeaters' clinics. The men were lured to the institution under false pretenses and then locked up.
Lakel believes that the problem has reached huge proportions: " . . . There are federal grand juries investigating this. I've also spoken to general counsel from very large insurance companies that have called me up to inquire whether their insurance company was involved in any of my investigations. . . The general impression I got from the mention of a grand jury investigation and the general counsel from a large insurance company was that it was not an isolated incident that I was dealing with."
The broken world of patient brokering encompasses more than fat farm fraud; it affects people who might need help with all types of problems . A nine-month investigation of deceptive brokering practices conducted by Florida's St. Petersburg Times was enlightening--and upsetting. [5] It was found that patient brokers sometimes share their finder's fees with school counselors who help provide likely young candidates for the brokers'. institutions, or with public health workers, union representatives, or police and probation officers who steer prospective patients their way. Finder's fees can be as high as $3000 per patient, it was found. Another investigation finding was that patients are sometimes given false diagnoses, for insurance purposes. This is not surprising. The trouble is (on a personal level, and letting alone the issue of massive fraud!) these false diagnoses of mental illness can return to haunt patients throughout their lives. Indeed, according to Randy Lakel, the worst part of the problem is having a psychiatric record for life:
"Once people are committed, it goes on their insurance record. These people. . . are appalled that they now have a psychiatric record for the rest of their lives . It can interfere with any kind of employment opportunity . One of the people I talked to was a professional in the medical field. In her application, she was afraid that they were going to ask her if she ever had psychiatric commitment. How do you get that off the record? That, from a legal point of view, is clearly a damage . " [4)
A disturbing aspect of patient brokers and referral services is that they are largely unregulated. As the St. Petersburg Times reported [5) , in Florida and other states , referral personnel do not need licenses or special training before they can deal with the sick and the troubled. So people with criminal records are among the brokers, many of whom will do whatever it takes to get one more body into a treatment center.
Says Paul McDevitt, a licensed Massachusetts mental health counselor [5]:
"These people have no ethics at all. They're morally bankrupt. They're like the grave robbers in old England who provided cadavers for the medical schools . The grave robbers of today are taking the bodies of those so confused as to be dead and shipping them out to treatment centers where they never get well. And the doctors who are the pillars of society are still reaping the benefits and still never asking where the bodies come from.
Bogus and Nonexistent Treatments
Psychiatric facilities consistently charge consumers for nontherapeutic treatments or services not performed. Adolescent facilities are common perpetrators of this abuse. One Texas hospital, for example, billed insurance companies $40 a day for relaxation therapy. This treatment, which simply consisted of turning on Muzac while teenagers were getting undressed, was actually far more exorbitant when you consider that each patient's insurance company was billed that price for one person turning on the Muzac one time.
Bruce Wiseman is president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, an organization that champions mental health consumer protection [6) . He can provide a plethora of examples of how psychiatrists rip off the system. Wiseman tells of a Texas psychiatrist who was known for his hundred dollar handshake. All he would do was walk by the beds of various patients, shake hands with them, and then bill each person's insurance company a hundred dollars. Another investigation discovered that charges for nutritional counseling were to cover the person going to lunch. Insurance companies are also charged for individual
therapy when a group of people are placed in a room together and told to scream at each other for a couple of hours. "These would be a little bit funny if they weren't so devastating in terms of what they do to insurance premiums and our taxes . " [7]
Wiseman states that psychiatrists collect $600,000 to 900,000 a year on bogus or nonexistent treatments. "We have plenty of cases where they just bill the insurance company or the government for treatment that was never given. They don't even see the patient and they send the bills in. " [7)
Abusive Treatments
The scenario worsens when you consider that economic exploitation is often coupled with physical abuse. Wiseman tells how an adolescent facility in Reno tormented a 15-year old boy and then billed his parents' insurance company $400,000:
"They would drug this kid with Haldol, a so-called anti-psychotic drug, until he was in a stupor, and then tie him in four-point restraints. They would tie his hands and feet to the bed, and then tickle him until he was hysterical. For that "treatment" this child's parents' insurance company was billed $400,000, and the insurance company paid it! If anyone does to a child what the psychiatrist does, it is called child abuse. But here the insurance company pays almost half a million dollars for it. This is the kind of treatment and insurance fraud that exists. " [8)
This is not an isolated incident, Wiseman explains, but typical of what goes on:
"In the Reno facility, children are subject to frequent take-downs. If a kid smarts off' or jumps the guards, he or she is physically abused. One patient in a Texas hospital had her legs strapped to a chair for four hours because she was moving her legs. They called it purposeful exercise, which she was not supposed to do. Kids are made to stand and look at a wall for 16 hours a day for months on end. There is also sexual abuse regularly going on in these hospitals. " [8]
Nickie Saizon, who regrettably placed her son in a psychiatric facility, says that routine punishments were called treatment. Her insurance company was billed exorbitant amounts for these procedures:
"If they punished them with a time out, they had to sit in a chair in the hallway all day without moving. They charged $37.50 for that. When the kids would get mad and angry, they would have a nurse and counselors surround the kids and tell them, 'Get mad, get it out, have your fit. ' They would keep on until they got mad and really started having a big fit. Then they put them down on the floor, held them there, and cut their shirt off. For that they charged $45 . Then they put them in a room which they call a think tank. The room is bare and empty. There is no carpet, no chairs, nothing. They have to go in there and think over how they should have handled the problem. . . They charged $87.50 for this room. Every time you turned around there were hidden costs. " [9)
Wiseman believes that people would be outraged to learn what really goes on in these institutions: "The general public isn't aware of it, but one would be hard-pressed to walk into any psychiatric hospital and not weep at the 'treatment' that occurs in these places . " [8]
Your Taxes Pay for This
In the final analysis, fraudulent insurance practices hurt taxpayers since the maintenance of moderate insurance rates becomes virtually impossible. Consider these figures. The American public is swindled out of $42 billion a year. That's $3 billion a month, $800 million a week, $1 16 million a day, $4 million an hour, $80,000 a minute, and $1300 a second.
The federal government and the insurance industry are finally waking up to the problem and starting to fight back. In 1993 , seven of the largest insurance companies sued one of the largest psychiatric hospital chains, National Medical Enterprises, for $750 million. In addition, every attorney general now has an assistant attorney general to oversee health care fraud prosecutions. As a result, some progress has been made . Wiseman states:
"Psychiatrists make up 8 percent of doctors , but 1 8 percent of those health care practitioners have been kicked out of the Medicare system for fraud. Last year, $4 1 1 million was paid to the government in fines and penalties for health care fraud and 90 percent of that was paid by psychiatrists or psychiatric institutions." [7]
Although this is a start, it is Wiseman's belief that to truly resolve the problem the public must become more informed about what' 5 going on, and insist on putting an end to the corruption.
Psychiatric Research
Each year, hundreds of millions of tax dollars are wasted on pointless research conducted by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) . For instance, these are examples of the types of studies they are finding under the guise of learning more about sexual behavior: a four-year study of horses masturbating, an eight-year study of castrated quail, a four-year study on the nasal cavities of hamsters during intercourse, a two-year study on the sexual preference and behavior of prairie moles, an 1 1-year study in which female pigeon genitals were stimulated to measure how hormones affect sexual behavior, a 9-year study of maternal licking of the genital region of male versus female ferret babies, a 9-year study on the sexual behavior of lizards, a 23-year study of sexual odors and social factors that affect male Asian monkeys, and a 23-year study on the sexual behavior of male rats as a biological basis for human behavior.
To study the effects of drugs, a 13-year study was undertaken in which rats were given hallucinogens, such as LSD, to see how they react when startled; and a 31 -year study looked at how rhesus monkeys respond to torture while on mind-altering drugs.
The NIMH also carried out a 32-year study on the chemical reactions in the jaw muscles of pigeons to better understand eating disorders in humans.
"This is what the NIMH is doing with our tax dollars, " says Bruce Wiseman. We think it's a travesty, and we think that organization should be eliminated. " [7]
Wiseman goes on to describe an NIMH study on sexual offenders that placed a Florida community at risk: "A few years ago, [NIMH) spent over a million dollars on a program down in Florida where they took 100 known child molesters, showed these guys pornographic material, and then turned them loose on the community to see how they would behave . Then, when these child molesters came back and reported their behaviors to these so-called researchers, they were immune from passing that information along to the authorities. " [7)
If the NIMH were studying how to alleviate mental illness, it would be different. Unfortunately, these studies provide nothing useful to the alleviation of mental suffering. According to Wiseman:
"Billions and billions and billions of dollars are poured into the psychiatric industry . If they could have cured anything, they would have done so over the last few decades. . . . [Psychiatrists) don't actually know what bothers people. Their answer to virtually everything is to drug it. They have convinced governments that they need billions in appropriations. We wonder why we can't balance our budget when studies [such as the above) cost the taxpayers millions and millions of dollars. I don't think there are many Americans who realize that their tax dollars are being spent on studying the nasal cavities of hamsters during intercourse. On the one hand, it's ludicrous. On the other hand, it is destructive and wasteful. " [7]
Inhumane Treatment
Involuntary Commitment
Each year, approximately one and a half million people are taken to psychiatric institutions against their will. That averages out to one person every 75 seconds . Often, there is no reasonable justification for committing a person. According to Bruce Wiseman, psychiatrists commonly make off-the-cuff diagnoses, having no real basis in medical fact, that result in people getting thrown into psychiatric facilities. This is not only possible, but easy to do, as it is sanctioned by state laws . Psychiatrists are given the police power to lock people up against their will. Sometimes, Wiseman states, people are put away for some of the most ridiculous reasons imaginable:
"A man who was picked up was pronounced schizophrenic by a psychiatrist and taken to a hospital, stripped and shocked. Subsequently, they found out that the man was simply speaking Hungarian. . . . That kind of thing goes on, on a very regular basis.
"Legislation has come out of Texas in the last year or so after the 'kidnapping' of a guy named Kyle Williams whose estranged wife apparently talked to a psychiatrist, and probably didn't have kind things to say about him. As a result, the psychiatrist ordered the guy picked up--a totally normal fellow--and he was thrown into a hospital. " [8)
Laws vary, but individuals are usually locked up for at least three days. During that time, they have no constitutional rights, and no access to an attorney or due process of law. Treatment usually consists of drugs, and sometimes electro convulsive therapy. After three days, they are then brought before a judge to determine whether or not they're sane. At this point, chances for release are slim since people are generally not in very good shape after all that has been done to them. Chances for release are far slimmer if the person's insurance pays for treatment. Wiseman reports:
"We get hundreds and hundreds of reports like this: A young mother took her child into a psychiatric hospital for an evaluation and the hospital insisted that the child stay. The mother decided to stay with the child just to comfort her. Then the mother wanted to leave; the hospital wouldn't let her. When she demanded to leave they placed her in a straitjacket and drugged her.
"A fellow was checked into a psychiatric hospital for back pain. Some doctor referred him, thinking that maybe it was psychosomatic. He was thrown into classes on sex abuse and chemical dependency , which had nothing to do with his problem whatsoever. He demanded to go home and they refused to let him.
When he got angry , they diagnosed him as suicidal and involuntarily committed him. Of course, they bill the insurance companies tremendous amounts of dollars." [8]
Concerning insurance companies' bills, while it's true that companies are bilked out of tremendous amounts of money to pay for people in mental hospitals who shouldn't be there, we should not feel entirely sorry for the insurance industry. According to Dr. Duard Bok, a former employee of Psychiatric Hospitals of America, "the insurance companies pay out on one side, but get it back on the other side. They are double-dipping, because they can disregard their billings from patients because they get it back as shareholders. " [10]
Electro convulsive Therapy
History of Electro convulsive Therapy
Shock “treatment” was first used in 1938 by psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti. He developed the procedure after a trip to a local slaughterhouse where he witnessed pigs being electrocuted by metal tongs attached to their heads. The pigs, which rarely died outright from the electrocution, could then be quietly killed and butchered. The measure was taken to make killing the pigs “painless” and “humane.”
Cerletti decided to experiment with animals to see if he could apply what he had seen at the slaughterhouse to humans. He shocked dogs, running currents of electricity in various directions through their heads and entire body. The shocks were increased gradually to find out what it would take to kill an animal. Most of Cerletti’s animals would go into convulsions or become temporarily unconscious. According to Cerletti:
“The animals that received the severest treatment remained rigid...then after a violent convulsive seizure they would lie on their sides for a while, sometimes for several minutes, and finally they would attempt to rise. After many attempts...they would succeed in standing up and making a few steps until they were able to run away. These observations gave me convincing evidence of the harmlessness of a few tenths of a second of application through the head of a 125-volt electric current...At this point I felt we could venture to experiment on man...”
[Leonard Roy Frank, The History of Shock Treatment, 1978, p.8-9]
Evidently, to Cerletti, anything less than fatal was “harmless.”
The first person to ever undergo shock “treatment” was a 39-year-old engineer who had been sent to Cerletti for “observation” after being arrested at a train station for wandering around departing trains without a ticket, according to the police commissioner of Rome. Cerletti described the man as “lucid, well oriented.” Nevertheless, he became Cerletti’s first shock victim. The first jolt hit with force and surprise. At the objections of Cerletti’s staff, he announced that he would shock the man again at a higher voltage to which the engineer pleaded, according to Cerletti’s own account, “Not another one! It’s deadly!” [Leonard Roy Frank, The History of Shock Treatment, 1978, p.9]
Early in its use psychiatrists presented various theories as to how ECT “worked.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders reported that it might be the “due to the discomfort, pain and terror...” connected with convulsive treatments. According to the Journal, “Since this terror is often very real...we were inclined to believe that the patient might have been shocked back into reality by the fury of the assault on him.” [Leonard Roy Frank, The Histoy of Shock Treatment, 1978, p.22]
Creating terror in mental patients was looked upon as “therapeutic” in psychiatry. In 1812, Benjamin Rush stated that, “Terror acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and should be employed in the cure of madness...FEAR, accompanied with PAIN, and a sense of SHAME, has sometimes cured this disease.” To frighten, injure and degrade were, in essence, a goal of early psychiatric “treatment.” [Leonard Roy Frank, The History of Shock Treatment, 1978, p.11]
Cerletti proclaimed the procedure “electroshock”, but as the Citizens Commission of Human Rights points out, the people who profit from it like to call it electro convulsive therapy (ECT), because this sounds a little better. Regardless of the label you give it, what this treatment amounts to is the destruction of brain cells by electricity. In other words, it's physician-induced brain damage.
This extreme treatment is given for severe depression, and it does work--in the short term. That's because a facet of the brain damage caused is memory loss, and so patients forget what they were depressed about.
In the 1940s, The Psychiatric Quarterly reported that “electric shock therapy abolishes almost entirely the ability to recall recently learned material....” [The Psychiatric Quarterly, vol. 19, no.2, A Review of the Research Work of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Hospital for the Year 1944, April, 1945, p. 223]
The American Journal of Psychiatry reported that the procedure had been labeled “annihilation” therapy because “this [ECT] results in severe amnesic reactions” and produced results comparable to prefrontal lobotomy. [Leonard Roy Frank, The History of Shock Treatment, 1978, p.20]
Unfortunately, the memory loss is often permanent, a fact generally denied by modern psychiatry. Also, permanent learning disability can be another effect of ECT, with disastrous career, not to mention emotional, ramifications. The bottom line: When the patient's underlying problems return, she or he is even less able to deal with them than before the treatment, because of the brain injury that has been sustained.
The American Journal of Psychiatry reported this in 1947. Patients who had been shocked were unable to do tasks they had done every day for 20 years. Here is the Journal’s own description of the damaging effects following shock treatment:
“There is a definite restriction in their intuition and imagination and inventiveness. This is a post-lobotomy picture but in a less severe and dramatic form...The findings tend to indicate that shock therapy increases the frequency of readmission and thus raises the question of whether the time saved in the hospital at the first admission is not lost by the early readmission following shock treatment. This is particularly significant since it seems likely that shock therapy does produce deterioration and personality changes which may explain this increased readmission frequency.” [Leonard Roy Frank, The History of Shock Treatment, 1978, p.31]
It should be noted that women are twice as likely as men to receive ECT.
In ECT, 180 to 460 volts of electricity are fired through the brain, for a tenth of a second to six seconds, either from temple to temple (bilateral ECT) or from the front to the back of one side of the head (unilateral ECT) . The result is a severe convulsion, or seizure, of long duration--i.e.. , a grand mal convulsion, as in an epileptic fit. The usual course of treatment involves 10 to 12 shocks over a period of weeks.
According to an expose by USA TODAY, the psychiatric industry has grossly misled the public about the number of deaths caused by shock treatment. While publicly admitting to one death per 10,000 people, the mortality rate has been independently verified as being more on the order of 1 in 200, a rate 50 times higher.
Still, psychiatrists claim that ECT is “safe and effective” -while having no idea of how it works. This hasn’t stopped them from using it to make $3 billion per year in America alone. In the ’70s in the UK, psychiatrists gave patients up to 20 shocks a day, arguing that it could “wipe the mind clean and let it re-grow.’
ELECTROSHOCK: CRUELTY IN THE NAME OF THERAPY
If Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway were alive today, he would probably conduct a heated argument with psychiatrists who hold him up as an example of “great writers with mental illness.” Tricked into a psychiatric institution, he was stripped of his clothes and his dignity, and given more than 20 electroshocks. Several weeks later, he confided to a friend, “What these shock doctors don’t know is about writers and such.... They should make all psychiatrists take a course in creative writing so they’d know about writers.... Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient....”
In July 1961, days after being released from the Mayo psychiatric clinic, Hemingway committed suicide. [CCHR , Psychiatry: Manipulating Creativity, 1997, p32]
Shocks, Drugs, and Deaths
Between 1963 and 1979, Chelmsford was a tranquil-looking psychiatric hospital in the outer suburbs of Sydney, Australia. But behind its nondescript exterior, lives were quietly being ripped apart with a cruel psychiatric treatment called “deep sleep” treatment. People were slammed into a coma with an often lethal cocktail of barbiturates and sedatives, shackled naked to their beds, and kept unconscious for two to three weeks, during which time they were given painful electroshock treatments, sometimes twice daily.
Frequently the patients were shocked without their consent. Some expressly refused ECT, but were treated anyway. Some were told they were going to have a long sleep to “switch off” their brain. Others were told less; they just went to sleep one night and woke up weeks later - brain damaged, sick with pneumonia, nursing blood clots, and with an irreversibly altered personality. Some never woke.
The survivors suffered in silence until 1990, when a full government investigation issued the findings of its 288-day inquiry into deep sleep treatment, and the truth emerged. Forty-eight people had died as a direct result of deep sleep treatment; in all, 183 died either in hospital or within one year of being discharged, and the files of another 18 fatalities were missing. More than 1,100 people - some as young as 12 - had been subjected to “deep sleep” for everything from depression and drug addiction to anorexia, and even some for “ticklish coughs.” Of these, 977 were diagnosed as brain damaged. Those fortunate to survive continued to suffer frightening mental effects resulting directly from the treatment.
In 1985, the perpetrator of these atrocities, Dr. Harry Bailey, was found dead in his car on a lonely dirt road. Ironically, he’d taken an overdose of Tuinal - one of the barbiturates with which he had destroyed the lives of others.
The continued use of this medieval-seeming therapy would perhaps be understandable if it had been shown to be effective. But as explained in a recent article in The Journal of Mind and Behavior [1 1) , "Follow-up studies about the effects of ECT in which recipients themselves evaluate the procedure are both rare and embarrassing to the ECT industry. The outcomes of these studies directly contradict propaganda regarding permanent memory loss put forth by the four manufacturers of ECT devices in the United States (Somatics, MECTA, Elcot, and Medcraft) , upon whom physicians and the public rely for information, much as the public relies upon pharmaceutical companies for information on drugs."
Former ECT recipient Diana Loper, of the World Association of Electric Shock Survivors, [12) stresses that the only way ECT stops depression is that "it wipes your memory out so you don't know what you were depressed about. " Then Loper says, after two weeks of a "brain-damage high, " people want to kill themselves when they have never before been suicidal. Loper is passionate in her work to totally ban the procedure, which she says only causes brain damage and sometimes death:
"ECT is non-FDA approved. The machines were grand fathered to a certain extent but they were put in category 3 , the most hazardous category that there is. . . They're coming in with new machines now saying that they're new and improved, but there's nothing new and improved about this procedure. Why do I want to see this procedure banned? Why does our organization want to see it totally out of the way? Because it's damaging. Psychiatrists. . . are not only damaging people's brains, they are killing people. . . The APA task force states that 1 in 10,000 people die of ECT.
" Our organization will stop this procedure . This is a promise I made . I kept a diary when I was being shocked. And I read my diary and I read it every day. And the last thing I said to my doctor is, 'Some day you'll never do this to anyone again. . . . ' We passed a law in Texas, last session. We have the strongest informed consent bill in the nation. " [13]
What makes Electroshock so damaging? Bruce Wiseman emphasizes that the procedure always creates grand mal seizures: "Electroshock treatments send several hundred volts of electricity through the brain. The brain then becomes starved for oxygen and pulls more blood into the brain. This causes blood vessels to break, damage to the brain, and eventual brain shrinkage. As a result of the lack of oxygen and the destruction of the nerves in the brain, the person has a seizure.
"This treatment is nothing but barbaric. If anyone else did it, they would be locked up as a terrorist. Yet 100,000 people a year in America get electro shocked, generating $3 billion to the psychiatric industry . That faction of the health care industry doesn't help. They're an enemy of the people and they're destructive. " [7]
Internationally known psychiatrist and author Dr. Peter Breggin adds that the treatment is so off base that doctors fabricate reasons to support it: "Psychiatrists end up distorting a great deal and forcing people into a model that's incorrect," Breggin explains. "Some of my colleagues claim that some undefined biochemical imbalance causes a problem like anxiety or depression, when we've never found a biochemical imbalance. Then, having suggested that maybe there is such a thing as a disturbance in the brain that's hurting a person, my colleagues go and do terrible things to the brain, such as shock treatments for the depressed person.
Breggin believes that this makes as much sense as deliberately putting patients in an automobile accident. "It traumatizes the brain horribly. Each person who gets shock treatment goes into a state called delirium or an acute organic brain syndrome. As a result, they're confused, they don't know which end is up, they may forget where they are and how to get around the hospital ward. They have an electrically induced closed head injury, with all the things you find in other closed head injuries. People are often permanently changed. They don't recover their memories and they don't recover other mental functions. " [14]
Diana Loper discusses a major motivation behind the popularity of ECT, profit: "ECT is the psychiatrist's most lucrative treatment, averaging between $800 and $1000 per individual treatment. A single series averages between 12 and 15 treatments, costing between $10,000 and $15,000. This isn't even including hospitalization. ECT is administered in private, for-profit psychiatric hospitals. In all states, insurance is what pays for this 'treatment. ' " [15]
Deep Sleep Therapy
Deep sleep therapy, a procedure that has been used in the United States and throughout the world, consists of placing people in a comatose state via barbiturates, hypnotics, and sedatives for two to three weeks, and shocking their brains on a daily or twice-daily basis. Jan Eastgate, the international president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, reports on its damaging effects:
"Patients suffered brain damage, pleurisy, double pneumonia, blood clots, and at least 48 people died. It was used in mind control experiments during the 1960s up in Canada as well. And yet it was passed off as a therapy. " [16]
Deep sleep therapy has been combined with psychosurgery for the treatment of asthma, Eastgate reports:
"Women who had asthma attacks were given deep sleep therapy. One woman who had an asthma attack was also given psychosurgery. Sixteen years later she was washing her scalp and cut her finger. She was rushed to the hospital and they said, did you know that you had metal plates sticking out of your head? She didn't realize that when they did the psychosurgery they had actually left metal plates with a serrated edge inside her head. They had to be removed. " [16]
Eastgate says that the treatment has been banned in certain countries, such as Australia, but that international cooperation between psychiatrists allows patients to be transported from nations where the procedure is prohibited to places where it is used. For example, Eastgate says that some Australian patients were sent to a Santa Monica psychiatrist. "So you have, internationally, some pretty horrific abuses. " [16] The Citizens Commission of Human Rights is currently carrying out an international investigation into the matter.
Sexual Abuse
“Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with female and male persons, be they free or slaves.”
These words are part of the Hippocratic Oath, sworn to by all physicians. You'd never know it, though, considering the results of a 1987 survey of over 1400 psychiatrists, [17]described in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The survey found that 65 percent of the psychiatrists reported treating patients who had been sexually involved with previous therapists, and 87 percent of the psychiatrists surveyed believed that the previous involvement had been harmful to the patients . An interesting finding was that only 8 percent of the psychiatrists polled reported their colleagues' behavior to a professional organization or legal authority . This finding does not speak well for the concept of professionals policing their own ranks. One factor here might be that they all have a vested interest in keeping malpractice insurance premiums down.
Sydney Smith, in a report on "The Seduction of the Female Patient, " [18], reports that nearly half of the patients that are sexually abused by psychiatrists have previously been the victims of sexual abuse of one type or another. Confusion arising from these earlier experiences can make patients easier to victimize--and less willing to come forward with complaints when they are victimized. Plus if they do come forward, they may seem less credible in their complaints; perhaps it was all a result of garbled memories.
Sometimes patient confusion is induced by psychiatrist-administered drugs. Consider the case of Barbara Noel, who, in the book You Must Be Dreaming, [19) details her years of sexual abuse by a renowned psychiatrist. Indeed, Dr. Jules Masserman was known worldwide as a leader in the psychiatric field.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights summarized Noel's story [20]:
"A past president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and honorary president for life of the World Association for Social Psychiatry, Masserman was a powerful man who abused that power often.
"Barbara Noel, who worshipped him and considered herself lucky to have him as her psychiatrist, realized how deep the deception ran when she awoke during a frequent drug-induced sleep administered by Masserman to find him panting loudly as he sexually assaulted her.
"Although this was just a step above necrophilia, Masserman convinced Noel that she could get in touch with her 'real feelings' by taking sodium amytal (a barbiturate) , which ironically had been used in mind control experiments and was found to block memory rather than, as Masserman claimed, enlace it.
"Noel became enraged when she finally realized how she had been abused for years by a supposedly 'respected' professional. However, with Masserman claiming Noel was 'sick' and lying, it took seven long years, court victories by her and two other women who went public after hearing of Noel's case, and even more women breaking their silence before the APA upheld the Illinois Psychiatric Society's decision to suspend Masserman for only five years. And even that suspension was for inappropriate use of drugs, not rape.
"Scandalously, Masserman remained as a member of the APA's Board of Trustees.
Comments the CCHR "It is hard to imagine a teacher who molests a young student would ever be allowed to teach again, but apparently a different set of standards exist for psychiatrists." [20]
In psychiatric facilities, patients are commonly sexually exploited as they are made to barter sex for freedom. Joanne Toglia, whose story is further told in a later section, says, of her abuse by a mental health counselor in a private hospital:
"Finally, the bottom line came down to, if I slept with him, I'd get out. If I didn't, I'd go to the state mental hospital. And at the time, I had four children--2, 3, 4 and 6. I was desperate to see them, so after three weeks of being locked up, I finally slept with him. "[2]
Reports of sexual abuse are less frequent in outpatient settings, where psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors generally act in supportive and professional ways. But in too many instances they do betray their patients' trust, as the Dr. Masserman saga illustrates. Attorney Steve Silver, who represents clients that were sexually abused by their therapists, gives one account of how unethical behavior on the part of a therapist can devastate patients' lives:
“I prosecuted a case against a female alcohol counselor who was roughly ten years older than her male patient, a married man with a couple of kids. The alcohol counselor ended up doing 'psychotherapy' on this gentleman, his wife, and on their two children. Ultimately, she seduced the man while telling his wife that because of her background of psychological problems she should withhold sexual relations from her husband.
"My client, who was the husband and father in this situation, left his family and married the alcohol counselor. This is a perfect example of even a low-level therapist, such as an alcohol counselor, being able to manipulate an entire family to ultimately serve her own romantic and sexual needs. Of course, it was incredibly destructive to all four members of the family, particularly the children."[22]
The problem is compounded by the fact that grievances against psychiatrists have little effect, leaving them free to prey on numerous other patients. Even if they are punished in one state, psychiatrists can easily set up shop in another. Silver says psychiatric boards are understaffed and in need of increased government regulation and money. "If these types of abuses are to be stopped, there needs to be a public investigation and sufficient resources to prosecute these bad shrinks and stop them from practicing . " [22) Psychology and social work boards are better about investigating sexual abuse, according to Silver, and their investigations can lead to the offending therapist losing his or her license to practice.
Exploitation of Minorities
Psychiatry is built on a foundation of prejudice against minorities, particularly African Americans. In the 1700s, for instance, none less than the father of American psychiatry, Benjamin Rush, asserted that African Americans were black because they had a disease ,Rush’s theory of Negritude, and that we should not tyrannize over them, but rather find a cure for their disease. In 1970, the American Journal of Psychiatry reviewed Rush’s theory:
“In a brief paper written in 1799, Rush was concerned with uncovering the cause or causes of the Negro’s blackness. His conclusion was that the black complexion of the Negro stemmed from a leprous-type disease. He maintained that by seeking a cure for this condition and subsequently removing the Negro’s blackness, a great service could be rendered to mankind...He therefore maintained that the removal of the Negro’s blackness would render him a certain amount of happiness since it was obvious that some Negroes had difficulty accepting their blackness: “Forever how well they appear to be satisfied with their color, there were many proofs of their preferring that of the white people.” The Journal was not critical of Rush, but stated that he “understood well the impact of physical differences on mental attitudes that is a vital factor in racial prejudice...” [The American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 127, no.6, 1970, Benjamin Rush and the Negro, Betty L. Plummer]
Rush would become known as the “Father of American Psychiatry” with his face immortalized on the seal of the American Psychiatric Association, perhaps a permanent reminder of how psychiatry sees illness where none exists.
Renowned author and professor emeritus of psychiatry, Dr. Thomas Szasz, wrote in his book, The Manufacture of Madness, "With this theory, Rush made the black a medically safe domestic, while at the same time called for his sexual segregation as a carrier of a dread hereditary disease. Here, then, was an early model of the perfect medical concept of illness--one that helps the physician and the society he serves, while justifying social maltreatment as medical prophylaxis [protection from disease]." [CCHR, Psychiatry: Creating Racism, 1995, p.9]
When Africans were torn from their families and homes and sold into slavery in the United States, science stood ready to define any disobedience or insubordination by them as a "mental illness."
As early as 1851, Samuel A. Cartwright, a prominent Louisiana physician, published an essay entitled "Report on the diseases and physical peculiarities of the Negro race" in the "New Orleans and Surgical Journal." Cartwright claimed to have discovered two mental diseases peculiar to blacks, which he believed justified their enslavement. These were called "Drapetomania" and "Dysaesthesia Aethiopis."
The first term came from ‘drapetes’, to run away, and ‘mania’, meaning mad or crazy. Cartwright claimed that this "disease" caused blacks to have an uncontrollable urge to run away from their "masters." The "treatment" for this "illness" was "whipping the devil out of them."
Dysaesthesia Aethiopis supposedly affected both mind and body. The diagnosable signs included disobedience, answering disrespectfully and refusing to work. The "cure" was to put the person to some kind of hard labor which apparently sent "vitalized blood to the brain to give liberty to the mind."
Much "scientific" and statistical rhetoric was used to justify slavery. One 1840 census "proved" that blacks living under "unnatural conditions of freedom" in the North were more prone to insanity. Dr. Edward Jarvis, a specialist in mental disorders, used this to conclude that slavery shielded blacks from "some of the liabilities and dangers of active self-direction." The census was later found to be a racist facade in that many of the Northern towns credited with mentally deranged blacks had no black inhabitants at all! [CCHR, Psychiatry: Creating Racism, 1995, p.8]
In 1887 , G. Stanley Hall, founder of the American Journal of Psychology and first president of the American Psychological Association, put forth the idea that Africans, Indians, and Chinese were members of "adolescent races , in a stage of , incomplete growth. [23]Thus, these ~ lack of equality was justified, because they were not fully adult. From these historical roots of racism, according to the CCHR's Jan Eastgate, all minority groups have become marked for psychiatric abuse:
"You have had a targeting of the African American community, the American Indians, Hispanic groups, as having a lower IQ than so-called whites. Based on this ' scientific' justification, psychiatrists have sterilized African Americans . By 1929, up to 6000 Californians were sterilized, and they were largely African Americans . If you look at the statistics now, psychiatrists involuntarily commit African Americans three to five times as often as they do whites . The diagnosis of African American men as having schizophrenia, by public and private institutions, is 15 times as high as whites. African American adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 are far more likely to be coerced into going to community mental health centers where they are placed on mind-altering drugs, major tranquilizers. And they are given higher dosages even than white people. So there's a concerted effort by psychiatry to target minority groups in this country by diagnosing them with spurious labels and then giving them mind-altering drugs and electric shock."[16]
Eastgate's statements may seem shocking but are mild compared to the figures presented in psychiatric literature. For example, the 1986 Contemporary Directions in Psychopathology admits:
“state hospital admission rates for the black poor are 75 times that for whites”... “These and similar findings, widely known and reported, tend to be neglected and ignored...”
The text also reported that a cross-national study revealed that psychiatrists at the New York State Psychiatric Institute had “a bias toward diagnosing schizophrenia in black patients” when compared to psychiatrists in London. [Contemporary Directions in Psychopathology, A Sociopolitical Perspective of DSM-IIIR, Rothblum, Solomon, and Albee, p. 168 and 174]
In 1994 the American Psychiatric Press’ Textbook of Psychiatry also acknowledged that studies suggesting a higher rate of schizophrenia in African Americans may have been skewed “due to a systematic bias to over diagnose schizophrenia in blacks.”
In addition to what has been already outlined here about IQ, US eugenics advocate Dr. Paul Popenoe published the findings of his study, entitled "Intelligence and Race--a Review of the Results of the Army Intelligence Tests--The Negro in 1918." With astounding arrogance, he fabricated and propagated the idea that the IQ of blacks was determined by the amount of "white blood" they had. The lighter skinned the black was, the higher his IQ, and the blacker he was, the lower the IQ.
Popenoe concluded, "...the Negroes' low mental estate is irremediable...The Negro is mentally, therefore eugenically, inferior to the white race. All treatment of the Negro...must take into account this fundamental fact."
Psychiatric "treatment" of African Americans has included some of the most barbaric experiments ever carried out in the name of "scientific" research--and not very long ago. In the 1950s in New Orleans, black prisoners were used for psychosurgery experiments which involved electrodes being implanted into the brain. The experiments were conducted by psychiatrist Dr. Robert Heath from Tulane University and an Australian psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Bailey, who boasted in a lecture to nurses 20 years later that the two psychiatrists had used blacks because it was "cheaper to use Niggers than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals."
Heath had also been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry out drug experiments which included LSD and a drug called bulbocapnine, which in large doses produced "catatonia and stupor." Heath tested the drug on African American prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. According to one memo, the CIA sought information as to whether the drug could cause "loss of speech, loss of sensitivity to pain, loss of memory, loss of will power and an increase in toxicity in persons with a weak type of central nervous system."
At the National Institute of Mental Health Addiction Research Center in Kentucky in the mid-1950s, drug-addicted African Americans were given LSD, with seven of them kept hallucinating for 77 consecutive days. At this same center, healthy African American men were still being used as test subjects almost 10 years later, this time for an experimental drug, BZ--100 times more powerful than LSD. [CCHR, Psychiatry: Creating Racism, 1995, p.9-11]
Nazi Influences on American Psychiatry
Perhaps there was no psychiatrist more influential in Nazi Germany than Ernst Rudin. Rudin was a world leader in the eugenics movement, the pseudo-science which asserts that a “superior” human can be created by selective breeding, allowing only “superior” individuals the right to procreate and preventing that right to what eugenicists called “inferior” individual. That is, those with physical or mental “defects.” A long-time advocate of eugenics, Rudin co-founded the German Society of Racial Hygiene in 1905 with his brother-in-law, psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz who demanded the “extirpation of the inferior institution provided employment for the island, there was no local incentive to close it down.
elements of the population” and battled against those of “Jewish and Slavic blood.” [Ideology of Death, Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany.; John Weiss, p.105-106]
In 1930, Rudin spoke in Washington, D.C., at the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene and called for all associated with the movement, later known as “mental health,” to make eugenics the principle aim of mental hygiene. Rudin was cold and to the point in expressing his philosophy:
“More mental and physical suffering, illness, deficiency, infirmity, poverty, chronic alcoholism, criminality, etc., than we can describe have as the main cause a bad hereditary tendency. Once such a person is born...they need the best and most extensive mental hygiene...It would be better, however, if such persons were not born at all, and that calls for eugenics.”
[Proceedings of the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene; Volume One; Frankwood E. Williams, editor, 1932, p.473]
In 1932, Rudin was elected president of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations propelling him to world leader in the eugenics movement. Within the IFEU, Rudin headed the Committee on Race Psychiatry. [Stefan Kuhl; The Nazi Connection; Oxford University Press; 1994, p.21-22]
When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, Rudin was appointed to help lead Germany’s Racial Purity program and he served on the Task Force of Hereditary Experts headed by Nazi SS officer Heinrich Himmler. Rudin helped write and give “scientific” interpretation to the Nazi Sterilization Laws. According to psychiatrist Peter Breggin, “It was Rudin who influenced Hitler, not Hitler who influenced Rudin.” [Peter Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry, 1991, p.102]
The sterilization campaign grew to include Jews and Gypsies, who Rudin referred to as “inferior race types.” By 1938 pilot killing programs were established in Germany psychiatric hospitals and the first to die in the Holocaust were some 375,000 German mental patients. Dr. Michael Berenbaum, project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, says the killing program “involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community.”
[Dr. Michael Berenbaum,The World Must Know, The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1993, p.64]
Over the coming years millions of “inferiors” would be slaughtered in the name of eugenics. Adolph Hitler honored Rudin with a medal for his work as “Pathfinder of Hereditary Hygiene” for the Third Reich. Rudin praised Hitler in a letter stating that “racial hygiene” had only become known in Germany “through the political works of Adolph Hitler and it was only through him that our dream of more than thirty years has become a reality and the principles of racial hygiene have been translated into action.” . [Dr. Thomas Roder, Volker Kubillus, Anthony Burwell, Psychiatrists: The Men Behind Hitler, 1995, p.94]
The principles of racial hygiene would give Europe the Holocaust.
In a special 1943 issue of Rudin’s Journal, Archive for Racial and Social Biology, Rudin praised Hiltler for making racial hygiene a fact among the German people, and applauded the sterilization laws for “preventing the further penetration of the German gene pool by Jewish blood.” [Robert J. Lifton,The Nazi Doctors, 1986 p.28]
In 1945 Ernst Rudin was called “the most evil man in Germany” and was credited with creating the “Nazi science of murder” by news reporter Victor Bernstien who interviewed the aging psychiatrist. Rudin admitted to Bernstien that when “the killing program began...I was not informed because it was not thought right that I should have such a matter on my conscience.” He fled Germany after the war and was stripped of his Swiss citizenship and placed under house arrest there. He died in 1952. [PM Daily, Created Nazi Science of Murder: Meet ‘Gentle” Prof. Rudin, Theorist of ‘Aryanism’, Tuesday, Aug. 21, 1945, p.5]
In 1996 a German psychiatric journal published “Ernst Rudin--a Swiss psychiatrists as the leader of Nazi psychiatry--the final solution as a goal.” In the article, Rudin was called a “racial fanatic” whose work did not “withstand scientific criticism.” Rudin demanded “coercive measures against the reproduction of...in the racist’s view, undesirable persons. With this objective in mind, he started his psychiatric research...[which] confirmed his preexisting opinions.” [Fortsch Neurol Psychiatr, Sept; 64[9]:327-343]
Despite being a racist, a Nazi, and an advocate of the sterilization of Jews, Rudin is still praised by today’s leading psychiatric texts. For example, the 1994 Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry credits Rudin for laying the foundation for the genetic theory of schizophrenia. In 1990, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression published an article which praised Rudin for his pioneering work in the field of psychiatric genetics in its Winter Newsletter.
The eugenics movement did not end in Nazi Germany. In 1936 psychiatrist Franz Kallmann left Rudin’s fold at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and traveled to the New York State Psychiatric Institute [NYSPI] at Columbia University. He was appointed to head its psychiatric genetics program, a field founded by Ernst Rudin. According to psychiatrist Nolan Lewis, then director of NYSPI, “the genetic research division was stabilized by the appointment of Dr. Franz J. Kallmann as senior research psychiatrist. It seems certain that the promotion of long-term research dealing with genetic and eugenic problems of mental disease will prove to be a step in the right direction.” [The Psychiatric Quarterly, Vol. 19, No.2, 1945, p.235]
Lewis encouraged psychiatrists to use the common sense of “any animal or plant breeder” when dealing with psychiatric patients. To Lewis, it was important to determine “the character of the stock” on individuals and their relatives. Lewis would become Chairman of the American Psychiatric Association’s Task Force on Nomenclature and Statistics for the first edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Prior to leaving Nazi Germany, Kallmann, arguing before Hitler’s interior ministry, Kallmann called for the sterilization of “schizophrenics” and their apparently healthy relatives. In a 1938 study, Kallmann referred to the mentally ill as “a source of maladjusted crooks, the lowest type of criminal offender...even the most faithful believer in liberty would be better off without those...” In his research, Kallman used less than scientific criteria for making a diagnosis. He included as schizophrenic anyone who was “bull-headed”, “cold-hearted,” “indecisive,” “asocial,”...his list went on and on.
He felt that if psychiatry was to make eugenic progress on a population, sterilization was necessary for “the tainted children and siblings of schizophrenics.” After the Holocaust, Kallmann testified on behalf of psychiatrist Otmar von Verschuer, one of Rudin’s staff who had personally selected individuals to be killed during the psychiatric killing program. With such aid from the scientific community, von Verschuer was fined $300, declared free from all responsibility for Nazi crimes, and let go. Von Verschuer’s name would show up in the 1950s on the membership list of the American Eugenics Society.
Franz Kallman was on the board of directors of the American Eugenics Society and in 1954, the Society announced that the foundation was in place for a program of “negative eugenics” in the United States. Negative eugenics is the suppression of the reproduction of what are considered “inferior” people. According to the March, 1954 Eugenics Quarterly, the editors stated “there can be no arbitrary decisions as to who should or should not have children” and that such a program, targeting those with “inferior” genes, would make it possible to “diminish the heavy burden of the socially inadequate and other defective hereditary types.” Admittedly, the difficulty of such a plan was in educating the public; the editors stating that such a broad educational program must start “with the leaders in education.” [Eugenics Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1954, The Role of the American Eugenics Society, p.1-3]
Just as Rudin had pushed to prevent the reproduction of what he considered “inferior race types,” the American Eugenics Society, was making a pitch in the U.S. to do the same thing.
Finally, the Society stated that the ultimate goal was to “increase the proportion of children born with the promise of sound character and good intelligence.” This mission statement would lead to psychiatry’s interest in “character disorders” of children and would also pave the way for “learning disabilities.” It would become the focus of psychiatry to examine the character and intelligence of U.S. school children in the years to come. The board of directors of the American Eugenics Society included not only Franz Kallmann, but men like Paul Popenoe who openly praised Hitl