5.6 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anti-psychiatry | 10/13 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:08:59.919288+00:00 | kb-cron |
Psychiatrists around the world have been involved in the suppression of individual rights by states in which the definitions of mental disease have been expanded to include political disobedience. Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions. Psychiatry possesses a built-in capacity for abuse which is greater than in other areas of medicine. The diagnosis of mental disease can serve as proxy for the designation of social dissidents, allowing the state to hold persons against their will and to insist upon therapies that work in favor of ideological conformity and in the broader interests of society. In a monolithic state, psychiatry can be used to bypass standard legal procedures for establishing guilt or innocence and allow political incarceration without the ordinary odium attaching to such political trials. Under the Nazi regime in the 1940s, the "duty to care" was violated on an enormous scale. In Germany alone 300,000 individuals that had been deemed mentally ill, work-shy or feeble-minded were sterilized. An additional 200,000 were euthanized. These practices continued in territories occupied by the Nazis further afield (mainly in eastern Europe), affecting thousands more. From the 1960s up to 1986, political abuse of psychiatry was reported to be systematic in the Soviet Union, and to surface on occasion in other Eastern European countries such as Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, as well as in Western European countries, such as Italy. An example of the use of psychiatry in the political field is the "case Sabattini", described by Giorgio Antonucci in his book Il pregiudizio psichiatrico. A "mental health genocide" reminiscent of the Nazi aberrations has been located in the history of South African oppression during the apartheid era. A continued misappropriation of the discipline was later attributed to the People's Republic of China. K. Fulford, A. Smirnov, and E. Snow state: "An important vulnerability factor, therefore, for the abuse of psychiatry, is the subjective nature of the observations on which psychiatric diagnosis currently depends." In an article published in 1994 by the Journal of Medical Ethics, American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz stated that "the classification by slave owners and slave traders of certain individuals as Negroes was scientific, in the sense that whites were rarely classified as blacks. But that did not prevent the 'abuse' of such racial classification, because (what we call) its abuse was, in fact, its use." Szasz argued that the spectacle of the Western psychiatrists loudly condemning Soviet colleagues for their abuse of professional standards was largely an exercise in hypocrisy. Szasz states that K. Fulford, A. Smirnov, and E. Snow, who correctly emphasize the value-laden nature of psychiatric diagnoses and the subjective character of psychiatric classifications, fail to accept the role of psychiatric power. He stated that psychiatric abuse, such as people usually associated with practices in the former USSR, was connected not with the misuse of psychiatric diagnoses, but with the political power built into the social role of the psychiatrist in democratic and totalitarian societies alike. Musicologists, drama critics, art historians, and many other scholars also create their own subjective classifications; however, lacking state-legitimated power over persons, their classifications do not lead to anyone's being deprived of property, liberty, or life. For instance, a plastic surgeon's classification of beauty is subjective, but the plastic surgeon cannot treat his or her patient without the patient's consent, so there cannot be any political abuse of plastic surgery. The bedrock of political medicine is coercion masquerading as medical treatment. In this process, physicians diagnose a disapproved condition as an "illness" and declare the intervention they impose on the victim a "treatment," and legislators and judges legitimate these categorizations. In the same way, physician-eugenicists advocated killing certain disabled or ill persons as a form of treatment for both society and patient long before the Nazis came to power. From the commencement of his political career, Hitler put his struggle against "enemies of the state" in medical rhetoric. In 1934, addressing the Reichstag, he declared, "I gave the order… to burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers of our internal well-poisoning." The entire German nation and its National Socialist politicians learned to think and speak in such terms. Werner Best, Reinhard Heydrich's deputy, stated that the task of the police was "to root out all symptoms of disease and germs of destruction that threatened the political health of the nation… [In addition to Jews,] most [of the germs] were weak, unpopular and marginalized groups, such as gypsies, homosexuals, beggars, 'antisocials', 'work-shy', and 'habitual criminals'." In spite of all the evidence, people ignore or underappreciate the political implications of the pseudotherapeutic character of Nazism and of the use of medical metaphors in modern democracies. Dismissed as an "abuse of psychiatry", this practice is a controversial subject not because the story makes psychiatrists in Nazi Germany look bad, but because it highlights the dramatic similarities between pharmacratic controls in Germany under Nazism and those that have emerged in the US under the free market economy.