Notes on
PSYCHIATRIC FASCISM
by Don Weitz
Toronto, Ontario
http://www.antipsychiatry.org/weitz2.htm
For almost 150 years, psychiatry has been masquerading as a medical
science and as a branch of medicine. It is not and never was a science
or a type of health care. Modern psychiatry is driven by unproved
empirical assumptions, medical biases, and pseudo-scientific opinions.
There are no scientifically established, independently proven facts in
psychiatry. Psychiatry, in fact, has no laws or testable hypotheses and
no coherent and comprehensive theory. Psychiatry conspicuously lacks
scientific proof or evidence to support its news-media-parroted claims
of "mental illness" or "disorders".
After about seventy years of psychiatric practices and research, there
is still no diagnostic test for schizophrenia or any of the other three
hundred so-called mental disorders listed in the current edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM),
which is essentially a list of class-driven moral judgements of
allegedly abnormal behaviour, published and propagandized by the
American Psychiatric Association. The DSM is the official bible of
organized psychiatry. The DSM is the equivalent of the Malleus
Maleficarum in the middle ages, which Spanish inquisitors used to
identify, target, stigmatize and burn witches and heretics. Today's
witches, heretics, and scapegoats are labeled mentally ill or
schizophrenic.
Hospital psychiatry with its emphasis on the control of inmate behaviour
through high risk behaviour modification programs, biological
"treatments", physical and mechanical restraints, locked doors and
wards, and seclusion/isolation rooms, have always exhibited several
fascist elements. I want to focus on three: fear, force and
fraud. These are the guiding principles and policies used to
control citizens and groups in the population whom government leaders
and other authorities, including the police and so-called mental health
experts, have judged to be dissident, problematic or difficult to
control. Hospital psychiatry is very similar to the prison system. In
the prison or correctional system psychiatrists have been used as
consultants to design dangerous, unethical behaviour modification
programs and to conduct high risk drug experiments on prisoners. Both
the psychiatric system and the prison system systematically use fear,
force and fraud for the purpose of social control and punishment - not
for purposes of treatment or rehabilitation, both of which are
euphemisms. It is or should be obvious that forced treatment is in
fact punishment. It is frequently cruel and usual and should
therefore be banned in the United States under that nation's Eighth
constitutional amendment. Virtually all treatments in psychiatric
facilities are forced or administered without informed consent. They
are administered against the "patient's" (the prisoner's) will or
with consent obtained by threatening the "patient" with worse
consequences, or with consent obtained by keeping the "patient" unaware
of important information about serious risks and alternatives. Informed
consent in psychiatry is a cruel sham. It doesn't exist.
Fear/Terror - "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 the sense of shame has sometimes cured the
disease". That was written almost two centuries ago in 1818 by Dr.
Benjamin Rush, father of American psychiatry, and the first president of
the APA, whose face still appears on the official seal of the American
Psychiatric Association. Dr. Rush advocated and practiced terror by
designing and using the straitjacket, the tranquilizer chair and "fear
of death" on numerous inmates in 19th century lunatic asylums. Rush
once had his son locked up in an insane asylum - some father!
Fear is a powerful motivator in enforcing conformity, obedience and
making people submit to authority. Historically, inducing and
manipulating fear or masked terror has always been a key policy and
practice in all fascist regimes, such as Italy under Mussolini, Nazi
Germany under Hitler, and the Soviet Union under Stalin - in fact, under
any dictatorship. The threat of punishment, torture and the threat of
being killed is enough to cause fear, panic, and terror if most of us.
We do as we're told or else.
As used in psychiatry, fear or terror is more selective but is
widespread and powerful. In the institution, psychiatry frequently
resorts to blackmail to control the more "uncontrollable" and difficult
or non-compliant patient. Psychiatrists and other therapists threaten
their patients with longer incarceration, higher doses of forced
neuroleptics or "antidepressants", and/or threatened transfers to more
severe maximum security institutions if they misbehave, fail to follow
doctors' orders, refuse to take their "medication", refuse to follow
institutional rules, or annoy their captors in other ways. Generally
aimed at captive populations of involuntary patients, these threats
typically strike fear in many of them, and psychiatrists know it. For
example, some years ago, several patients and former patients of Queen
Street Mental Health Centre, Toronto's notorious mental hospital or
psycho-prison, told me and other activist-critics that psychiatrists
have threatened, if they didn't calm down or control themselves, to
transfer them to Penetang, the Oakridge division of Penetanguishene
Mental Health Centre, a maximum security behaviour modification facility
in Ontario, known for its harsh and brutal environment. Penetang was
and still is recognized as punishment, one of the most barbaric
psycho-prisons in Canada. It should have been shut down years ago,
especially after a scathing report about many of its abuses by
psychiatrist Steven Harper.
Threatening patients with physical restraints or solitary confinement is
also extremely effective in arousing fear or panic in patients. On
virtually every psychiatric ward or unit, there is a place,
euphemistically called "The Quiet Room", a barren and forbidden
cell-like room, with a mattress or sink, usually no toilet or blankets.
While languishing the quiet room, patients are sometimes further
restrained by leather cuffs, two-point and four-point restraints,
tightly wrapped around their wrists and/or ankles so they can barely
move, for hours at a time. The mere threat of loss of freedom,
involuntary committal, or being locked up in a psychiatric ward or
institution against your will, and without any trial or public hearing,
is enough to frighten most of us. In virtually every province and
territory in Canada, these are the main criteria or reasons for being
locked up or committed to a psychiatric institution: judgement of
mental illness or disorder; judgement of threatening to physically hurt
yourself or another person; judgement of being unable to look after
yourself. Note that these criteria are subjective moral judgements of
dissident behaviour based on observation and opinion, not medical or
scientific facts. Despite the fact that mental illness or mental
disorder, which in my opinion is a metaphor for dissidence, has never
been officially classified as a medical disease or illness, only
physicians are legally authorized to make these non-medical and fateful
judgements.
In Ontario, any doctor can sign a committal form which forces an
individual to be locked up in any psychiatric facility for the first 72
hours for observation and assessment. Two other doctors can sign a form
authorizing an individual's imprisonment for another 2-4 weeks. During
the last few years, approximately 50% of thousands of people treated in
Ontario's nine psychiatric hospitals were involuntarily committed.
The threat or fact of losing your freedom being locked up in a
psychiatric facility for days or months at a time is terrifying. The
minimal or non-existent advocacy currently provided in Ontario makes the
right to appeal or protest a sham, and this serves to heighten people's
fear and despair. The mere threat of forced psychiatric
treatment as well as the treatment itself can be terrorizing - e.g.,
electroshock, also called electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), but more
accurately called electro-convulsive brainwashing by shock survivor
critics such as Leonard Frank. My close friend Mel told me of being
dragged by several aids along the hallway to a hospital shockroom. I
can imagine his terror and the terror of others who suffered the same
fate. I suffered a similar terror when I was forcibly subjected to over
50 subcoma insulin shocks in the 1950s. To the surprise of many people,
this barbaric brain-damaging and memory destroying treatment not only
exists, but is expanding in Canada and the United States. Its main
targets are women and the elderly, particularly elderly women.
There is also the threat of psychiatric drugs, euphemistically called
"medication". These chemicals such as minor tranquilizers,
antidepressants and the anti-psychotics such as Haldol, Modicate,
Thorazine, and the so-called mood modifier Lithium, are not natural
substances but are manufactured poisons, aptly called neurotoxins by
psychiatrist and psychiatry critic Peter Breggin in several of his books
and Joseph Glenmullen, a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard
Medical School, in his book Prozac Backlash. These chemicals
have no scientifically proven medical value or benefit. What they do is
control or subdue any problematic or disturbing behaviour, mood and
emotion. These toxins, particularly neuroleptics like Haldol, Modicate,
Chlorpromazine, are so disabling, powerful and fearsome that many
psychiatric survivors and other critics call them chemical lobotomies or
chemical straitjackets. These drugs have many serious and disabling
effects, called "side effects" to minimize how they are perceived, such
as trembling, uncontrollable shaking or movement of the hands or other
parts of the body (which occur in the neurological disorder such as
Parkinsonism or tardive dyskenisia), powerful muscular cramps, blurred
vision, restless pacing, nightmares, sudden outbursts of anger,
agitation, memory loss, fainting, blood disorders, seizures, and sudden
death. These so-called side effects are the drugs' intended
effects. This fear of psychiatric drugs is compounded by ignorance and
uncertainty, because psychiatrists and other doctors fail to inform
patients of the drugs' horrific effects.
Without the use or threat of force, fascism could not exist.
Machiavelli, Mussolini, Hitler knew this. All dictators, would-be
dictators, and bullies know this basic fact. And this is the case with
psychiatry. Without the use and threat of force, institutional
psychiatry would die. Lots of psychiatrists would be out of a job. I
wish that would happen! Psychiatry gets its authority and power to
force, imprison, involuntarily commit, and treat individuals against
their will from the state.
Mental health legislation gives psychiatrists and other physicians the
power to involuntarily commit any person they "believe", after only
minutes of examination, to be dangerous to themselves or others. This
is problematic. The Mental Health Act wrongly assumes that doctors can
predict dangerous and violent behaviour, which they cannot do. It is
worth emphasizing that Ontario's Mental Health Act, as with other mental
health acts across Canada and the United States, legally sanction the
state to use force to detain or imprison people for days, weeks or
months at a time. Unfortunately, there has never been a public outcry
or protest over the fact that people judged or assumed to be crazy or
dangerous, but not charged with any crime, can nevertheless be locked up
without a trial or the legal rights accorded to people charged with
crimes such as murder or rape. This is prevention detention,
which is illegal in Canada and other so-called democratic countries, but
it is legal and a common practice in all police states and totalitarian
countries. I know of no lawsuit challenge to involuntary committal as
preventive detention and therefore as unconstitutional.
In institutional psychiatry in fascist states, forced treatment is the
rule, not the exception. Forced treatment and tortuous terminal medical
experiments inflicted on thousands of Jews, gypsies, political
prisoners, women and children, were carried out in death camps during
World War II throughout Nazi Germany. There is now irrefutable,
documentary evidence that it was the German psychiatrists, particularly
prominent professors of psychiatry, and psychiatry department heads, who
were chiefly responsible for initiating and administering the infamous
T4 program, which involved the mass murder of over 200,000 mental
patients and thousands of sick and disabled children and adults during
the holocaust. The term euthanasia and mercy death to describe this
murderous program is a cruel euphemism.
Much of biological psychiatry, which is largely based on unproved
assumptions about the biological and genetic causes of schizophrenia and
other mental disorders, can be traced back to the racist,
eugenics-driven psychiatrist in Nazi Germany, Ernst Rudin, who
propagated the myth that schizophrenia is a genetic disease. He, along
with hundreds of other psychiatrists in the T4 program of mass murder of
psychiatric patients, is still cited in some psychiatric journal
articles, as documented by researcher-activist Lenny Lapon in his
brilliant book, Mass Murderers in White Coats: Psychiatric Genocide
in Nazi Germany. He states that several German psychiatrists from
the Nazi era emigrated to the United States and Canada and succeeded in
indoctrinating many of his colleagues in his biological, genetic and
racist theories of mental illness. Heinz Layman who emigrated to Canada
in 1937, is chiefly responsible for introducing Thorazine or
Chlorpromazine, and propagated the use of psychiatric drugs in Canada.
We now have an epidemic of brain damage caused by psychiatric drugs,
partly due to Layman and all the other doctors he taught. In one 1954
journal article, Layman admitted that Thorazine was a "pharmacological
substitute for lobotomy". Despite publicly acknowledging this alarming
fact, it never stopped Layman from using it on many "schizophrenic"
patients in Montreal's Douglas Hospital. Layman also persuaded Ewen
Cameron to administer chlorpromazine and many other drugs and massive
amounts of electroshock. Chlorpromazine, considered an experimental
drug at the time, was widely used on many patients during Cameron's
infamous brainwashing experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute in the
1950s and 1960s.
There was no informed consent then, and there is none now. During the
Nazi years, the doctors didn't seek permission. According to Nazi
ideology, these were "useless eaters", "subhumans". This is a mindset
that still rules in biological psychiatry throughout North America.
Another legacy of psychiatry in Nazi Germany is the widespread
acceptance and justification of abuse to break the will of non-compliant
or rebellious patients. Physical or mechanical restraints such as
straps, ropes, belts, handcuffs and solitary confinement are used in
psychiatric institutions not to treat or protect but to punish people
for dissident or rebellious behaviour. It is this naked display of
force and threats against patients by hospital staff which resembles the
awesome brutality of German psychiatric staff during the holocaust.
Fraud: A very apt quote by Leonard Roy Frank, author of
Influencing Minds is "Mystification is psychiatry's defense against
the danger of being found out". Many of the labels or diagnoses used by
psychiatrists do not refer to real psychiatric problems or to actual
illnesses. Psychiatry professor Thomas Szasz has exposed the fraud and
the myth of the concept of mental illness in many books, starting with
his classic The Myth of Mental Illness. This misrepresentation
one of the greatest scientific scandals in our scientific age. The code
words that are now used in biological psychiatry such as
anti-depressants do not assist people with overcoming depression or
get at the causes of depression. The term "Quiet Room" is a fraudulent
code for solitary confinement. The word "medication" is also a
misleading euphemism and misrepresentation for toxic substances
to which many of us have been subjected.
I've tried to show that institutional, coercive psychiatry has a fascist
history and that biological psychiatry as practiced today in psychiatric
facilities in Canada and the United States is still based on fear, force
and fraud. Psychiatry does not deserve public or government support.
We must work to abolish psychiatry. We must also continue working to
create self-help advocacy groups, more drop-in centers, and more
affordable, supportive housing in our communities. We need to create
our own alternatives to the monstrous and evil mental health system. By
doing this, we empower ourselves. This is our work, our challenge, and
our hope.
Copyright 2001 by Don Weitz - used by permission