With the endorsement of her psychiatrists, a Dutch woman in her twenties was recently “allowed” to die by assisted suicide—that is, she was killed by her doctors. This occurred after the failure of “intensive treatment” to cure her of trauma from child abuse.
Psychiatrists have a long and terrible history of destroying people in the name of curing them. Having utterly failed to help so many of their patients over decades and even centuries, psychiatrists historically have condemned them to dreadful and often deadly alternatives. Putting it more exactly, having made their patients worse by battering their brains with drugs, psychiatrists and organized psychiatry have in the past and now again in the present put their victims to death. In short, euthanizing psychiatrists first make their patients worse, then declare them incurable, and finally participate in killing them.
The tragic irony in respect to victims of child abuse is truly beyond words. How does one describe the horror of a profession that takes over the lives of people wounded by abuse, then further abuses them, and finally participates in killing them in the name of euthanasia?
Victims of child abuse can be helped, but not by biological psychiatry, which discourages them and compromises their brain function. On their own sometimes, often with the loving support of others, even the most dreadful victims of child abuse have gone on to live worthwhile lives, sometimes becoming leaders in publicizing child abuse and in rejecting the continued abuses of psychiatry. My own life and work has been informed by Louise Armstrong’s Kiss Daddy Goodnight and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It.
Psychiatry’s inability to help its patients led to lobotomy and electroshock in the 1930s, both of which are still with us. Worse yet, nearly all contemporary victims of electroshock and lobotomy were already being made worse by years of psychiatric abuse in the form of drugs and discouraging diagnoses. Originally, most of these brain-damaging treatments were inflicted within the confines of state mental hospitals where individuals were routinely subjected to isolation, humiliation, and toxic chemicals, finally to be subdued with lobotomy, shock, and early death.
More recently, out of this continuing inability to help, while making people worse, psychiatry puts millions of people on toxic drugs that ruin their quality of life and often put them to an early death. This dark influence now permeates Western culture, so that anyone with a prescription pad — from nurse practitioners to pediatricians and family doctors — is likely to pull the trigger and prescribe. My own research, and that of Peter C. Gøtzsche and Robert Whitaker, make clear that typical courses of psychiatric drugs often lead to a dramatic loss in quality of life and a shortened lifespan.
The death cult nature of psychiatry culminated in the late 1930s in Germany when psychiatry turned on those within its care and exterminated hundreds of thousands of people, first in Germany itself, and then in the conquered lands in World War II. They called their victims “useless eaters,” “the incurably insane” and the “disabled.” They were, in reality, victims of psychiatry’s failed attempts to help.
Psychiatry in Germany did not turn to mass murder on behalf of Hitler and Nazis, but instead was fulfilling its own trajectory of “euthanizing” those in its care—a history that predated Hitler. Psychiatry inspired Hitler. This organized psychiatric slaughter of the innocents gave Hitler a blueprint for the Holocaust by showing that mass murder could be bureaucratically organized and carried out with full cooperation and approval of the highest-ranking psychiatrists. Observers at the Nuremberg Trials confirmed that the psychiatric murder program provided the model and made possible the Holocaust. For the facts about psychiatry’s role in the Holocaust, see my article and the book, by the German geneticist, Benno Muller-Hill, Murderous science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, gypsies, and Others, Germany, 1933- 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Now the so-called euthanasia movement is once again being led by psychiatrists in Europe, as they decide that young people, including victims of child abuse, are beyond help—and deserve to be relieved of their suffering by government sponsored, psychiatrically endorsed death.
Recently someone I deeply care about was feeling suicidal and went from one psychiatrist to another at esteemed university medical centers, where he was repeatedly told that he needed electroshock treatment. What was each of these psychiatrists really saying? Each was saying, “I have no idea how to help you! Like all the other people we cannot help, we must hand you over to the shock guillotine.”
In Europe, and in growing numbers in the US, psychiatrists who have no idea how to help people, and often have made them worse off, will be recommending that they kill themselves. When will my colleagues in organized psychiatry finally admit that they do not know how to help people—that drugs and electroshock are demonstrations of their inabilities—and that in their frustration they must stop destroying the brains and lives of people in their care? I fear they will never inhibit their destructive impulses on their own.
One is tempted to say that psychiatrists are “playing God.” But is that true? Would God, as best understood, look down upon a suffering victim of child abuse and declare the person better off dead? Would such a God fulfill the purposes of the abusers by forever silencing their victims? Or would a loving God expect all of us to rally around this individual with empathy and wisdom while devoting ourselves to ending child abuse? Psychiatrists who injure people and then declare them incurable and call for their deaths are not “playing God”—they are playing psychiatrist. It is time to stop psychiatry from killing off the victims after failing to help them and making them worse off.
Psychiatrists who claim to be experts in something they do not think exists (“psychiatrist” lit. Greek: “doctor of the soul”).
“The spirit of a man can endure a sick body, but who can bear a broken spirit?” (Proverbs 18:14)
Thats all I have to say about that .
Psychiatrists sure aren’t playing God, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility that they’ve been visited by Satan. They may be possessed by Him and acting under his direction when they’re torturing and exterminating Mad people for money.
I refer to them as the spawn of Satan.
I don’t know – the “God” of the Bible was a pretty violent, threatening killer.
What made the God of the Bible very angry was when He saw people oppressing the weak and suffering to promote their own self-serving agendas. He often referred to Himself as a Father to the orphan and a Husband to the widow. Both were treated badly in ancient times.
It is fascinating to see how psychiatrists claim authority over all emotional-mental suffering, i.e. the ability to diagnose and treat “mental illnesses” from a cool Olympian height, to be regarded as “experts” in brain diseases… and yet, as a profession, many psychiatrists are afraid that they are regarded as charlatans, frauds, con-artists, and fake doctors.
Psychiatrists speak of “great progress in developing effective treatments for mental disorders”… and yet they are facing a large deficit of young people wanting to train in their poorly regarded profession, which continues to come under relentless attack from myself and thousands of others, and will continue to indefinitely until it collapses.
Of course, there is a reason that psychiatry is the only medical profession that has an anti-movement. Because it is not a true field of medicine, nor are psychiatrists real doctors. They are indeed charlatans, frauds, con-artists, and fake doctors… for the most part, anyway.
It is ironic that someone like Breggin would even call himself a psychiatrist, given how different he acts and writes to most of his ilk. He would be better to name himself as a healer, enlightened critic, therapist, or modern world shaman.
Hey I thought that Dr Lewis Judd – the former Director of NIMH promised us that mental illness will be conquered by the year 2000. I guess there isnt much sanity or honesty in modern psychiatry= just a lot of greedy narcissists who try to impose their will on the rest of society.
Dr. Breggin is one of the few psychiatrists or soul-doctors actually worthy of the title. All the rest are shrinks–cause that’s what they do to your brain!
The 1942 “euthanasia” debate in the American Journal of Psychiatry:
http://www.brown.uk.com/teaching/HEST5001/joseph.pdf
oldhead
Thanks for posting this; I’d read about it but never got my hands on anything really dealing with it. Kind of scary; most people probably think that 1942 was a long time ago but this was just six years before I was born.
I usually send that to people along with a companion link: http://www.breggin.com/psychiatrysrole.pbreggin.1993.pdf
This is Dr. Breggin’s historical account of how, among other things, psychiatry created the initial infrastructure of the death camps. I was astounded to learn, for example, that German psychiatrists continued to “euthanize” people in mental institutions even after the camps had been liberated and dismantled. Also noteworthy is the support at the time of numerous American psychiatrists for the eugenics theories which ultimately led to the holocaust.
In the late 80s I turned to a psychiatrist for help because I was having a very hard time dealing with life, having the will or the energy to do even the most basic self-care tasks, and had 2 babies barely a year apart to care for on my own. He diagnosed depression, prescribed prozac, and scheduled a follow-up appt for a month later. I tried the pills but quickly found the effects intolerable (a sense of being inside a bubble of not-feeling) and quit taking them. When he asks at the next appt how the pills are working and I tell him I’d quit taking them, he demands to know who told me I could stop. As if I needed anyone’s permission! I disabused him of the notion that he was in charge: “I am the only one living my life, feeling my body, thinking my thoughts. I am the expert on my experience; you aren’t. Your role here is as a consultant, not an authority. But your ego seems to require a power differential in this relationship, which is the opposite of therapeutic, so you’re fired.”
You go, woman! I wish I had felt that level of entitlement to my body when I younger. Maybe then I could have tried to stop my psychiatric clinicians from lying to me, poisioning me, locking me up, and standing in the way of my dreams.
Thank you J! If we had a time machine, I’d loan you the set of brass balls I acquired in that time of my life!
Like I said, this was on the heels of almost back-to-back births. I was very in touch with my body’s wisdom at this point, because I’d had experiences around pregnancy/birth that made it impossible not to be. When I first got pregnant, I kept having periods for like 3 months, so had no physical signs to suspect pregnancy. But my body knew, and my psyche knew too- I kept having two very distressing thoughts/gut feelings: that someone was stealing my stuff; and that I could never get even a moment alone to myself. Newly-married, we were sharing an apartment with my best friend to split the rent, and I’d come home from work and literally check that my belongings were exactly where I left them. Nothing was ever amiss, and I thought I was going bonkers, until my body caught up and stopped the monthly and my boobs got suddenly very sore which prompted peeing on a stick. I was immediately relieved because both those pervasive thoughts make total sense in the context of getting pregnant! And as soon as I knew I was pregnant, I knew a couple other things: baby was a girl, and she was gonna be big, 9 or 10 lbs. So then came the due date dilemma: usually, they calculate this based on last menstruation, but that was obviously unreliable so they estimated based on her femur length from ultrasound images. And their calculations were based on the average birth weight, not the big baby I was carrying, so they were convinced she was due about 3 weeks earlier than the date she finally decided to arrive. So the pressure to induce. Nope, not based on your guesstimate, that’s not a good enough reason to risk the complications. Then the concerns that the baby is getting big (I knew that going in, so this was a non-concern for me) and that that could be an indicator of gestational diabetes. Okay, so then we test to rule-out that problem. Glucose tolerance test was negative, and I made it clear that unless there was evidence of a problem, no more talk of inducing. When active labor finally hit and I went to the hospital, I refused the IV they wanted to put in “just in case.” I had the unmedicated birth I had planned; the baby was a few ounces shy of 10 pounds, just as I’d known she’d be.
We got pregnant again right away (an oops!) and the doctor I ended up with for this one seemed okay at first, but over time it became clear that he was pushing for a C-section. I was 7 1/2 months along when he made it clear he felt entitled to override my decisions if he decided that to do so was in my best interest. I fired him on the spot, got dressed without even waiting for him to exit the room, and politely requested my medical file from the receptionist (she gave me a form for that) and left without a second thought.
Nobody challenges my right to bodily autonomy. And I will never cede to anyone else the right to determine what is in my best interest because it is me and mine that will be stuck with the consequences!
So yeah, I was already a veteran of firing uppity doctors who don’t know their place! 🙂
– and in case you’re curious, I found a midwife a few days after firing the OB, had the baby perfectly healthy at home. Baby #2 was still over 9 pounds, but I had not one tear, not one stitch.
The late Gertrude Black, MD, a GP in the south-central region of my state, was an orthomolecular practitioner before the word orthomolecular existed and had a number of psych patients on vitamin programs. She was particularly amused when one of these patients was told by his doctor how delighted he was at the great improvement in his patient from his medication now that the doc knew he was taking it regularly. Actually the patient hadn’t used any meds for six months and was smart enough not to tell the elated psychiatrist.
I should reveal Dr. B’s treatment for suicidal ideation, since that seems to be a big topic on the site. It uses vitamin B1- start with 500mg B1, adding 100 mg every hour until such thoughts subside or you’ve used 500mg in 100mg doses. They weren’t around then, but I might also suggest a 500omcg B12 sublingual tab at start, as B12 is therapeutic for the depressive end of bipolar syndrome.
Sadly this means that the `elated’ psychiatrist will continue to believe that his intervention was successful and will continue to drug all comers, smugly claiming success. It would be far better if this individual tells the doctor that his recovery was in spite of and without the drugs and suggest that the doctor RETHINK.
THis is why they continue to poison thousands of people and call the naysayers, liars.
I don’t blame the guy, myself. Telling the doc would be like firing rifle shots at a passing armored column that’s looking for trouble- you’d be in the middle of a 100 meter circle of devastation when the vehicles finished.
“Your role here is as a consultant, not an authority.”
That is exactly right. I had this same issue repeatedly with clinicians. This is where the confusion lies. When I was seeking support to help me heal from the distress of trauma, by no means was I implying that wanted to be ‘parented.’ That’s ridiculous, and the height of arrogance, off the charts. Let’s not hand them over our personal power on a silver platter!
Self-empowerment such as what you describe here is not only the pathway to healing through self-agency, it is also what is going to make this profession rightfully obsolete. Thank you for being the example.
This is how the socialist welfare states in Europe saves money, they don’t want to pay to help a young mentally ill person with life time payments from the government so they called it ‘Euthanasia’.
The capitalist states in America medicate them and make millions selling pharmaceuticals, to mask the abuse with chemicals.
Wouldn’t they simply use compassion, support them financially with safe and secure housing, access to healthy organic foods, access to simple recreation, and work through their problems with empathy even if it takes years to assist in their pursuit of happiness?
I had the exact same thought about the welfare state trying to save money. Of course they would not admit this, probably not even to themselves.
The problem is when the abuser not only does not recognize that he/she is being abusive and rationalizes life- and spirit-sabotaging behaviors (including carefully spoken and specifically directed words), but also when they are protected by an enabling system. Calling it out can be rough and it can elicit retaliation, shaming, and all sorts of projections that can do harm if a person is vulnerable. People generally do not want to see they are being/have been abusive; that can be a hard truth to own and the guilt from awakening to that can be overwhelming.
But how else will it cease? At least guilt is a good deterrent.
“People generally do not want to see they are being/have been abusive; that can be a hard truth to own and the guilt from awakening to that can be overwhelming.”
Everyone who enters a “mental health” profession has the duty to be able to handle deep self-examination. If they can’t handle that heat, they’ve got no business near other peoples’ kitchens! Psychiatrists cannot be afforded the luxury of lacking insight into their own motivations, or the consequences of their behaviors. If they can’t take a good hard look inward, go into another line of work. (Lay tile, mix grout, prune bonsai trees, but don’t go near vulnerable hearts and minds!) They have not earned the right to guide others on a journey they can’t handle themselves!
I completely agree that the deeper we know ourselves and allow ourselves to grow and evolve as we go along, the better equipped we are to support others when our paths cross. I’m not convinced, however, that it need be any profession in particular, I believe we can voluntarily support others that desire it, to the best of our abilities at any given moment, self-caring along the way so as to not drain ourselves. For me, it’s a matter of spiritual conviction and values.
But certainly what you say rings totally true, that as long as there is a ‘mental health’ field to go into, one should be well-prepared to face and work through their shadow issues with complete ownership and with no resistance. Otherwise, they get projected onto the client, which is when it becomes bad news for said client and they start a downward spiral, via drugs, stigma, coercion, and marginalization–aka institutional abuse. Thanks for highlighting this. Sadly–and, I think, obviously–the latter scenario is the norm.
I so totally agree with you Alex. Being a support to someone in distress or experiencing an extreme state shouldn’t be considered the purview of any particular profession. I heard a definition of a shaman once (don’t know where; attribution is not my strong suit) as someone who has been through hell and out the other side, so has a map. I trust “Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.” way more than “Went to school to study that. Wrote a paper on it. So I’m an expert.” every day of the week. Doctors as a category, but psychiatrists in particular, in my experience, demand a level of trust they have not earned.
Are Psychiatrists playing God ? No , they are Gestapo . Anyone remember back in the hippie days the poster sold in head shops of Nixon riding a motor cycle with an Argentina license plate ?
I wrote this 2 days ago when I first heard of this –
Re Dutch giving lethal injection to 20 something year old woman with history of child abuse:
This is MURDER. If she chose suicide that is her right. But for a doctor to administer an injection is to put her down like an animal. I thought psychiatry had reached its zenith but I was wrong. How long will it be before they kill ALL their failures? How often will a person who might have had a chance to heal AWAY from medicine, die because their plea for help cost them their lives? How often will a person be persuaded that their situation was absolutely hopeless and there was no chance of anything helping by one group of people, who offer death as a solution to their pain? How long will it be before a society wherein this can happen becomes inured to death dealing intervention and sees `for the good of the patient’ become `for the good of our society’? Well, it’s been done before. In Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Half a million mental patients and 6 million Jews – by PSYCHIATRISTS.
And for you who go along with euthanasia, `assisted suicide’ or whatever euphemism you want to call `putting to death’, who administers the injection? What does this make them? There should be very few doctors who would be willing to actually do it and I would have serious questions about the psychological profile of those who do.
Is this the ultimate `furore therapeuticus’, the last desperate NEED of the doctor to DO something, regardless if the outcome. It’s all about him/her – an arrogance with dire results for all of us if it’s allowed to gain momentum.
Having dealt with psychiatrists, for over thirty years, I can attest to the fact that it is an extremely challenging job. Psychiatry is really in it’s infancy, since so much about the brain is unknown, as mental illness is a mystery to science, mainly.
There is the other pendulum, in which people discredit everything that they say, and regard the whole field as being a fraud. It is a tough balance, between respecting the discipline, and disregarding it. In terms of legislative power, or legal authority over individuals, in life and death situations, that is another realm, the legislative body.
I do not agree with euthanizing individuals with complex diagnosis, who show little signs of improvement, I agree with that. People can have breakthroughs, in fact, they do, and we should not presuppose that it will not happen in the future.
Psychiatry is really in it’s infancy, since so much about the brain is unknown, as mental illness is a mystery to science, mainly.
Briefly: Psychiatry is actually closer to its deathbed than infancy; psychiatry has nothing to do with the brain except for damaging it with drugs and ect; and “mental illness” is a myth, and should always be put inside quotation marks lest it be interpreted otherwise.
“Mental illness” is a “mystery” for the simple reason that psychiatry is looking in the completely wrong places. The idea that knowing more about the brain will help cure “mental illness” is the central fallacy that keeps them from learning the first thing about it.
A recent article on this site mentioned that over 90% of people on the inpatient psych wards had trauma severe enough to cause PTSD in their past, vs. something like 3.5% of the general population. Yet psychiatry consistently overlooks or denies that trauma plays a central role in almost every case of “mental illness,” and spends billions looking fruitlessly for genes that will “explain” what is very obviously NOT a genetic phenomenon.
I have no hope that psychiatry will be able to change its path, nor even want to. They’re making lots of money even though they have no real idea what they’re doing. It’s not a lack of information, it’s a lack of compassion and intention to find out what they don’t know.
—- Steve
“…they have no real idea what they’re doing.”
That’s the real bottom line, isn’t it?
Steve
I gave a “hospital” wide presentation about the issue of trauma in “mental health” and only three psychiatrists out of the fifteen in the “hospital” even bothered to attend. Then, one of the three psychiatrists stated, “What do you expect us to do about this? We don’t have the time to deal with trauma on the units!” They absolutely refuse to even come close to approaching trauma in the lives of the people they’re supposedly “treating”. They don’t want to deal with it, period. And so they fill people full of toxic drugs, which only tamp the issues down that trauma created.
It’s an uphill battle to try and get anyone to deal with the trauma issue and yet it’s the very thing that’s probably caused so many issues for people to try and deal with in their lives.
A “mental health professional” who has no idea what to do about trauma is a danger to his/her clients. Yet that’s what clients get at the psych ward every day. It’s what actually drove me out of the mental health field in the end – when I saw the inside of a psych ward, it was clear that no one with an ounce of empathy for the patients could allow this kind of scenario to exist or imagine for a moment that there was anything therapeutic about it.
Thanks for sharing your observations from “behind the lines!”
— Steve
Steve – I think you say it all in this comment. I couldn’t agree more. We’ve been hearing biological psychiatrists claim to be on the brink of a great discovery for over 60 years but, as you rightly point out, it’s not going t happen because they’re looking in the wrong places.
Yeah this “in its infancy” bullcrap is not going to work as an excuse. Psychiatrists have had over 100 years to learn about the effects of trauma, neglect, poverty, stress, and isolation on human behavior and emotional experience, and has shown very little interest. Avoiding and denying the real causes of people’s suffering for over 100 years isn’t equivalent to “Oh we’re a young field; there’s a lot of progress still to be made…”
There is a reason that psychiatry is so poorly regarded, which is that it regularly disregards evidence that its diagnoses are invalid, that suffering is caused primarily by non-biological factors outside the brain, and that it regularly coerces, misleads, and in some cases murders innocent people.
It was constructed that way! There is a book called The Assault on Truth (here’s the link about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assault_on_Truth)
that lays out Freud’s early training experiences, theories, and profession’s reaction to them. It was clear from the very start of the foundations of psychiatry that trauma is at the root of the problems, and Freud sacrificed his patients to his career!
This is NOT the author’s opinion, by the way. No, this comes direct from Freud‘s own private papers and writings and correspondence! Psychiatry has been a self-serving sham from its very inception!
This is very true. Freud’s genius was that he listened to his patients and believed their stories, and thereby uncovered the trauma and the scandal of widespread sexual abuse in Victorian society, a hundred years before these facts came to be generally accepted. But the reaction of his profession says all that needs to be said about psychiatry’s roots and true intentions – they did everything they could to suppress this truth, and Freud knuckled under and became the progenitor of a hundred years of further denial of the truth.
Psychiatry has never really been all that interested in the truth, at least when it has conflicted with the interests of the elite and the powerful.
—- Steve
Yes. Even doctors who treat cancer have a success rate over 0! That makes shrinks the most useless professionals on the planet and a notch below the mafia when it comes to compassion.
Are you sure they’re below the Mafia? In comparison to psychiatry the Mafia seem like a fine institution to me. After all they take on ALL comers and don’t restrict themselves just to the most vulnerable.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Peter Breggin, the conscience of psychiatry. My research, too, has shown that it appears the psychiatric industry has gone from claiming Jews are “mentally ill” during the Nazi era, to claiming child abuse victims are “mentally ill” today. If I recall correctly, 92% of “borderline” stigmatized today are child abuse victims, and 82% of “psychotic” stigmatized are child abuse victims today.
And psychologists and psychiatrists profiteering off of further victimizing child abuse survivors goes all the way back to Freud, if not the end of the witch hunting days, from my understanding. If you have more insight into this, I’d be grateful. But, as the mother of a very young child who was abused, who was subsequently misdiagnosed and drugged, based upon lies from the child molesters, according to my medical records. It was confessed to me by an ethical pastor that I’d dealt with “the dirty little secret of the two original educated professions.” In other words, the psychologists and psychiatrists have been covering up child abuse for the religions, and easily recognized iatrogenesis for the incompetent doctors, for decades or longer.
And the medical evidence today does seem to indicate psychiatric misdiagnoses of child abuse victims, and their subsequent iatrogenic illness creation / torture with the psychiatric drugs is, in fact, the bread and butter of psychiatric treatment in our society today.
And this illegal psychiatric behavior, coving up child abuse, allows the child abusers to stay on the streets, raping more children, while the abuse victim is tortured and told they alone are the problem. The high school of my local child molester had the highest suicide rate in the nation, by the time my child was in high school. This paternalistic societal problem needs to be addressed and changed. It obviously is profitable for the psychiatric industry, but it’s not in the best interest of society as a whole, which is why doctors technically have a legal mandate to report symptoms of abuse, although they cover them up instead.
And you are absolutely correct, child abuse victims can be helped, just NOT with psychological and psychiatric denial and drugging. I quickly got my child away from the abusers. I gave him love, empowered him to the best of my my ability, and kept him away from the psychiatrist and social worker who wanted to get their hands on him. He went from remedial reading in first grade, after the abuse, to getting 100% on in state standardized tests in eighth grade, to being valedictorian of his high school class. Love and compassion is the way to help an abused child, not stigmatization and drugging. Absolutely, this societal problem needs to be exposed, and ended. Thank you for pointing this out, Dr. Breggin.
Dieu et mon Droit (God and my Right) is the foundation of our legal system in Australia.
When a persons civil and human rights can be removed on the basis of psychiatric fraud (ie you installed anti spyware on your computer and are therefore paranoid and in need of incarceration and treatment with a chemical baseball bat [more than enough grounds according to our Chief Psychiatrist]), and the authorities charged with protecting the public simply ignore their duty, it would appear that the State has provided psychiatrists (and others) with the opportunity to play God. Let them be tested, and history will show, once again, what happens when this type of evil deception is enabled to deal with a few ‘small problems’ behind closed doors.
I agree that Hitler and the National Socialists in Germany were not the first to use this ‘tool’ for nefarious purposes. But I wonder why, at MiA of all places, there has been little mention of Radovan Karadzic? Take a look at the list of crimes he was charged with and you have a blue print for his colleagues who I feel sure will follow when their belief that they are God is exposed before God.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radovan_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87
So the State has removed citizens human and civil rights, and allowed psychiatrists to play God, but it does not necessarily mean that they will chose to act in such a manner. Though given a belief that “no one is watching” one might be tempted ever once in a while.
Exactly. There is a choice. As I’ve said the drug companies and ECT manufacturers have the aim of selling a product, it’s business, but nobody is forcing psychiatrists to use their products. Surgeons have developed a procedure for controlling previously uncontrolled epilepsy, no one is forcing psychiatrists to use it, and I quote, `for the purpose of altering… thoughts, emotions or behaviour’. To choose to remove the rights of their fellow citizens indicates that they are capable of denial to a pathological degree in their daily lives. Never let it be said that many have disturbed sleep, or suffer pangs of conscience, but what do they say when their own politicised and passionate child questions their actions? Smile sadly and medicate them? Or do the children of psychiatrists learn denial at their parent’s knee. They are the masters of it after all. Is there ANY other profession that has these powers? The law requires evidence and procedures, the police may not arbitarily lock someone up on a suspicion without some regard to proof of action for 72 hours, incommunicado. Only a person accused of a `mental illness’ can be incarcerated on a prediction that he or she MIGHT do something. Nobody else can be locked up unless something has actually HAPPENED! Psychiatrists admit they can’t predict violence. In both the US and UK, the APA & the RCP have said in writing that they cannot take responsibility for violence/suicide because they CANNOT BE EXPECTED TO ABLE TO PREDICT IT! So why do they still have the power to DO IT? Is it only fear of litigation? If that’s the case, then why don’t the police lock up every loitering ex con seen on the streets – in case they DO something? Surely the police are afrasid of litigation of one of their `loiterers’ commits a crime and they knew he/she’d done it before. No, he’she gets the benefit of the doubt? Why is this basic logic unseen by the authorities? Psychiatry has no logic associated with it at all but because they are DOCTORS, nobody is noticing.
“Those sick in the soul insist that humanity is sick and they are
the surgeons who should operate on the rest of humanity.”
– Eric Hoffer
“Les malades dans l’âme insister qu’il est l’humanité
qui est malade et ils sont les chirurgiens d’opérer sur elle.”
I’ve known lots of people that have made complete recovery from dreadful child abuse and gone on to live productive lives helping other people when they can. None of these people have recovered through medication dependency or clinical means – they’ve recovered through mutual human support.
Usually psychiatric murder happens in slow motion. So glad to see this latest atrocity of so-called “euthanasia” being discussed. Thank you.
That is a good description of most psychiatric murders of severely distressed people. Slow motion murder, spiritual, psychological, and then physical, occurring over years or decades through drugging, discouraging, marginalizing, coercing.
You get a few quick ones as well. My last contact with psychiatry in 1984 involved a near fatal depot injection at twice the introductory dose. I had been complaining about my treatments and the consultant had been getting annoyed.
If I remember correctly it was Peter Breggin who said : ” People heal people, drugs don’t heal people.”
ECT doesn’t heal people, either. It maims. For those who ‘see’, the results of drugs and ECT are visible in the human energy field. The result of emapathic therapy as practised by Peter Breggin is also visible in the human energy field. To heal = to make whole. Psychiatry (mainly) = to harm.
Hi Peter,
I found your article deeply troubling, and very important. I recall while in graduate training for psych, I consistently experienced intense, confused/outraged reactions to much of the genetic and biological psychiatric discussion (that borders on eugenics) in mainstream mental health training. I remember thinking to myself “what is this, Nazi ideology?”, repeatedly, while listening to my professors. While I was deeply troubled by it than, and continue to be now, this is the first article that I’ve read that was able to elucidate the visceral intuitive feeling I have had for years: The German psychology that rests as the foundation for “Western” psychological theory and practice is the very same philosophy used by the Nazis…I am following your premise correctly?
Well, i for one believe that you ARE following the premise correctly…. Yes, psychiatrists began killing the so-called “mentally ill”, and “mental defectives” in German hospitals & “clinics”, beginning in the early 1930’s – long before the Jews were herded into the death camps. Psychiatry is a pseudoscience and a drug racket. So-called “mental illnesses” are exactly as “real” as presents from Santa Claus. They may have some subjective reality, but NO objective reality. Biopsychiatry is 100% a fraud, and a scam. The DSM is nothing more than a catalog of billing codes. And, the esteemed Dr. Peter Breggin is the exception which proves the rule. I read his “Toxic Psychiatry” over 20 years ago….he literally saved my life from more drugging with neuroleptics….
The Psychiatric industry began with talking, then it devolved into making a quick diagnosis to medicate after a 15 minute meeting.
It is incredible the depths of quick fixes has infected western society, that it would enable the death of a young patient.
I can’t blame the industry because at its creation it was ideal, a free market system that actually profits from showing those with severe problems in life mercy so that they can pursue happiness.
Ideally psychiatrists would talk to patients, listen to their problems without prejudice, and offer a place of peace, love, and sanity above all else.
Today the industry is corrupted to the point where they pass off the most important part of their responsibilities to lesser trained and underpaid therapists. Who usually most often restful or bitter that they are less respected in the mental health profession, and the quality of care for the patient plummets as a result.
Does this mean we do away with the industry? No way that is equally as disturbing, we have to fix the broken parts.
Make psychiatrists assume their original roles, and center therapy around a long term comprehensive approach of compassion, love, and encouragement. Not quick fixes of medications, and abusive talk therapy like cognitive behavioral therapy which is short term and provoking emotionally.
You can’t fix a lifetime of unhappiness and problems with a few months or even few years of listening to someone’s problems. It takes a lifetime to sort out everything, while trying to maintain a good quality of life in the pursuit of happiness.
Peter, again thank you for a thought provoking article. I loved your book “Medication Madness” and was both riveted and disturbed by the information in the book, especially when it introduced the Prozac trial data. We are back to archaic experiments, I’m afraid. I am appalled at Lieberman and his Mengele experiments on producing psychotic breaks in schizophrenia patients. And here again, I hear the Nazi reference again.
Again, we have manipulation of data and the statistics. There doesn’t seem to be any science behind this facade. It’s amazing they’ve lasted this long, the pharmaceutical companies, the psychiatrists and the whole mental health establishment. I heard they are going to redo a drug trial called 329. I don’t have much faith in the effort, because I have seen and done statistical manipulation as a student. The trick is to throw out the data at the beginning. But this was to prove Newton’s laws and the law’s of physics and nobody is debating whether they are true or not. Those experiments are repeatable.
Robert Whitaker, who wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic, a book of which I adore and I have a deep respect for his research efforts. I love all the statistics and layman explanations of the anatomy and all the lessons needed to understand how to “pull apart this issue”, believes he can discuss and prove that the drugs have no efficacy to change the system by talking to the doctors. Unfortunately, to admit this, the doctor’s themselves will have to admit they have been fooling themselves all along and have to bite the hand that feeds them. Give up their means of making money and survival, not to mention the years, blood sweat and tears to get an MD and build a practice. How will they pay off their student loans?
So let’s change the system. How do you accomplish such a task? Well, history proves that it has to be evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt that the pharmaceutical companies are acting in a way that harms the patient. But they are supposedly all crazy. A lawsuit full of crazy people, even though no court of law should be able to verify that science exists behind this industry. Change the way the FDA is run and funded? The pharmaceutical basically use our regulatory systems to train their future employees. The psychiatrists are looked at, as the sales force and a very indentured group to say the least.
So Peter, give us your advice. How to we slay Goliath? Especially since they are the one controlling all the money? 330 billion dollars a year in revenue is a lot of money; never mind, what they already have in equity on the balance sheet.
Also, on another note, I would love to know how many people were in the Prozac drug study and which phase, if you would be so kind? The one where Ely Lilly took 6 of the 12 suicides and relabeled them “emotional liability”
It’s emotional LABILITY, not “liability”…. But, “liability” fits in a way I hadn’t thought of, before, so THANK-YOU. And, it’s only slightly off-topic, but recently, the State of New Hampshire spent HUGE$$$$ to investigate whether the Drug Co.’s used fraudulent tactics to push opioids on the gullible public. (They DID….) Basically, MOST modern American “medicine” is in fact a DRUG RACKET, especially psychiatry….
Thanks for the correction. Maybe it was a Freudian slip.
You’re welcome!…;)… Yes, the so-called “emotional lability” of those test subjects was seen as a LIABILITY, by the drug companies! That’s what I was getting at. I tried to have a friendly tone, and hope you took it that way! Psychiatry IS going away, and morphing, too…. Here in N.H., there’s a serious “shortage” of psychiatrists….(boo hoo hoo….LOL…)…The local “psych ward” at Cheshire Medical Center / Dartmouth Hitchcock-Keene is closing in July, after their adolescent unit closed a few months ago. No shrinks. The local in-patient drug & alcohol treatment – “Phoenix House” – has to use an 82-yr. old shrink for insurance purposes. There’s a new, “State-wide propaganda campaign for “mental health”, using a former State Supreme Court Judge Broderick, but they NEVER mention psychiatry…. Hmmm…???…
Thanks, “Anonymous2016”!… KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
The Dutch case is a symptom, also, of great economic uncertainty. Consider that the Europe of some decades ago rivaled quality of life in the US. (The US many decades ago rivaled itself today.) Europe is not the socially secure group of nations as it once was. Neo-liberalism and austerity are going to take an even greater toll on humanity. Self interested elites are motivated to care little for their own citizens.
In the interests of finance then, we see the important role of psychiatry – there is less time and means to help people, and their business is mostly time and money.
Social systems (as Dr Breggin describes) are apt to Nazi-like processes in the fraudulent name of “identity issues” or a warped concepts of “freedom” or other nonsense. Look at our own elections for similar indications of this idiocy.
Advocates of the process that took this young girl’s life have a firm grip on their intrinsic beliefs, undoubtedly with professional “zeal” at the end result. But let’s be honest, many of these countries, including the US, have a professional class that has no trouble bombing and destroying people around the world, this includes the Netherlands, busy in the “war on terror”.
the mental health system should improve if the political system improves.
if the politics allows favoritism for greed, it will happen everywhere including mental health.
Maybe this is the extreme end of what psychiatry offers most people? Pills that numbs the senses, dull the mind…shocks that take that a step further…surgeries to make personal pain more bearable, by destroying perfectly good brain tissue…
…and now, physician approved, physician assisted suicide, the extreme end of the available “treatments.”
….they couldn’t help her live, so they helped her die, instead….
It´s a horror history the one I just read about this young women going to or gone already to assisted suicide. It´s a horror history too that a civilized country as Nederland permits such an act of killing knowing as they know, and if not ignorance is no excuse, that this so called euthanasia, is executed there.
I´d like to share o couple of ideas that come to my mind almost as an urge when I read the conclusions to which some of the posting persons arrive to: I´d like to say, Psychiatry is a Science, part of Medical specialties, it´s there, that word doesn’t harm anybody. Psychiatrists are MD who as humans choose the way they put in practice the interpersonal relation with clients, society. Associating Psychiatrists to playing god even as a metaphor seems unfocused for me because of the meaning the word god has for most of us. Would god do such a thing? So, playing god is synonymous to the act of killing… I don´t think that the profession called psychiatrist converts certain individuals in collaborators of abominable acts, that is a weak point of view, too simple, it has no depth, no broadness in the analysis. I remember so many years ago “my Psychoanalyst” saying to me: “you shouldn’t´t get into such a relation, you might feel guilty.” No pills, no mental illness diagnoses, just part of my trainings to be a better psychiatrist, and was this Doctor deciding for me, a 34 yo man. I´ve seen during my career so many representatives of psychopharma labs offering me and colleagues all kind od filthy businesses to sell their products and I saw all kind of decent and indecent responses, those were men and women only “no role play of god” anywhere. If we want to be constructive in front of this serious problem caused and displayed by human we must thinks in serious terms, in depth and broadness. On the other hand there are many psychiatrists in USA that not only do what al wee ought to, but go so far away in working to build a better world. I would highly recommend you to search for Mindsight from Dan Siegel. I don´t him, I just enjoy and grow reading what he writes, listening what he says.
Submitted with respect
Olaf
Unfortunately there will always be the low grade graduates with few options for a high paying specialty that requires little academic ability and less work, along with those with psychopathic tendencies and/or a desire for power and few other options because of their own inadequacies, who will fill the breeches. As long as the law supports the involuntary treatment of people, this will lead/is leading to a concentration of poor quality, and aggressively defensive people in positions of power that they will almost certainly abuse. It will be much worse for the patient as these inadequates struggle to maintain their position in the face of changes they are incapable, for many reasons, of adjusting to.
It’s so bad that the therapists are picking and choosing who they want to see based on how much work they have to do.
If it is someone with severe emotional problems they will pass them up and see the people with less severe problems.
The psychiatrists are busy pushing pills and playing God, it is not even a concern for them to do talk therapy.
Dostoyevsky:
`When a man has unlimited power over the flesh and blood of his fellow men, when a man is in a position to degrade another human being to the limit of degradation, he is unable to resist the temptation to do wrong. Tyranny is a habit. In the end it becomes a disease. The best man in the world becomes so brutalized as to be undistinguishable from a wild beast’