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.
