I Accuse Psychiatry of Murder

November 19^th is the fiftieth anniversary of the suicide of my dearly beloved friend Geoffrey.  He put a pistol into his mouth, pulled the trigger and thus brought an end to twelve years of psychiatric conversion therapy, an end to his pain, and an end to his life.  He was twenty-eight years old.

The happy and pleasurable union of two souls and two bodies is what poets call love.  The transition from childhood innocence to adulthood bewilderment is a sacred moment in one’s life.  But there were no poets to celebrate Geoffrey and me bonding together, nor any priests to sanctify the occasion.  There were just psychiatrists who declared that our relationship was a mental illness and should end immediately.  We were sixteen years old.

Conversion therapy, which attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation, is now illegal throughout all of Canada as well as in twenty-six American states.  The Canadian government has declared it to be a form of torture.  There is never any justice for victims of psychiatric abuse.  They have no possibility to sue their psychiatrists, even when the psychiatric treatment was forced upon them, as was the case for Geoffrey and me.  All that we can do for them is to honor their memory by recalling their stories.

I would like very much to start a Me Too movement for victims of psychiatric abuse, especially for homosexuals who underwent conversion therapy.  One major goal would be to convince the American Psychiatric Association that it should apologize for treating homosexuality as a mental illness until December 15, 1973.  The Canadian Psychiatric Association does not need to apologize since it never considered homosexuality to be a mental illness.  This is a perfect example of the arbitrariness of psychiatry.  Until 1973, a Canadian homosexual could become mentally ill just by crossing the border and entering the United States, whereas an American homosexual could cease to be mentally ill just by going across the border in the other direction.

On June 21, 2019, the American Psychoanalytical Association apologized for having previously treated homosexuality as a mental illness. It issued a statement saying: “It is long past time to recognize and apologize for our role in the discrimination and trauma caused by our profession,” while referring to conversion therapy.  But it was not a psychoanalyst who pushed Geoffrey to suicide.  It was a psychiatrist.  Likewise, it was not a psychoanalyst who drove me into an acute paranoid schizophrenic psychosis.  It was a psychiatrist.

Many people say that American psychiatry has changed greatly since I left the country in 1968, but one aspect remains constant, and that is the refusal of psychiatrists to assume any blame for the harm that they cause.  With me, they practice what Germans call Todeschweigetaktik: the tactic of killing someone with silence.  Psychiatrists just ignore me and all that I write with the idea that I will soon die and the issues will thus be resolved.  Since the year 2000, I have published numerous books and articles in both French and English denouncing psychiatric abuse.  My first book on the subject, Comment réussir sa schizophrénie, received literary prizes in both Québec and France.  This will be the fourth article that I have published in Mad in America.  Despite all this international visibility, not once has any psychiatrist made any comment about my writings, let alone apologize for the psychiatric abuse that I suffered and that destroyed my life.

I have a recurring fantasy.  I go to my mailbox and discover a letter written to me by Dr. Wille Zurmacht, president of the American Psychiatric Association.  The name is just as fictional as the letter, but composing the letter gives me great pleasure.  It goes like this:

Dear Dr. Dole, As president of the American Psychiatric Association, I am writing to express the sorrow and pain that all of our members have felt in reading the tragic story of how psychiatrists drove your friend Geoffrey to suicide and how other psychiatrists turned you into a schizophrenic.  We are truly sorry and hope that you will forgive us.  However, it is needless to say that you should not expect our association to reimburse the thousands of dollars that psychiatrists pocketed while destroying the lives of two promising young men.

In particular, we apologize for the practice of conversion therapy, which traumatized countless homosexuals of your generation.  It was an inhumane and degrading treatment.  We also apologize for using electric shock therapy to change sexual orientation.  You may have heard about it.  During the heyday of the behaviorist movement, homosexuals were given electric shocks when they saw a picture of a naked man and the shock ended when this picture was replaced by the picture of a naked woman.  This was indeed an inhumane and abusive treatment.  I still blush with shame when I recall that psychiatrists even gave lobotomies to homosexuals to express their disapproval of their sexual orientation.  This practice was indeed humiliating and insulting.  Finally, I should mention the psychiatric practice of castrating homosexuals, either surgically or with chemicals.  This was the fate of Alan Turing, who saved Western Civilization.  He committed suicide as a result of the chemical castration that was forced upon him by a British court.  There are no words adequate for expressing the shame and regret that the American Psychiatric Association feels when confronted with such barbaric practices forced upon homosexuals.

Since you are also a schizophrenic, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for the cruel and inhumane treatments that psychiatrists have forced upon schizophrenics throughout the ages.  They include electric shock treatments, insulin shock therapy, lobotomies, cold baths, hot baths, mud baths, blood suckers, incarceration, chemical imprisonment (neuroleptics), solitary confinement and psychotherapy sessions, during which the psychiatrist says absolutely nothing and then sends a bill for sharing his wisdom.  Of course the worst use of psychiatry was done by Nazi psychiatrists, who had the task of deciding which mentally ill Germans should be killed in death camps. 

For all these degrading, inhumane treatments, the American Psychiatric Association expresses its regrets and begs for forgiveness.

Yours sincerely, Wille Zurmacht, M.D.

Before I go to my Great Reward, I would like to give an account of some of the psychiatric scandals that I witnessed in America.  At McLean Hospital, I went for many months without having any news from my parents.  They did not write to me, visit me, or telephone me.  I had no idea why they were avoiding me at the moment in my life when I needed them more than ever.  The thought occurred to me that McLean psychiatrists had told them that my schizophrenia was incurable and that they should just try to forget about me, for their own sake.  They also told my parents that they should sell their house since they expected me to be confined forever.  Thirty years after my release I asked my mother why she and my father had no contact with me for so many months while I was at McLean, and she said: “It is because your psychiatrists said that it was our fault that you were mentally ill.”  I told her that they were totally wrong, that the only cause of my psychosis was my psychiatrist at the Phillips Exeter Academy who tried to cure me of my homosexuality.   I never told my McLean psychiatrists that my Exeter psychiatrist had driven me insane mostly because I thought that they would not believe me.

My first psychotherapist at McLean was an elderly woman who said nothing and continually smoked Parliament cigarettes, flicking the ashes in a small glass ashtray.  Once I brought up to subject of sex with her.  She told me that I should return immediately to my room because it was not allowed to speak about sex.  After that I refused to see her.  She was replaced by a young man psychiatrist who smoked Marlboros and who took copious notes of what I was saying.

I had a fellow patient at McLean, a lady in her sixties, who told me that she had been locked up at McLean for the past forty years because her husband, who was a psychiatrist there, wanted to live in peace with his mistress.

I know for a fact that my last psychiatrist in Boston had sexual relations with his male patients, before he went to prison.

I have a friend who has not seen her daughter in twenty-four years because a Harvard psychiatrist told the daughter that my friend had claimed that the girl’s father had sexually abused her.  This abuse never happened.  My friend never said any such thing.  It was a horror story invented by the psychiatrist with the sad result that the daughter has refused to have any contact with her mother for twenty-four years.

Dear Reader, please take a minute today to remember victims of psychiatric abuse.  Geoffrey was a brilliant, hard-working, kind and affectionate young man.  He was perfectly bilingual (English and Spanish) and an excellent soccer player.  He managed in his short life to earn a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a master’s in education from Boston College and a doctor of jurisprudence from the University of Virginia.  He could have contributed so much to the world if psychiatrists had not murdered him.