History of Psychiatry

Overview

So what has psychiatry done to earn the label “An Industry of Death”?

The answer to that question is found on these pages and also in the documentary Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.

It is an answer best explained from the perspective of psychiatry’s 200-year history and the grave impact psychiatry has on society today. Since the early days when psychiatrists chained, flogged, starved or tortured their patients into total submission, little has changed. Then, as now, the goal was the subjugation of the individual, not to cure madness. The brutal treatments psychiatry evolved and still uses to this day - electroshock, psychosurgery and debilitating drugs - stand testament to that fact.

History of Psychiatry

Until the mid-1800s, the practice that became known as “psychiatry” was responsible only for the warehousing of the mentally disturbed. Patients were treated like animals, managed through brute force. Cruel physical punishments dominated asylums.

Inmates were confined to cages, closets and animal stalls, shackled and flogged. Psychiatrist Lee Coleman, author of Reign of Error, says the roots of psychiatry are based on control and power, “Whatever was done to make this person more manageable was called a treatment. And the sad reality is that many of these so-called treatments were in essence torture.”

Through the 1600-1700s, inmates at the infamous “Bedlam” mental asylum in London were chained, beaten, fed rotten food and subjected to regular bloodlettings. The only beneficiaries of this treatment were the asylum attendants, who made fortunes from their human warehouses and displayed their victims like circus acts to anyone willing to pay admission.

Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, patients were chained naked to walls, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience. French asylum director Philippe Pinel abolished the use of chains at Paris’s Salpêtrière Institution in 1793. In their place, however, he instituted straitjackets and threatened patients who misbehaved with “10 severe lashes.”

In 1808, Germany’s Johann Christian Reil coined the term “psychiatry.” The word literally means “healing the soul” from the Greek “psyche.” Yet Reil had already concluded in 1803—without evidence—that mental disturbances were of the brain, not of the soul. He advocated punishment, intimidation, loud noises, flogging and opium as treatments, describing them as “non-injurious torture.” For a man who suffered “delusions about the purity of the female sex,” Reil recommended “a prostitute who will cure his delusions.”

Psychiatry abandons the existence of the Human Soul

In 1879, German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt unveiled “experimental” psychology to his students at Leipzig University, declaring the study of the soul “a waste of energy” and that Man was nothing more than an animal. He stated: “The soul can no longer exist in the face of our present-day physiological knowledge.”

Although the “man-is-an-animal” theory is easily debunked (dogs do not drive cars, horses will never paint masterpieces and concerts have yet to be performed by an orchestra of monkeys), psychology and psychiatry adopted Wundt’s biological model.

The progression from Wundt’s “man-is-an-animal” theory to the psychiatric breeding doctrines of eugenics [meaning “good stock”] was a natural one. In the early 1900s, to build support for sterilising minorities and “the unfit”, the American Eugenics Society awarded medals at country fairs for the best-bred families. Sterilisation of those deemed “unfit” by psychiatry continued for several decades, most notably in Germany.

Psychiatry was behind The Holocaust

In 1895, psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz had introduced eugenics to Germany, expanding it to include killing “undesirables”. He coined the term “rassenhygiene” meaning “racial hygiene” and inspired psychiatrists to assess the value of humans and weed out and kill the inferior.

Hitler consulted Ploetz’s work and Fritz Lenz’s book Foundation of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene, and they became a basic for his vision of Germany. Hitler’s personal doctors, eugenicists Karl Brandt and Theodor Morell piloted the first “mercy killing” on “defective children.” Psychiatrists and doctors were then given the power to “grant mercy death” to patients. The first “gassing test” was conducted in January 1940 at Brandenburg Institution. Some 300,000 “mentally defective” persons - 94% of Germany’s “mentally ill” - were killed at the hands of psychiatrists.

At first, Jews were considered “undeserving” of euthanasia. This changed on August 30, 1940 when 160 Jewish patients were filmed as part of the propoganda film “Scum of Humanity,” transferred to Brandenburg Institution and then gassed to death. Psychiatry’s killing programme continued until the end of the war when the true horror of the Holocaust became known. Six million Jews, roughly 60% of the entire Jewish population, lost their lives because of Hitler’s psychiatric programme.

At the Nuremberg Trials, only 23 German doctors were accused, a mere 16 convicted of crimes against humanity and of these only 5 were psychiatrists. Never identified or tried as the mass-murderers they were, most of the psychiatrists responsible for The Holocaust returned to prominent psychiatric practice after the war.

Psychosurgery

On September 14, 1936, American psychiatrist Walter Freeman hammered an ice pick through the eye socket of a patient and into the frontal lobes of the brain. Slashing the instrument from side to side, Freeman destroyed wide areas of tissue.

The psychiatric community successfully convinced state governments that psychosurgery could reduce their mental health budgets. By the time “Operation Ice Pick” ended in the 1960s, an estimated 113,000 people had been lobotomised with an estimated death rate of 10-20%.

In spite of the multitude of victims whose lives have been completely destroyed by psychosurgery, psychiatry has never been forced to stop this barbaric practice.

Electroshock

Electroshock was first introduced in 1938 by psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti after experimenting on dogs (half of which died) and then visiting a local slaughterhouse to watch butchers stun pigs with electricity. Inspired, Cerletti soon arranged for his first human subject, administering electroshock to a local jailhouse prisoner; the man secreamed in response: “Not another one! It’s deadly!” Cerletti simply increased the voltage.

As up to 40% of electroshock patients suffered bone fractures from the convulsions induced by the electric shocks, psychiatrists eventually introduced muscle paralyzers and anaesthetics. These did not, however, reduce the impact of the shocks on the brain.

Ask a psychiatrist how electroshock “works” and he is likely to say that he does not know; he is not an “expert” on electricity. Instead he will commonly provide you with a theory - for example, that electroshock:

Is a destructive process that somehow makes for improvement.
Yields a beneficial vegetative effect.
Yields the unconscious experience of dying and resurrection.
Gives rise to the identification of the physician to the mother.
Yields fear, which in turn causes remission.

Two million people a year are subjected to electroshock worldwide. An estimated 10,000 die as a result. Two thirds of electroshock victims are women. Fifty percent are elderly.

Psychiatric Drugs

By the early 1950s, psychiatrists had discovered the next “miracle cure” - one that swelled psychiatric coffers and altered the face, but never the intent, of institutional psychiatry. Developed originally as a synthetic dye, French psychiatrist Jean Delay discovered Thorazine, which had a profound effect on patients. Marketed as an “antipsychotic,” the drug severly hindered brain function, creating an effect psychiatrists enthusiastically described as “a chemical lobotomy”.

Within eight months psyciatrists had administered Thorazine to an estimated two million patients in the US. A full three quarters of these were outside institutions. The use of such substances continued to spread beyond the confines of psychiatry and into general medicine where they began to be prescribed for everyday maladies. By the mid 1960s, 48% of American adults had taken a psychiatric drug reaping billions for the psychiatric and drug industries.

A staggering range of addictive psychiatric drugs followed, increasingly prescribed for the general population. And with more and more billions at stake, the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry bombarded society with advertisements, media articles and talk shows, fraudulently pitching the benefits of psychiatric drugs. Finally, perfectly normal people had become the target for psychiatric drug marketing.

Consumption of these drugs has become so widespread that more than 150 million people worldwide have taken Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor antidepressants. These drugs are so widely prescribed that the pharmaceuticals travel through the sewage network and end up being recycled into the water system. Scientists have discovered traces of one widely used antidepressant in English and US drinking water.

All the while, in an ever-increasing incestuous relationship, psychiatrists continued to invent mental diseases for which drug companies could supply a drug to prescribe.

Psychiatry Today

In today’s psychiatry, motivated by its mission to “follow the money,” to quote a contemporary president of the American Psychiatric Association, you are witnessing a profit-driven, corrupt industry that leaves death and destruction in its wake. Strong words, but based on cold hard facts. Facts you need to know. Consider the following:

Psychiatry monopolizes international mental health and demands trillions of euros from governments each year for its services.
Insurance in the United States alone pays out $69 billion annually in mental health costs annually.
Psychiatric service costs exceed those of general medical services by almost 200%.
International psychiatric drug sales total in the range of $76 billion a year.

And what are governments and societies getting in return?

By their own admission, psychiatrists do not know how to cure a single mental problem.
They do not know how their treatments affect patients.
According to one study, psychiatric treatment scored a 99% failure in patient recovery.
More than 20 million children worldwide are on prescribed psychiatric drugs known to cause violence, psychosis, hallucinations, suicide, homicide. diabetes and death for alleged disorders that have never been scientifically proven to exist.
Antidepressant “wonder-drugs” are widely prescribed. However, these drugs are under fire by drug regulatory agencies, not only for their potential to create violence and suicidal impulses, but because drug trials have found they perform no better than placebos (sugar pills).
The number of American seniors aged 65 who receive electroshock is more than three and a half times that of those aged 64. Why? Government health insurance for senior citizens becomes available at 65.
Yet while almost half of the elderly who receive electroshock therapy die within two years, psychiatrists continue to electroshock millions of people throughout the world.

If psychiatry is destructive and fraudulent to this extent, how has it become so entrenched in society?

In 1940, British psychiatrist John Rawling Rees, later co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health, told a meeting of the National Council of Mental Hygiene in the UK: “Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within [psychiatry’s] sphere of influence ... we have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church; the two most difficult are law and medicine...”

In 1945, a time of great disruption, uncertainty and dismay, Canadian psychistrist and World Federation for Mental Health co-founder G. Brock Chisholm declared: “To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas.”

With such treacherous rhetoric, the destructive agenda of Chisholm, Rees and the World Federation for Mental Health paved the way for the power and money foundations of modern psychiatry.

Despite billions invested in it, psychiatry does not cure or alleviate. On the contrary, psychiatrists ruin lives and undermine society at huge cost. Something can and must be done about this dangerous profession. Only by taking action can we hope to create a brighter future for our society and for our children.

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