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Read, John 2022 Biological Psychiatry and the Mass Murder of “Schizophrenics”: From Denial to Inspirational Alternative


Shep

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Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 2022 DOI: 10.1891/EHPP-2021-0006

 

Biological Psychiatry and the Mass Murder of “Schizophrenics”: From Denial to Inspirational Alternative

 

Read, John, PhD and Masson, Jeffrey, PhD

 

The paper is behind a paywall here, but the preprint is available for free here

 

An interview with the authors is here: Mad in America John Read and Jeffrey Masson – Biological Psychiatry and the Mass Murder of “Schizophrenics”

 

Abstract

 

This article documents the murder, by psychiatrists, of a quarter of a million patients, mostly diagnosed as “schizophrenic,” in Europe during the second world war; and the sterilization of hundreds of thousands more internationally, including in the USA and Scandinavia. These sterilizations and murders were justified by biological psychiatry’s unsubstantiated hypothesis that the conditions involved are genetically determined. Gas chambers in the six psychiatric hospitals involved, in Germany, were subsequently dismantled and moved, along with the psychiatrists and their staff, to help establish some of the Holocaust’s concentration camps, in Poland. The avoidance of these facts and their profound implications, by the profession of psychiatry, internationally, over subsequent decades, is discussed. An inspirational trauma-focussed alternative to the pessimistic, unscientific ideology of biological psychiatry, involving psychiatrists 60 years later, is presented.

 

 

 

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An interview with the authors is here: Mad in America John Read and Jeffrey Masson – Biological Psychiatry and the Mass Murder of “Schizophrenics”

 

I was really impressed with Dr. Jeffrey Masson. It's a difficult topic to read but for those who believe psychiatry hasn't changed and is still doing harm, you'll appreciate Masson's perspective. As he says in that interview, " I guess you can go into psychiatry because you want to help, I understand that. But I think once you see what they’re doing, you have to quit."

 

He talks about his background, including aligning with psychiatric survivors in the anti-psychiatry / patients' rights movement. 

 

This is an important paper. This history needs to be known. It needs to be in the textbooks. 

 

In a related article, Robert Whitaker recently wrote The Holocaust, Biological Psychiatry and a Shift Toward a More Humane Psychiatry Today. Just my take on it, but the term "humane psychiatry" is an oxymoron. The only humane thing psychiatrists can do is to work to end their sadistic profession, but the history in that article is important. 

 

As an Ashkenazi Jew myself, I find this history especially necessary to understanding my own journey and the intergenerational trauma involved. 

 

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