Political abuse of psychiatry

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In the case of political abuse of psychiatry , the medical means of psychiatry (e.g. diagnostics , therapy , forced admission ) are used to remove individuals from the public for political reasons, to discredit them or to deny them basic human rights.

In many countries around the world and at different times, psychiatrists have been involved in the abuse of their patients . This happens either in individual cases or has a systematic character, for example during the Nazi era in Germany ( Action T4 ), in the People's Republic of China and in the Soviet Union .

Psychiatry abuse by country

China

In 2002, British human rights activist Robin Munro published his book Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and its Origins in the Mao Era on Human Rights Watch , based on publicly available Chinese documents. In it Munro explains that psychiatric abuse began in China in the 1950s and 1960s and increased extremely during the entire Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and reached its peak there.

Since the Mao period , members of religious groups, political dissidents and whistleblowers in China have been admitted to psychiatric clinics and thus silenced. Millions of people have been misdiagnosed as being insane. According to Munro's research, that affected around 15 percent of all forensic psychiatric cases in the 1980s.

In the early 1990s, the numbers had dropped to five percent, but the percentage rose sharply when the state persecution of Falun Gong began.

Germany

time of the nationalsocialism

In 1940 and 1941, under the supervision of doctors and therapists in Germany, more than 70,000 people with intellectual disabilities or mental illnesses were murdered as part of Action T4, and more than 200,000 people in the Nazi murders between 1933 and 1945. The measures were euphemistically referred to as " euthanasia ". In fact, for economic reasons and for reasons of “ racial hygiene ”, “unworthy life” was systematically eradicated.

German Democratic Republic

Individual case studies are known of the abuse of psychiatry in the GDR to eliminate opponents of the regime.

Federal Republic of Germany

In the Frankfurt tax investigator affair , several investigators from the Frankfurt V tax office were declared incapacitated in 2006 and retired after an expert attested a " paranoid - troubled development". Those affected had repeatedly resisted instructions from their superiors to stop certain investigations into billions in tax evasion committed by customers of Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank . In December 2015, the complaint of the persons concerned due to immoral and deliberate false assessment was approved by the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court in the last instance ; The expert had to pay four victims a total of 226,000 euros in damages. There was no criminal investigation against the superiors of those affected. An investigation committee of the Hessian state parliament into the processes was ended without result.

Canada

Between 1940 and 1970 around 20,000 orphans in Québec were wrongly classified as mentally ill and placed in clinics ( Duplessis orphans ). In this way, the provincial government and the Catholic Church received state funds that they were not actually entitled to for the accommodation of orphans.

Soviet Union and successor states

Main article: Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union , political dissidents were deliberately diagnosed as mentally ill , especially in the Serbsky Institute in Moscow . The then KGB agent and later General Secretary of the CPSU, Yuri Andropov, was in charge of the proceedings . This policy became known through the dissident Wladimir Bukowski , who smuggled a 150-page report into the USA in 1971.

From the Ukraine and from Russia and individual reports. The then 37-year-old Mikhail Kosenko was classified by a Moscow court as dangerous after taking part in a protest rally against the inauguration of Vladimir Putin , despite the fact that the court had received evidence of his involvement in violent clashes. A permanent admission to a psychiatric hospital was ordered. Similar reports came out from Ukraine in 2010.

United States

In the 19th century, the American doctor Samuel A. Cartwright developed  the clinical picture of drapetomania . It was used to describe the desire for freedom of enslaved Afro-Americans who opposed their captivity.

Psychiatrist Colin A. Ross reports in his book The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists that there was systematic abuse by psychiatrists on behalf of the CIA in the 20th century .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robin Munro, Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and its Origins in the Mao Era , Human Rights Watch, August 13, 2002, ISBN 1-56432-278-5 , accessed January 27, 2017
  2. ^ A b c Robert van Voren, On Dissidents and Madness: From the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the "Soviet Union" of Vladimir Putin , Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi. 242. May 18, 2009, ISBN 978-90-420-2585-1 , accessed January 27, 2017
  3. ↑ Psychiatric Abuse of Falun Gong Practitioners in China , American Journal of Psychiatry, 2002, accessed January 27, 2017
  4. ↑ Politically abused? Psychiatry and State Security in the GDR
  5. Jump up ↑ Frozen , Frauke Hunfeld, Der Stern, December 19, 2008
  6. ↑ Tax investigators who have been declared paranoid are being rehabilitated , Matthias Thieme, Berliner Morgenpost, December 12, 2015
  7. ^ Duplessis Orphans: A dark history revealed
  8. ↑ Report by HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
  9. ↑ Russian protester's sentence of indefinite psychiatric treatment upheld
  10. ↑ Psychiatric Abuse For Political Purposes Returns to Ukraine Jamestown Fundation, August 17, 2011.