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Most people are aware of at least some of the facts of psychiatric abuse in the U S S.R. and Eastern Europe. In recent conversations about professional ethics and the question of an individual's and society's responsibility for upholding moral codes of practice and condemning immoral ones, I have been asked “What can we do?” I have been told that the majority of child analysts are not psychiatrists, from which I am to infer that it is none of our business; or the word “politics” has been muttered darkly and our blessed neutrality invoked to calm any quiverings of the super ego.
I think such reactions must arise from the need in most of us to develop some kind of defensive armour against the battery of atrocities and inhumanities forced upon us daily. We feel hopeless in face of them all and turn to our own bit of humanitarian work, where the same ethic applies whether we are psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, social workers, or members of the medical profession. If this basic humanitarian ethic is being systematically violated by a core of Russian psychiatrists, why should we react?
The reason is historical and inescapable. In 1931 a group of Bavarian psychiatrists discussed openly the principles and needs for sterilisation and euthanasia. By 1936, extermination of the “physically or socially unfit” was accepted practice.
All state mental hospitals and homes for retarded children had to report on patients who had been ill for over five years. The decision as to which patients should be killed was carried out by consultants, most of whom were professors of psychiatry. They never saw the patients.
Those first exterminations of human beings for political reasons were carried out by medical men under the guise of sickness. The killings went from the mentally retarded, the “chronic schizophrenic”, “the criminally insane” to the “racially impure”.
Thus medical anti-humanism begins with very simple shifts of attitude in the doctors involved. All that was necessary in Germany was to