Editing Anti-psychiatry (section)

=== Political abuse of psychiatry ===
{{Main|Political abuse of psychiatry}}
{{See also|Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union}}
[[File:Guantanamo captive psych ward.jpg|thumb|right|The psychiatric ward at Guantanamo Bay]]

Psychiatrists around the world have been involved in the suppression of individual rights by states in which the definitions of mental disease have been expanded to include political disobedience.<ref name=Semple>{{cite book|last1=Semple |first1=David |last2=Smyth |first2=Roger |last3=Burns |first3=Jonathan |title=Oxford handbook of psychiatry |year=2005 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford |isbn=978-0-19-852783-1 |pages=6 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1MeRuoTs0loC&pg=PA6 |access-date=2014-01-12}}</ref>{{rp|6}} Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions.<ref name="Noll">{{cite book |last=Noll |first=Richard |author-link=Richard Noll |title=The encyclopedia of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders |year=2007 |publisher=Infobase Publishing |isbn=978-0-8160-6405-2 |page=[https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780816064052/page/n28 3] |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780816064052 |url-access=registration }}</ref><!--|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jzoJxps189IC&pg=PA3-->{{rp|3}} Psychiatry possesses a built-in capacity for abuse which is greater than in other areas of medicine.<ref name="Medicine betrayed">{{cite book|title=Medicine betrayed: the participation of doctors in human rights abuses |year=1992 |publisher=Zed Books |isbn=978-1-85649-104-4 |page=65 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bMTu_oIfVsIC&pg=PA65 |access-date=2014-01-12}}</ref>{{rp|65}} The diagnosis of mental disease can serve as proxy for the designation of social dissidents, allowing the state to hold persons against their will and to insist upon therapies that work in favor of ideological conformity and in the broader interests of society.<ref name="Medicine betrayed" />{{rp|65}} In a monolithic state, psychiatry can be used to bypass standard legal procedures for establishing guilt or innocence and allow political incarceration without the ordinary odium attaching to such political trials.<ref name="Medicine betrayed" />{{rp|65}}

Under the [[Nazi Germany|Nazi regime]] in the 1940s, the "duty to care" was violated on an enormous scale.<ref name="Check1" /> In Germany alone 300,000 individuals that had been deemed mentally ill, work-shy or feeble-minded were [[Compulsory sterilization|sterilized]].  An additional 200,000 were euthanized.<ref>{{Cite journal | last1 = Strous | first1 = R. D. | title = Nazi Euthanasia of the Mentally Ill at Hadamar | doi = 10.1176/appi.ajp.163.1.27 | journal = American Journal of Psychiatry | volume = 163 | issue = 1 | pages = 27 | year = 2006 | pmid =  16390885}}</ref> These practices continued in territories occupied by the Nazis further afield (mainly in [[eastern Europe]]), affecting thousands more.<ref name="Birley">{{Cite journal | last1 = Birley | first1 = J. L. T. | title = Political abuse of psychiatry | doi = 10.1111/j.0902-4441.2000.007s020[dash]3.x | journal = [[Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica]] | volume = 101 | issue = 399 | pages = 13–15 | date=January 2000 | pmid = 10794019| s2cid = 144720199 }}</ref> From the 1960s up to 1986, [[political abuse of psychiatry]] was reported to be systematic in the Soviet Union, and to surface on occasion in other Eastern European countries such as [[Socialist Republic of Romania|Romania]], [[Hungarian People's Republic|Hungary]], [[Czechoslovak Socialist Republic|Czechoslovakia]], and [[Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia|Yugoslavia]],<ref name="Medicine betrayed" />{{rp|66}}  as well as in Western European countries, such as Italy. An example of the use of psychiatry in the political field is the "case Sabattini", described by [[Giorgio Antonucci]] in his book ''Il pregiudizio psichiatrico''.<ref>Antonucci, Giorgio: Il pregiudizio psichiatrico, Milano, 2020 [1989], ISBN 978-88-33020-76-1, pp. 147-150</ref> A "mental health genocide" reminiscent of the Nazi aberrations has been located in the history of South African oppression during the apartheid era.<ref name="Press conference">{{cite web |title=Press conference exposes mental health genocide during apartheid |date=14 June 1997 |url=http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/1997/06160x76497.htm |publisher=South African Government Information |access-date=16 January 2012 |archive-date=10 January 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120110122650/http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/1997/06160x76497.htm |url-status=live }}</ref> A continued misappropriation of the discipline was later attributed to the People's Republic of China.<ref name="van Voren 2010">{{cite journal|last=van Voren |first=Robert |title=Political Abuse of Psychiatry—An Historical Overview |journal=[[Schizophrenia Bulletin]] |date=January 2010 |volume=36 |issue=1 |pages=33–35 |pmid=19892821 |pmc=2800147 |doi=10.1093/schbul/sbp119 }}</ref>

K. Fulford, A. Smirnov, and E. Snow state: "An important vulnerability factor, therefore, for the abuse of psychiatry, is the subjective nature of the observations on which psychiatric diagnosis currently depends."<ref name="Fulford">{{cite journal|last1=Fulford |first1=K |last2=Smirnov |first2=A |last3=Snow |first3=E |title=Concepts of disease and the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR |journal=[[The British Journal of Psychiatry]] |year=1993 |volume=162 |pages=801–810 |doi=10.1192/bjp.162.6.801 |pmid=8330112 |issue=6|s2cid=20611990 }}</ref> In an article published in 1994 by the ''[[Journal of Medical Ethics]]'', American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz stated that "the classification by slave owners and slave traders of certain individuals as Negroes was scientific, in the sense that whites were rarely classified as blacks. But that did not prevent the 'abuse' of such racial classification, because (what we call) its abuse was, in fact, its use."<ref name="Szasz, 1994" /> Szasz argued that the spectacle of the Western psychiatrists loudly condemning Soviet colleagues for their abuse of professional standards was largely an exercise in hypocrisy.<ref name="Gosden" />{{rp|220}}<ref name="Szasz, 1994" /> Szasz states that K. Fulford, A. Smirnov, and E. Snow, who correctly emphasize the value-laden nature of psychiatric diagnoses and the subjective character of psychiatric classifications, fail to accept the role of psychiatric power.<ref name="Szasz, 1994">{{cite journal|last=Szasz |first=Thomas |author-link=Thomas Szasz |title=Psychiatric diagnosis, psychiatric power and psychiatric abuse |journal=[[Journal of Medical Ethics]] |date=September 1994 |volume=20 |issue=3 |pages=135–138 |pmid=7996558 |doi=10.1136/jme.20.3.135 |pmc=1376496 }}</ref> He stated that psychiatric abuse, such as people usually associated with practices in the former USSR, was connected not with the misuse of psychiatric diagnoses, but with the political power built into the social role of the psychiatrist in democratic and totalitarian societies alike.<ref name="Gosden" />{{rp|220}}<ref name="Szasz, 1994" /> Musicologists, drama critics, art historians, and many other scholars also create their own subjective classifications; however, lacking state-legitimated power over persons, their classifications do not lead to anyone's being deprived of property, liberty, or life.<ref name="Szasz, 1994" /> For instance, a plastic surgeon's classification of beauty is subjective, but the plastic surgeon cannot treat his or her patient without the patient's consent, so there cannot be any political abuse of plastic surgery.<ref name="Szasz, 1994" />

The bedrock of political medicine is coercion masquerading as medical treatment.<ref name="Szasz, 2001">{{cite journal|last=Szasz |first=Thomas |title=The Therapeutic State: The Tyranny of Pharmacracy |journal=[[The Independent Review]] |date=Spring 2001 |volume=V |issue=4 |pages=485–521 |url=http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_05_4_szasz.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050304030638/http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_05_4_szasz.pdf |archive-date=2005-03-04 |url-status=live |access-date=20 January 2012 |issn=1086-1653}}</ref>{{rp|497}} In this process, physicians diagnose a disapproved condition as an "illness" and declare the intervention they impose on the victim a "treatment," and legislators and judges legitimate these categorizations.<ref name="Szasz, 2001" />{{rp|497}} In the same way, physician-[[Eugenics|eugenicists]] advocated killing certain disabled or ill persons as a form of treatment for both society and patient long before the Nazis came to power.<ref name="Szasz, 2001" />{{rp|497}}<ref>{{cite book|last=Black |first=Edwin |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3qBduQAACAAJ |title=War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race |publisher=Dialog Press|isbn=978-0-914153-29-0|year=2012}}{{page needed|date=January 2014}}</ref>

From the commencement of his political career, Hitler put his struggle against "enemies of the state" in medical rhetoric.<ref name="Szasz, 2001" />{{rp|502}} In 1934, addressing the Reichstag, he declared, "I gave the order… to burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers of our internal well-poisoning."<ref name="Szasz, 2001" />{{rp|502}}<ref name=Kershaw>{{cite book |last=Kershaw |first=Ian |title=Hitler: 1889–1936 |year=1999 |publisher=New York |location=Norton |isbn=978-0-393-04671-7 |url=https://archive.org/details/hitlerhubris00kers }}</ref>{{rp|494}} The entire German nation and its National Socialist politicians learned to think and speak in such terms.<ref name="Szasz, 2001" />{{rp|502}} [[Werner Best]], [[Reinhard Heydrich]]'s deputy, stated that the task of the police was "to root out all symptoms of disease and germs of destruction that threatened the political health of the nation… [In addition to Jews,] most [of the germs] were weak, unpopular and marginalized groups, such as gypsies, homosexuals, beggars, 'antisocials', 'work-shy', and 'habitual criminals'."<ref name="Szasz, 2001" />{{rp|502}}<ref name=Kershaw />{{rp|541}}

In spite of all the evidence, people ignore or underappreciate the political implications of the pseudotherapeutic character of Nazism and of the use of medical metaphors in modern democracies.<ref name="Szasz, 2001" />{{rp|503}} Dismissed as an "[[political abuse of psychiatry|abuse of psychiatry]]", this practice is a controversial subject not because the story makes psychiatrists in Nazi Germany look bad, but because it highlights the dramatic similarities between pharmacratic controls in Germany under Nazism and those that have emerged in the US under the [[free market]] economy.<ref name="Szasz, 2001" />{{rp|503}}<ref>{{cite book |last=Klein |first=Naomi |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=C0KIy92V58wC |title=The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism |date=29 July 2008 |publisher=Knopf Canada |isbn=9780676978018 }} Highlights similarity between Psychiatric treatments and disaster Capitalism.</ref>{{page needed|date=January 2014}}