The Dark Side of Medicine
The Dark Side of Medicine
Greg Crowhurst 03/01/11
(permission to repost)
In early December last year, the German Psychiatric Association (DGPPN), 65 years after the end of the Third Reich, finally apologised for the crimes committed by psychiatrists during the era of National Socialism. The original article can be found here.
In the article, English translation here, DGPPN president Frank Schneider admits that : “This darkest part of our history has been shunned and repressed much too long. A Professor Gerhardt Schmidt, for example, head of psychiatry in Lübeck, Germany, who directly after 1945 came to a clinic where patients starved to death, meaning they were killed, wrote a very outright book about these conditions. However Schmidt was not able to publish his book for 20 years because, according to the DGPPN, “ he was facing a Mafia of psychiatrists who didn’t want anybody to foul their nest. In the 1980s it was a moment of glory in our association to award him with a medal for it. “
Schneider describes how after the Second World War“ three renowned psychiatrists, who made medical estimates for enforced sterilizations and who decided upon life or death, became presidents of our association and even honorary members”
“What’s even worse: " In the 1960s, when the question arose whether people who suffered forced sterilization should get any indemnity …psychiatrists appeared as an authority on the subject in the Bundestag (Lower House of German Parliament). In an advisory committee they declared that forced sterilization was compliant to the rules at that time and it was all done within the then current scope of science and nothing was to take back. This is once again a debasement for the victims. There was nobody to say anything against that. “
I write this after listening to a profoundly thought-provoking interview on the BBC World Service yesterday with Bernhard Schlink , author of The Reader, that extraordinary book, now a film, which has so captivated audiences world wide. Its subject : the guilt , particularly of second generation Germans, especially, over the atrocities committed by their fathers, grandfathers in the War and their struggle to understand why.
Because of the way my life, as a carer for someone with Very Severe Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) , is dominated absolutely and severely curtailed , by a present day psychiatric mafia, who in the employ of the medical Insurance industry do all they can to ensure that my wife receives no biomedical treatment for her disease, I was hanging on every word Schlink said.
For example, I opened up my emails this morning and there was a piece by Jan van Roijen about a “ UK Prof “ a member of the supervisory board of a company named PRISMA”, the same company which is “ being paid many millions of pounds to supply ‘rehabilitation’ programs (such as
CBT and GET) to the NHS for use on ‘CFS’ patients.
This Prof “is also an officer of the insurance company UNUM. Insurance companies save a huge amount of money in payments if illnesses can be viewed as mental and not physical.
Anyhow this Prof was involved in a case where a severely ill, virtually paralysed young boy with ME/CFS was subjected to horrific psychiatric ‘treatment’ including throwing him into a swimming pool:
i.e swim or drown....
(By the way, they forced that youngster, aged 11, onto a Ghost train first.....)
What really struck me yesterday was how Bernhard Schlink portrays the German society , at the time of the Third Reich, as an extremely well educated, seemingly-solid and cultured society . Chillingly, many of those who committed such tremendous atrocities, turned out to be kindly, gentle folk, caring teachers , who went on to be responsible members of society.
I am sure that van Roijen's "Prof" above and his colleagues are not "monsters"; that is far too simplistic an explanation.
However their impact upon my life and that of my wife, her screaming agony that she must endure endlessly , and all those who have died, as a direct result of their cruel, barbaric interference, surely must cause them a restless night or two ? They know that there's 5000 biomedical papers refuting their made-up of the top of their heads theory, that ME is CFS is Psychiatric ......don't they surely???
....Well,maybe not . As Say No to Psychiatry suggest :
"In a very real sense both the 14th century priest (burning another human being at the stake) and the modern psychiatrist are nothing more than very dull people, incapable of a calm detached observation of what actually is, and asserting very stupid ideas which far too many people readily accept without any careful examination or resistance. Both appeal to extensive "educated reasoning", "authority", "logic" and "rational methods", but as will be discussed more in this web site, "logic" and "reason" fail completely at arriving at "truth" or "positive results" when the logic or reasoning is based upon false, absurd, and incorrect basic ideas, notions, postulates or fundamental axioms."
...For sure, anyone who knows anything about ME politics would be the first to admit that the psychiatric lobby's "logic or reasoning is based upon false, absurd, and incorrect basic ideas, notions, postulates or fundamental axioms."
To understand this phenomena better, we could do worse than turn to the Annals of General Psychiatry ; in 2007 Rale Rous, from Tel Aviv University, published an excellent study on what can be learned from the Nazi era, for clinical and research practice.
Fascinatingly he explores the "Common assumptions leading to gross ethical misconduct". One of the most relevant conclusions, I suggest, for us in the ME world is the assumption that :"Philosophical constructs and ideas should define clinical practice. " As Rous chillingly explains :
"During the period of the Nazi regime, psychiatry supported compulsory sterilization and euthanasia of the physically and mentally ill, and subsequently, the killing of "inferior" races. They did this by applying scientifically invalid conclusions from evolutionary biology ... Aside from the fact that these philosophical constructs and scientific paradigms of evolutionary theory were flawed, they were also immoral and contravened basic tenets of medical ethics and clinical practice. ."
...tragically today psychiatry supports throwing severely disabled children into swimming pools and leaving them to drown,sectioning and locking young people up in a mental hospitals, taking of severely disabled children away from their parents and denying them access, leaving of tens of thousands to suffer unnecessarily, for decades on end, all under the philosophical construct "Complex Somatic Symptom Disorder".
As Rous concludes : "A dark side to medicine exists."
Indeed it does : it's called the PACE trial.
Greg Crowhurst 03/01/11
(permission to repost)
In early December last year, the German Psychiatric Association (DGPPN), 65 years after the end of the Third Reich, finally apologised for the crimes committed by psychiatrists during the era of National Socialism. The original article can be found here.
In the article, English translation here, DGPPN president Frank Schneider admits that : “This darkest part of our history has been shunned and repressed much too long. A Professor Gerhardt Schmidt, for example, head of psychiatry in Lübeck, Germany, who directly after 1945 came to a clinic where patients starved to death, meaning they were killed, wrote a very outright book about these conditions. However Schmidt was not able to publish his book for 20 years because, according to the DGPPN, “ he was facing a Mafia of psychiatrists who didn’t want anybody to foul their nest. In the 1980s it was a moment of glory in our association to award him with a medal for it. “
Schneider describes how after the Second World War“ three renowned psychiatrists, who made medical estimates for enforced sterilizations and who decided upon life or death, became presidents of our association and even honorary members”
“What’s even worse: " In the 1960s, when the question arose whether people who suffered forced sterilization should get any indemnity …psychiatrists appeared as an authority on the subject in the Bundestag (Lower House of German Parliament). In an advisory committee they declared that forced sterilization was compliant to the rules at that time and it was all done within the then current scope of science and nothing was to take back. This is once again a debasement for the victims. There was nobody to say anything against that. “
I write this after listening to a profoundly thought-provoking interview on the BBC World Service yesterday with Bernhard Schlink , author of The Reader, that extraordinary book, now a film, which has so captivated audiences world wide. Its subject : the guilt , particularly of second generation Germans, especially, over the atrocities committed by their fathers, grandfathers in the War and their struggle to understand why.
Because of the way my life, as a carer for someone with Very Severe Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) , is dominated absolutely and severely curtailed , by a present day psychiatric mafia, who in the employ of the medical Insurance industry do all they can to ensure that my wife receives no biomedical treatment for her disease, I was hanging on every word Schlink said.
For example, I opened up my emails this morning and there was a piece by Jan van Roijen about a “ UK Prof “ a member of the supervisory board of a company named PRISMA”, the same company which is “ being paid many millions of pounds to supply ‘rehabilitation’ programs (such as
CBT and GET) to the NHS for use on ‘CFS’ patients.
This Prof “is also an officer of the insurance company UNUM. Insurance companies save a huge amount of money in payments if illnesses can be viewed as mental and not physical.
Anyhow this Prof was involved in a case where a severely ill, virtually paralysed young boy with ME/CFS was subjected to horrific psychiatric ‘treatment’ including throwing him into a swimming pool:
i.e swim or drown....
(By the way, they forced that youngster, aged 11, onto a Ghost train first.....)
What really struck me yesterday was how Bernhard Schlink portrays the German society , at the time of the Third Reich, as an extremely well educated, seemingly-solid and cultured society . Chillingly, many of those who committed such tremendous atrocities, turned out to be kindly, gentle folk, caring teachers , who went on to be responsible members of society.
I am sure that van Roijen's "Prof" above and his colleagues are not "monsters"; that is far too simplistic an explanation.
However their impact upon my life and that of my wife, her screaming agony that she must endure endlessly , and all those who have died, as a direct result of their cruel, barbaric interference, surely must cause them a restless night or two ? They know that there's 5000 biomedical papers refuting their made-up of the top of their heads theory, that ME is CFS is Psychiatric ......don't they surely???
....Well,maybe not . As Say No to Psychiatry suggest :
"In a very real sense both the 14th century priest (burning another human being at the stake) and the modern psychiatrist are nothing more than very dull people, incapable of a calm detached observation of what actually is, and asserting very stupid ideas which far too many people readily accept without any careful examination or resistance. Both appeal to extensive "educated reasoning", "authority", "logic" and "rational methods", but as will be discussed more in this web site, "logic" and "reason" fail completely at arriving at "truth" or "positive results" when the logic or reasoning is based upon false, absurd, and incorrect basic ideas, notions, postulates or fundamental axioms."
...For sure, anyone who knows anything about ME politics would be the first to admit that the psychiatric lobby's "logic or reasoning is based upon false, absurd, and incorrect basic ideas, notions, postulates or fundamental axioms."
To understand this phenomena better, we could do worse than turn to the Annals of General Psychiatry ; in 2007 Rale Rous, from Tel Aviv University, published an excellent study on what can be learned from the Nazi era, for clinical and research practice.
Fascinatingly he explores the "Common assumptions leading to gross ethical misconduct". One of the most relevant conclusions, I suggest, for us in the ME world is the assumption that :"Philosophical constructs and ideas should define clinical practice. " As Rous chillingly explains :
"During the period of the Nazi regime, psychiatry supported compulsory sterilization and euthanasia of the physically and mentally ill, and subsequently, the killing of "inferior" races. They did this by applying scientifically invalid conclusions from evolutionary biology ... Aside from the fact that these philosophical constructs and scientific paradigms of evolutionary theory were flawed, they were also immoral and contravened basic tenets of medical ethics and clinical practice. ."
...tragically today psychiatry supports throwing severely disabled children into swimming pools and leaving them to drown,sectioning and locking young people up in a mental hospitals, taking of severely disabled children away from their parents and denying them access, leaving of tens of thousands to suffer unnecessarily, for decades on end, all under the philosophical construct "Complex Somatic Symptom Disorder".
As Rous concludes : "A dark side to medicine exists."
Indeed it does : it's called the PACE trial.
PACE is not a trial - it is a sentencing
ReplyDeleteI read a wonderful book last year on this subject, by Philip Sington. It was called 'The Einstein Girl' . Well worth a read and very evocative of that time.
ReplyDeleteIt's about a young psychiatrist who is nearly swept up into the rationale of the Nazis.
I was so taken with one quote that i wrote it in my diary.
"So it is with confidence that I place myself in your hands, safe in the knowledge that to you, of all men, the perpetuation of a lie is an intolerable thing. However convenient its' continuation may be to men of narrower vision and lesser principle"
When I read this, I thought of all the great and humane people who fight for us daily against the odds and against so many vested interests.
Helen Mc
Thank you so much Shelley : what a brilliant comment !! That is absolutely right, PACE is a "sentence" based on wrong judgment, that will do harm to people with genuine ME.
ReplyDeleteHelen, thank you for this fantastic, amazing quote, which has really touched us.
Surely enough is enough. Surely this is the year when the truth will be heard.... ?
Psychiatry seems to be a purely subjective science detailing more about the observer than the observed.
ReplyDeleteI cannot understand how its practitioners have managed to gain such lofty status.