How can we deal effectively with this topic, when it seems that daily lurid revelations are occurring about some highly-placed person’s infidelity or alleged sexual harassment.
While it is not our place to make judgments about this, there are some things we can say about psychiatrists’ and psychologists’ involvement in matters of sexual abuse and harassment.
In a British study of therapist-patient sexual contact among psychologists, 25% reported having treated a patient who had been sexually involved with another therapist.
Therapist sexual abuse is sexual abuse. Therapist rape is rape. They will never constitute therapy.
Psychiatrists and psychologists rarely refer to rape as rape. Instead, they downplay it as “sexual contact,” a “sexual relationship” or “crossing the boundaries” when one of its members sexually forces themselves on a patient, often with the help of drugs or electroshock. While psychiatrists account for only 6% of physicians in the country, they comprised 28% of perpetrators disciplined for sex-related offenses.
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the mental disorders section of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) have greatly assisted psychiatrists and psychologists in their efforts to avoid criminal proceedings for sexual abuse. The DSM decriminalizes illegal acts by defining criminal behavior as a biologically based aberration or “mental disorder.” In this way, dangerous criminals in psychiatry’s own ranks have been excused of all personal responsibility for their actions.
How did this come to be?
The family unit, long held sacred by religion, was purposely weakened by psychiatry’s World Federation for Mental Health, which considered it “the major obstacle to improved mental health.”
In 1993, Catholic psychologist William Coulson admitted that, “The net outcome of sex education, styled as Rogerian encountering [Carl Rogers’ therapy], is more sexual experience. Humanistic psychotherapy, the kind that has virtually taken over the Church in America … dominates so many forms of aberrant education like sex education.”
Considering that, according to William Coulson, the result of sex education is “more sexual experience,” there is no doubt as to psychologists’ intention or the direction of these courses.
Freudian theory developed in the 1890’s called for radical permissiveness in sexual mores. Freud taught that sexual repression was the chief psychological problem of mankind, which has been used to whitewash behavior that society has traditionally considered inappropriate, leading to excessive sexual permissiveness.
Psychiatrists and psychologists cannot be allowed to continue to determine the standards of conduct in any society, or society risks further degradation.
For more information, download and read the CCHR booklets about psychiatry assaulting religion and psychiatric rape.