Posts Tagged ‘Eugenics’

Mental Illness Manual Revision Is Criticized Over Racism Entry

Monday, March 14th, 2022

A revised mental disorders diagnostic manual being released this month already faces controversy over attempts to explain the impact of and “under-diagnosing” of racism and discrimination as mental illness.

“Oppression and racism are real, and anyone subjected to this is going to feel denigrated, upset, angry or any of a wide array of justified emotional responses to injustice. However, this is not a mental ‘disease.’ History warns us about defining the effects of racism as an illness, with claims that ‘victims’ are discriminated against by inequitable treatment.”

Rev. Frederick Shaw

By Jan Eastgate
President CCHR International
March 7, 2022

Controversy is surrounding the soon to be released revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) over its inclusion of “an analysis of the effects racism and discrimination on the manifestation and diagnosis of mental disorders.”[1] The mental health industry watchdog, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) International said there is a risk that the impact of oppression on minorities will be pathologized and increase the numbers of them prescribed mind-altering psychotropics.

Rev. Frederick Shaw, a spokesperson for CCHR, founder of its Task Force Against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics and president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Inglewood South Bay branch, said that it was predictable during the massive racism protests in 2020 that efforts would be made to define racial anguish and anger as mental disorder. Rev. Shaw says: “Oppression and racism are real, and anyone subjected to this is going to feel denigrated, upset, angry or any of a wide array of justified emotional responses to injustice. However, this is not a mental ‘disease.’ History warns us about defining the effects of racism as an illness, with claims that ‘victims’ are discriminated against by inequitable treatment.”

During slavery African Americans were diagnosed with Drapetomania (drapetes, runaway slave, and mania, meaning crazy) and Dyasethesia Aethiopis (laziness and impaired sensation). Drapetomania described Blacks having an “uncontrollable urge” to run away from their “masters.” The “treatment” was “whipping the devil out of them.”[2]

In January 2021, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) publicly apologized for psychiatry’s “role in perpetrating structural racism” that “hurt Black, Indigenous, and People of Color” (BIPOC).[3] This included these two disorders and that in 1792 the “father” of American psychiatry, Benjamin Rush, declared that African Americans’ skin color was a “disease” called negritude, derived from leprosy. The “cure” was when their skin turned “white.”[4]

APA’s apology said that since its inception, practitioners had subjected persons of African descent and Indigenous people to “abusive treatment, experimentation, victimization in the name of ‘scientific evidence,’ along with racialized theories that attempted to confirm their deficit status.”[5]

The DSM has been criticized in the past for perpetuating racism.

Professors Stuart A. Kirk and Herb Kutchins, co-authors of Making Us Crazy, said: “Defenders of slavery, proponents of racial segregation…have consistently attempted to justify oppression by inventing new mental illnesses and by reporting higher rates of abnormality among African Americans or other minorities.”[6]

DSM-II was published in 1968 when civil rights protests against racism had escalated. Psychiatrists claimed such protests caused violent “schizophrenic” symptoms in African Americans, inventing the diagnosis “protest psychosis.” Ads for antipsychotics used African symbols to reflect so-called “violent traits” in minorities to increase antipsychotic prescriptions and sales.[7]

DSM-III-R was published in 1987, during the 1980s and 1990s racial riots. Researchers under the aegis of the federally-funded Violence Initiative Project theorized that violence was the hereditary characteristic of Black and Latino people. One study bogusly hypothesized that a racially inherited genetic predisposition to aggressive behavior and violence existed, which could be countered by increasing serotonin levels in the brain.[8] This meant prescribing an antidepressant to “prevent” violent behavior, yet the drug was known to cause violent and suicidal behavior.[9]

In 1992, the psychiatric head of the National Institute for Mental Health, who helped develop the “Violence Initiative,” compared Black youth to “hyperaggressive” and “hypersexual” monkeys in a jungle who only want to kill one another, have sex and reproduce.  He was forced to resign.[10]

DSM-5 was released in 2013 by psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, then president of the APA, who was recently suspended from his position at Columbia University over his racist tweet about a dark-skinned model.[11]

Shaw said that in response to the racism protests in 2020, suddenly statistics were espoused about the increasing rates of African Americans showing signs of anxiety or depressive disorders.[12] In June 2020, the APA established a Task Force to Address Structural Racism Throughout Psychiatry.[13]

In October 2021, the American Psychological Association also issued an apology for hurting many through “racism, racial discrimination, and denigration of people of color.”[14]

However, some Black psychologists responded, stating: “While the apology details many of the past racist practices in psychology, it largely omits a key portion of this history: how the fields of psychology and psychiatry colluded with the state to suppress rights, liberties and, in many cases, political freedom.”[15]

Shaw predicts the DSM-5 revision addressing racism could victimize minorities, swelling the number of his community that will be considered to be disordered and in need of “equitable” treatment, meaning potentially debilitating psychotropic drugs and electroshock. He recommends individuals sign a Psychiatric Living Will to avoid treatment being forced on them.

References:

[1] “Revisions to DSM-5 Coming in March 2022,” National Association of Social Workers, http://www.socialworkblog.org/practice-and-professional-development/2022/03/revisions-to-dsm-5-coming-in-march-2022-2/

[2] https://www.cchrint.org/2019/07/17/minority-mental-health-month-may-spell-mental-health-slavery/; Thomas Szasz, Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1987), pp. 305, 306, 307; “Dysaesthesia aethiopis,” Oxford Reference, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095737938

[3] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/01/26/american-psychiatric-associations-apology-for-harming-african-americans-rejected/, citing: Megan Brooks, “APA Apologizes for Past Support of Racism in Psychiatry,” Medscape, 19 Jan. 2019, https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/944352?src=wnl_edit_tpal&uac=345404PY&impID=3143084&faf=1

[4] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/01/26/american-psychiatric-associations-apology-for-harming-african-americans-rejected/, citing: Prof. Thomas Szasz, M.D., The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement, Jan. 1970, p. 154

[5] https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/apa-apology-for-its-support-of-structural-racism-in-psychiatry

[6] Herb Kutchins & Stuart A. Kirk, Making Us Crazy – DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders, (The Free Press, New York, 1997), p. 200.

[7] https://www.cchrint.org/2019/07/17/minority-mental-health-month-may-spell-mental-health-slavery/, citing: Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis, How Schizophrenia became a Black Disease, (Beacon Press, Boston, 2009), pp. 101, 102

[8] Mitchel Cohen, Beware the Violence Initiative Project — Coming Soon to an Inner City Near You, Spring 1999, http://greens.org/s-r/19/19-07.html

[9] https://antidepressantadversereactions.com/antidepressants-and-suicide/; https://antidepressantadversereactions.com/hostility-and-aggression/

[10] https://www.cchrint.org/2020/06/16/naacp-inglewood-executive-educates-about-psychiatric-racism/ citing “U.S. Hasn’t Given Up Linking Genes to Crime,” The New York Times, 18 Sept. 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/18/opinion/l-us-hasn-t-given-up-linking-genes-to-crime-153192.html; https://www.breggin.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/abiomedical.pbreggin.1993.pdf

[11] “Psychiatrist’s Racist Tweet About Model Nyakim Gatwech Draws International Condemnation & Resignation,” https://www.cchrint.org/2022/02/25/psychiatrists-racist-tweet-about-model-nyakim-gatwech/

[12] “Depression and anxiety spiked among black Americans after George Floyd’s death,” The Washington Post, 12 June 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/06/12/mental-health-george-floyd-census/

[13] https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/structural-racism-task-force

[14] “Apology to People of Color for APA’s Role in Promoting, Perpetuating, and Failing to Challenge Racism, Racial Discrimination, and Human Hierarchy in U.S.,” American Psychological Association, 29 Oct. 2021, https://www.apa.org/about/policy/racism-apology

[15] “Why the APA’s apology for promoting white supremacy falls short,” NBC News, 21 Nov. 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-apa-s-apology-promoting-white-supremacy-falls-short-ncna1284229

DSM BS

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Planned Parenthood = Planned Extermination

Monday, June 7th, 2021

“Eugenics is not a closed book of past history. It casts a long shadow over both science and society in the Western world and, in fact, also globally.”

[Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics]

The May 17, 2021 National Review magazine contained this observation:

“In the New York Times, Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson formally criticized the institution’s infamous founder, Margaret Sanger, for her association with white-supremacist groups and the eugenics movement. After about a century, and the last year of racial tension, the abortion provider is finally ready to admit what many of us have been saying for quite some time: Sanger was a leader in the U.S. eugenics and population-control movements, motivated especially by her animus toward the poor, the “unfit,” and the “feeble-minded.” Sanger’s repulsive sentiments should shine a harsh light on the present-day business model of her organization. Nearly 80 percent of its clinics are located within walking distance of neighborhoods occupied predominantly by black and Hispanic residents. While constituting only 13 percent of the female population, black women represent more than one-third of all abortions in the U.S. each year, and they are five times more likely than white women to obtain an abortion. In recent years in New York City, more black babies were aborted than were born alive. Some day, let’s hope, Planned Parenthood will be apologizing for more than just Sanger.”

Pushed by mental health practitioners, the eugenics idea of racial inferiority became ingrained in the U.S. and led to Sanger’s “cure” for racial inferiority — sterilization. Sanger planned to “exterminate the Negro population” by inducing several black ministers with “engaging personalities,” to preach that sterilization was a solution to poverty. She stated that reaching Blacks “through a religious appeal,” would be the “most successful educational approach.”
[Elasah Drogin, Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society, 1986]

The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) recent apology (January 18, 2021) for its support of structural racism understates psychiatry’s racial human rights abuses and its long history of instigating racism by providing “rationales” that justified and perpetuated it.

Over the last 50 years, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has exposed that sordid history and intensified its efforts by forming the Task Force Against Psychiatric Racism and Modern Day Eugenics.

It is noteworthy that in the late 1700s, psychiatry’s own “Father of American Psychiatry,” Dr. Benjamin Rush, a slave owner, created a medical justification for racism by claiming Blacks suffered from a disease called “negritude,” supposedly a form of leprosy, and recommended their segregation to prevent them from “infecting” others.  A logo with the image of Benjamin Rush is still used for APA ceremonial purposes and internal documents. The APA still gives a Benjamin Rush Award.

Psychiatrists in the American mental health movement later latched onto and promoted the false science of eugenics [from the Greek word eugenes, well-born, from eu- well + -genes born], which claims some humans are inferior to others and should not have children.

African Americans are disproportionately diagnosed with mental illness and disproportionately committed to psychiatric facilities. They are more likely to be labeled with conduct disorder and psychotic disorders, especially schizophrenia, and overly prescribed antipsychotic drugs.  Black men are more likely to be prescribed excessive doses of these psychiatric drugs. Black children are overly labeled with ADHD. 

The APA’s incomplete apology may be viewed as political pandering and an attempt to whitewash history to pave the way for the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry to expand – very profitably – into the African American community.

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Task Force Against Racism & Modern Day Eugenics

Monday, February 1st, 2021

“People need proper and effective healthcare, not damaging drugs and electroshock that passes for mental health treatment today. Funds should be redirected from psychiatry into safe, accountable non-psychiatric medical care and social programs. This is especially true for the African American community, given psychiatry’s long history of racist eugenics theories which still permeate modern day mental health care.“

—Reverend Fred Shaw

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is the leading mental health industry watchdog in the world, responsible for helping to enact more than 180 worldwide reforms that protect the public from abusive mental health practices.

In 2020, CCHR International spokesperson Reverend Fred Shaw, started a Task Force against Institutional Racism in the Psychiatric Industry, comprising African American attorneys, civil rights advocates, educators and doctors. The Task Force reminds African Americans of the mental health industry’s history of stigmatizing minorities—from labeling runaway slaves and civil rights protesters as mentally ill and the use of eugenics (population control that targeted African Americans, sterilizing them) to segregating children in schools and the foster-child-welfare system today and drugging them.

This type of rampant abuse of African Americans within the mental health industry continues to this day. Shaw has now launched a Task Force to combat institutional racism and empower the African American and minority communities with facts about modern eugenics masked today as “mental health care.” The Task Force comprises African American leaders, including ministers, attorneys, doctors, psychologists and civil rights advocates.

For generations eugenics—the fraudulent, dehumanizing and harmful psychological theory that certain races of color were not equal to whites and, therefore, “deserved” fewer rights—has been used in the mental health system and in other social policies to justify horrific oppression of African Americans and minorities.

https://www.cchrtaskforce.org/

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Psychiatric Morphology

Monday, August 5th, 2013

Psychiatric Morphology

Morphology: the study of the form and structure of something (from Greek morphe, form.)

We have been seeing a recent spate of media about the jam the psycho-pharmaceutical industry has placed itself in, and how that came to be. Many news and magazine articles, radio and TV programs are discussing the history and morphology of psychiatry, the ridiculous fraudulent nature of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and the epidemic of harmful and addictive psychiatric drug use across this nation and the world.

This is not limited to the United States. Much of the rest of the world uses the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in the same manner as the U.S. uses the DSM. ICD has the same kind of silly characterizations for mental distress as the DSM, such as “mental disorders” related to one’s difficulty reading, spelling, doing arithmetic; and other categories that the rest of us just know as stress such as disaster, war and other hostilities; smoking, drinking, “lack of physical exercise,” “inappropriate diet,” “lack of relaxation or leisure;” and indeed even for other peoples’ problems such as a “family history of mental and behavioural disorders.” Yes, one can be labeled with a mental disorder because someone else in one’s family was so labeled; we call this the eugenics of psychiatry.

An August 2nd article by Will Self in the United Kingdom’s Guardian News, “Psychiatrists: the drug pushers,” is an example of the recurrent backlash against psychiatric fraud and abuse. Here are a few choice quotes:

“What do psychiatrists have to offer … beyond their capacity to legally administer psychoactive drugs, and in some cases forcibly confine those they deem to be mentally ill?”

“… only psychiatry deals in mandatory social care and legal sanction.”

“Yet while the regime under which those diagnosed with mental pathologies has changed immensely in the last half-century, the prognosis remains no better. Some say that it is manifestly worse.”

This is what we would like to address in our morphology of psychiatry: the fact that, even with the many changes the psychiatric industry trumpets over the last fifty or hundred years, the bottom line is that psychiatry’s reliance on brutality and coercion has not changed since the moment it was born.

Without any ability to cure, psychiatrists have always relied on intimidation, force and fear to control those they claim to help. Because of its history of cruel and unworkable treatments, psychiatry is the ugly stepchild of medicine, and must enforce its treatments on the helpless in order to exist at all.

The pseudoscientific ideology of eugenics, the theory that human beings could be selectively bred to encourage desirable traits and weed out the undesirable, was spread by psychiatrists as blatant racism that justifies shoddy treatment of poor people and ethnic minorities. Between 11 and 17 million people were murdered during the Holocaust, all judged eugenically “inferior” and marked for death. And psychiatrists designed the entire machinery and, in some cases, ran it.

The psychiatric ideology of eugenics embraced by Nazi psychiatrists was never abolished after the end of Hitler’s Third Reich, but has continued to present day, and is evident in the ICD’s classification for “family history of mental and behavioural disorders.” For the proof, watch the CCHR documentary, “The Age of Fear – Psychiatry’s Reign of Terror,” and show it to your family, friends and associates.

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