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If I've ever learned anything from history, it's that no one has ever learned anything from the mistakes of history!

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Since the dawn of civilization, human beings have needed scapegoats. The psychological mechanism of blaming others for one's own sins, which psychiatrists call "projection," is described anecdotally in the Jewish Talmud in Megillah 25, which relates the story of an anti-vice crusader who accused the inhabitants of Jerusalem of committing the very same crimes of which he himself was guilty (Gold H. R. Psychiatry and the Talmud, Vol. I, No.1, Jewish Heritage, 1957). Individuals who are basically humanitarian and who tend to be tolerant of other peoples, have bought into the scapegoat mentality when assailed by media manipulators preying upon the fears of society. In Ancient Greece, whenever there was a plague, "the mentally-ill" were forced to live on the outskirts of town (ancient history's version of the homeless?) and were stoned to death as part of the ritual purification of the city. This ritual purification was called "pharmakos" and is the root source of our modern day word pharmaceutical. The ancient Latin encyclopedist Celsus (14 A.D.) wrote in his treatise "De Medicina" (c 30 A.D.) regarding the treatment of "the mentally-ill": "Whenever he says or does anything wrong, he is to be coerced by starvation, fetters and flogging... to be thoroughly frightened is beneficial in this illness, and so, in general, is anything which thoroughly agitates the spirit" (From Shaman to Psychotherapy). This allusion to the "agitation of the spirit" persisted well into the Middle Ages when it was common practice for "mad-doctors" to chisel a hole into the skulls of their patients to - "let the devil escape!" Believing this "agitation" was caused by demons and evil spirits, asylums were equipped with a wheel-like device into which the patient was strapped, and the wheel was revolved at a terrific speed so that the demons and evil spirits would come flying out for their lives. A noteworthy pioneer in the treatment of mental illness is Soranus of Ephesus (1st-2nd century AD). Through his written accounts Soranus questions the barbaric approach to treatment of his predecessors. Some of them, he rails, failed to take into consideration that the patient lacks reason, wherefore penalties and hardship were not conducive to a cure. The hit or miss recipes of his peers and colleagues were exposed with clarity and logic as calculated to worsen a condition, rather than improve it, and his tempered remedies foreshadowed the moral treatment of Dr. Philippe Pinel (1745-1826).

History Repeating Itself: the Arrival of the Secular Inquisition

Following the publication of the infamous witchfinders manual, the Malleus Maleficarum in 1489, various symptoms of "mental illness" were ascribed to possession. It was the work of the evil one. The result of commerce between madmen and demons who were constantly tempting man to perdition. This conveniently opened the door for society to criminalize "the mentally-ill" and to rid itself of it's undesirables. Most people do not know that the clinical term "mania" is actually the name of an ancient Roman goddess of hell. This belief led to a misogynist witch hunt of unprecedented proportions that is indeed one of the darkest pages in the history of humankind. Authors Dr. Franz Alexander and Dr. Sheldon Selesnick, in their widely acclaimed "History of Psychiatry" point out that, "The Malleus details the destruction of dissenters, schismatics, and the mentally-ill, all of whom fell under the term witch. The book is divided into three parts. The first section attempts to prove the existence of devils and witches; if the reader is not convinced by the authors' arguments, it is only because he himself is a victim of witchcraft or heresy [similar to the present-day belief that "mental patients" don't know they're sick because they are victims of their illness]. The second part tells how to identify witchcraft [How to spot a Mental Patient]; the third part describes how witches are to be tried in civil courts and punished [similar to today's mental health courts]." Dr. Alexander and Dr. Selesnick continue: "The authors of the Malleus justified their attack upon women by stating that they came from an inferior rib of Adam and were thus imperfect in their physical structure and soul [similar to the present-day belief that the mentally-ill are biologically brain-damaged and are thus mentally imperfect and inferior]." (The History of Psychiatry, Chapter 5, The Medieval Period). The "Summis Desiderantes Affectibus" set the groundwork for laws legalizing the confinement and forced treatment of "witches." Forced treatment back then consisted of the dungeons, the rack and the stake. These laws foreshadowed present-day laws like Kendra's Law and Laura's Law. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of those people who were chained in dungeons and burnt at the stake by the Inquisition were people whom our society labels "mentally-ill". Today those dungeons have been replaced by the psychiatric ward, and the stake and the rack have been replaced by the hypodermic needle and ECT. As late as 1946, the Reverend Montague Summers wrote of the Malleus Maleficarum: "Certain it is that the Malleus Maleficarum is the most solid, the most important work in the whole vast library of witchcraft. One turns to it again and again with edification and interest. From the point of psychology, from the point of jurisprudence, from the point of history, it is supreme. It is hardly too much to say that later writers, great as they are, have done little more than draw from the seemingly inexhaustible wells of wisdom which the two Dominicans, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger have given us in the Malleus Maleficarum." (October 7th, 1946).

In the 16th and 17th centuries, people were obsessed with the concept of mental illness. This is evident throughout Shakespeare's plays, but is especially evident throughout his play "Hamlet." In 1547, Henry VIII handed over to the city of London the Priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem (which became the infamous Bedlam Hospital) for the express purpose of housing "mental patients." The conditions inside this hospital were harsh and inhumane. The building was incredibly dirty as the patients were made to wallow in their own filth. They were often chained to the walls doused in cold water until they were near drowning and spun violently in a rotating chair. The administrators of the hospital would charge admission to the general public to come and gawk at the patients who were often naked and catatonic. Patients eventually began to protest the brutality and ulterior motives behind forced treatment as expressed in a dramatic letter sent to Dr. Thomas Munro in 1796 by former "mental patient" William Belcher titled "A Receipt to Make a Lunatic and Seize his Estate." According to "The History of Psychiatry" by Dr. Franz G. Alexander and Dr. Sheldon T. Selesnick: "Should they survive the filthy conditions, the abominable food, the isolation and darkness, and the brutality of their keepers, the patients of Bedlam were entitled to treatment," including bloodletting and various "so-called harmless tortures." Bedlam has now become synonymous with chaos and confusion and at its peak, Bedlam rivaled the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey in terms of tourist popularity. Author and investigative journalist Robert Whitaker relates in his engrossing and brilliant expose' Mad in America, that there was a common belief among English physicians that "the mentally-ill" were brutes who had descended to the level of wild beasts "by virtue of having lost their reason." And like all wild beasts needed to be beaten and subdued.

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"If they are not mad when they go into these cursed houses, they are soon made so by the barbarous usage they there suffer... Is it not enough to make anyone mad to be suddenly clapped up, stripped, whipped, ill fed, and worse - used? To have no reason assigned for such treatment, no crime alleged, or accusers to confront." (Daniel Defoe)

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"It is difficult to understand the incredible inhumanity with which mentally sick citizens were treated well into the era of Enlightenment..." Their cruel segregation and restraint was described by Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813), one of the most progressive psychiatrists of his era: "We incarcerate these miserable creatures as if they were criminals in abandoned jails, near to the lairs of owls in barren canyons beyond the city gates, or in damp dungeons of prisons, where never a pitying look of a humanitarian penetrates; and we let them, in chains, rot in their own excrement. Their fetters have eaten off the flesh of their bones, and their emaciated pale faces look expectantly toward the graves which will end their misery and cover up our shamefulness." Excited patients were locked naked into narrow closets and fed through holes from copperware attached to chains. Beatings were common and defended by shallow rationalizations. Strait jackets and chains attached to walls or beds were used to restrain patients, since the theory was that the more painful the restraint, the better the results, particularly with obstinate psychotics. The attendants were mostly sadistic individuals of low intelligence who could not find any other employment. The unsanitary conditions, lack of nourishment, wounds inflicted by the chains, and application of drastic skin irritants to increase the torment killed a large number of these patients." (The History of Psychiatry, by Franz G. Alexander, M.D., and Sheldon T. Selesnick, M.D., Chapter 8) 

The 17th century English physician Thomas Willis, author of "Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes" claimed that the insane can: "break cords and chains, and break down doors or walls... without any sensible hurt." Willis declared that: "Discipline, threats, fetters, and blows are needed as much as medical treatment." Dr. Isaac Hawes, another 17th century physician concurred noting that: "Nothing is more necessary for the recovery of lunatics than forcing them to respect fear. This is why maniacs recover much sooner if they are treated with torture instead of with medicines." And Benjamin Rush, a co-signer of the Declaration of Independence wrote: "terror acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and should be employed in the cure of madness." All of these views are consistent with the views espoused by the ancient Latin encyclopedist Celsus and the present day advocates of forced treatment. This forced treatment mentality reached it's culmination in Nazi Germany where gas chambers were built to exterminate "the mentally-ill" on the grounds that they were "unworthy of life." Obviously, forced treatment has never worked.

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Prior to the Jewish Holocaust, the first people to lose their rights in Nazi Germany were the physically and the mentally disabled. Through no fault of their own, a nation of people disgruntled by the hardships imposed upon them by the Treaty of Versailles were easily seduced by Nazi propaganda to believe that certain segments of the society were responsible for their hardships. The "mentally-ill" were one segment of the population who were "scapegoated" and so in 1939, Heinrich Himmler, head of the notorious S.S. ordered that all those who were a "burden on the society" were to be exterminated. This legalized murder deceptively called euthanasia - although rarely acknowledged - set the stage in a practical and ideological way for the eventual extermination of 6 million Jews. Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Rudin, a psychiatrist from Munich University who gained notoriety as "one of the most evil men in Germany," drew up Germany's 1933 sterilization law which called for the sterilization of all Jews and "colored" German children. Dr. Rudin proposed that psychiatry should take the lead in purifying the race thereby ensuring that "genetically defective persons shall not be able to propagate." In 1971, in an eerie case of history almost repeating itself, a Dr. Ernst Rodin, head of the neurology department at the Lafayette clinic in Detroit (who advocated for the control of young black males through the use of psychosurgery and castration) said that "medical technology" should be applied to solve the problem of riots in black ghettos. Highly reminiscent of the "medical technology" applied to the Jewish ghettos of Nazi Germany. Contrary to popular belief, however, the first gas chambers did not open up in Auschwitz. The first gas chambers opened up in Brandenberg in 1939, one of six camps operated in Nazi Germany for exterminating "mental patients." Two years later in 1941 Auschwitz was launched and in September of 1941, the first official gassing took place there. The victims being 250 "mental patients" and 600 Russians and Jews. By the end of World War II, approximately 300,000 "psychiatric inmates" were killed by gassing, starvation, injection of deadly "research" drugs and other ghastly experiments.

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Before Auschwitz: Nazi Extermination of People with Disabilities by Darby Penney/Talking History (2002)

(RealOne Player required to hear audio history. Download is free.)

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First Victims
is it treatment?
Are We Next?

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"EVEN MEMBERS OF THE NAZI PARTY WEPT"

"If we want to understand violence as a whole, we cannot leave any of its major manifestations in a fog of half-knowledge. But this is exactly what has happened with an unprecedented occurence of mass violence, the deliberate killing of large numbers of mental patients, for which psychiatrists were directly responsible... They initiated the most extreme measures and cloaked them in scientific terminology and academic respectability... What psychiatrists did made even members of the Nazi Party weep. When patients were transferred from a regular institution to one where they were to be killed, they were usually told that it was only a regular normal transfer from one hospital to another or that it was a change to a better place. Sometimes a glimpse of the truth would become known to the patients, and scenes worthy of Callot or Goya would follow. Here is such a true scene: In the sleepy little town of Absberg, two large autobuses (belonging to a central transport of the euthanasia program) are parked on the street near an institution where there are several hundred mental patients. Some time before, twenty-five patients had been fetched by such a bus. Of these twenty-five, twenty-four "died" and one woman patient returned. The other patients in the institution learned what had happened, as did the inhabitants of the town. As the patients leave the institution to enter the buses, they are afraid, they refuse and remonstrate. Force is used by the personnel and each patient is shoved violently into a bus. A large group of bystanders has assembled. They are so moved that they break into tears. The whole operation is presided over by an experienced psychiatrist from the big state hospital Erlangen. Among those spectators who cried openly at this pitiful spectacle were - as the official Nazi report states - "even members of the Nazi Party." (Fredric Wertham, M.D. A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence, Ch9)

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Harbingers of CineMania

While film was extensively used to promote Nazi propaganda, nowhere was it as grotesque as in the push to exterminate thousands of people labeled "mentally-ill". Between 1935 and 1937 various films were produced that promoted the sterilization of people with "mental illness". Films such as "Sins of the Fathers" and "Straying from the Path" used close-up shots to capture contorted movements and unconventional grimaces and used various lighting techniques to emphasize the bizarre and unusual character of the subjects. Flickering lights which created wild shadows accentuated the stunned expression of the subjects in an attempt to provoke fear in the viewing audience. The use of this cheap expressionism was highlighted in Michael Burleigh's authoritative volume on "euthanasia" and "the killing films" in Nazi Germany. In 1939 Hitler's Chancellory commissioned director Hermann Schweninger to produce a feature-length documentary about the plight of "mental patients" and the need to dispose of them. He filmed in over twenty insititutions searching for particularly crass examples of "the mentally-ill". But this filming went beyond the "apparent unworthiness" of it's subjects, actually showing what was done to dispose of them. Some of this footage survived the war and was shown to the presiding judge of the U.S. military tribunal in Nuremburg, who declined to show the footage to the jury for fear that they "might collapse."

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Letter from Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler to SS-Oberfuehrer Brack, December 19th, 1940:

"Dear Brack, I hear there is great excitement on the Alb because of the Grafeneck Institution. The population recognizes the gray automobiles of the SS and think they know what is going on at the constantly smoking crematory. What happens there is a secret and yet is no longer one. Thus the worst feeling has arisen there, and in my opinion there remains only one thing, to discontinue the use of the institution in this place and in any event disseminate information in a clever and sensible manner by showing motion pictures on the subject of inherited and mental diseases in just that locality."

Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1949-1953, Vol. I, p. 856.

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Between 1939 and 1941 Nazi doctors produced a film called "The Mentally-Ill" which presented the pros and cons of electroshock and gassing procedures. This film details the false notion of "curing the mentally-ill" with electroshock and proposes gassing them to death as the only other alternative. More people were killed during World War II than during the entire known history of human warfare. How ironic that one of the key people responsible for putting a stop to this mindless war machine was someone who had a psychiatric diagnosis himself, Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. Horrors of this magnitude usually start with what seems to be at first glance a meaningless and unimportant footnote (in this case the extermination of "the mentally-ill"). Unfortunately, however, once the escalation begins, it's usually too late for anyone to do anything about it. Today that war propaganda has been replaced by the media propaganda I refer to as "CineMania", and one of the most important lessons I ever learned in high school was that "those who don't learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them." Is this just an omen of things to come? Prophecy, "they say", has a way of fulfilling itself, and one day in the not too distant future the destruction of this entire planet will be laid at our own individual doorsteps. Poetically etched upon the final pages of mankind's history will be the somber words: "At long last the guiltless, have finally slaughtered the guiltless." But, of course, there won't be anyone around to read it!!! David at mentalhealthstigma.com

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"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." Albert Einstein

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"On close examination there seems to be two kinds of madness... There is what could be called "clinical madness", which describes those who simply give up, throw in the towel, and insulate themselves from the rest of the world... But there is another kind of madness portrayed by [Elie] Wiesel, what some have called "moral madness"... Mosche, the "madman," was so described because he told people that Jews were being cremated, when everybody knew that such things don't happen in the twentieth century. Wiesel suggests, in other words, that the attitude which the world calls madness, may in fact be true sanity, seeing things as they really are, refusing to accept the values and patterns and standards that were regnant in Europe at that time. Such persons may have had a higher degree of sanity than those around them who called them mad." (When Man and God Failed: Non-Jewish Views of the Holocaust, Harry James Cargas, PH.D., Macmillan)

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Lest We Forget the Shame of the States

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"Shortly after the war ended, Americans found themselves staring at photographs of a lost world closer to home. First in Life magazine and then in a book by journalist Albert Deutsch, America was given a vivid tour inside its state mental hospitals. The picture seemed impossible: mentally-ill men huddled naked in barren rooms, wallowing in their own feces; barefoot women clad in coarse tunics strapped to wooden benches; sleeping wards so crowded with threadbare cots that patients had to climb over the foot of their beds to get out. One photo caption told of restrained patients, unable to use their hands, lapping food from tin plates, like dogs eating from bowls... Numerous newspapers ran scathing exposes as well. Papers in Norman, Oklahoma; Cleveland; Miami; Baltimore - their reports all told a similar story. In hospital after hospital, scenes of patients cuffed, strapped to chairs, and wrapped in wet sheets. Facilities infested with rats, cockroaches, and other vermin. Patients, the reporters noted, went weeks, months, and even years without seeing a doctor. Order in the madhouses was maintained by attendants who, with some frequency, beat unruly patients... In 1944, an Ohio grand jury investigating conditions at Cleveland State Hospital, where several patients had died after being beaten with belts, key rings, and metal-plated shoes, summed up the state of affairs: the atmosphere reeks with the false notion that the mentally-ill are criminals and subhumans who should be denied all human rights and scientific medical care." (Robert Whitaker, Mad in America, Chapter 3)

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Bedlam, by Albert Q. Maisel,  Life Magazine, May 6th, 1946

"Court and grand-jury records document scores of deaths of patients following beatings by attendants. Hundreds of instances of abuse, falling just short of manslaughter, are similarly documented. And reliable evidence, from hospital after hospital, indicates that these are but a tiny fraction of the beatings that occur, day after day, only to be covered up by a tacit conspiracy of mutually protective silence and a code that ostracizes employees who sing too loud. Yet beatings and murder are hardly the most significant of the indignities we have heaped upon most of the 400,000 guiltless patient-prisoners of the over 180 state mental institutions... Hundreds - of my own knowledge and sight - spend 24 hours a day in stark and filthy nakedness. Those who are well enough to work, slave away in many institutions for 12 hours a day, often without a days rest for years on end. One man at Cleveland, Ohio - and he is no isolated exception - worked in this fashion for 19 solid years on a diet the poorest sharecropper would spurn. Thousands spend their days, often for weeks at a stretch, locked in devices euphemistically called restraints: thick leather handcuffs, great canvas camisoles, muffs, mitts, wristlets, locks and straps and restraining sheets. Hundreds are confined in lodges - bare, bedless rooms reeking with filth and feces - by day lit only through half-inch holes in steel-plated windows, by night merely black tombs in which the cries of the insane echo unheard from the peeling plaster of the walls... Thus thousands who might be restored to society linger in man-made hells for a release that comes more quickly only because death comes faster to the abused, the beaten, the drugged, the starved and the neglected... Charges such as these are far too serious to be based solely upon the observations of any single investigator. But there is no need to do so. In addition to my own observations in a dozen hospitals, in addition to court records and the reports of occasional investigating commissions, there is now available for the first time a reliable body of data covering nearly one-third of all state hospitals in 20 states from Washington to Virginia, from Maine to Utah.

Consider, for instance, the shocking data on brutality and physical abuse of the patients. One report from a New York State hospital reads as follows: The testimony revealed that these four attendants slapped patients in the face as hard as they could, pummeled them in their ribs with fists, some being knocked to the floor and kicked. One 230-pound bully had the habit of bumping patients on the back of the head with the heel of his hand - and on one occasion had the patient put his hands on a chair, then striking his fingers with a heavy passkey. From a state hospital in Iowa comes the following report: Then the attendant and the patient who had done the choking began to kick the offender, principally along the back, but there were several kicks at the back of the neck and one very painful one in the genitals which caused the victim to scream and roll in agony... Something more than 20 kicks must have been administered. Finally he was dragged down the floor and locked in a side room. When I asked the attendant how it started, he said 'Oh nothing. That ---- ought to be killed'. The victim was in handcuffs all the time; had been in cuffs continuously for several days. From an Ohio state hospital: An attendant and I were sitting on the porch watching the patients. Somebody came along sweeping and the attendant yelled at a patient to get up off the bench so the worker-patient could sweep. But the patient did not move. The attendant jumped up with an inch-wide restraining strap and began to beat the patient in the face and on top of the head. 'Get the hell up!' It was a few minutes - a few horrible ones for the patient - before the attendant discovered that he was strapped around the middle to the bench and could not get up. These are but samples among score upon score of cases described and corroborated in the records of the National Mental Health Foundation. The ultraskeptical may feel that they represent the exaggerated views of impressionable conchies with a moral axe to grind. But this idea is fully refuted by the fact concerning other cases which have broken into the newspapers and reached the courts."  (Bedlam 1946, by Albert Q. Maisel,  Life Magazine, May 6th, 1946) 

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For those of you who truly believe that these types of abuses are a thing of the past, you might be surprised to learn that New York Times investigative journalist, Clifford J. Levy, was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize (2003) for his expose' on the abuse of the mentally-ill in state-regulated homes titled "Broken Homes." And in the not-too-distant-future psychiatric survivors, although fearful of state-sanctioned reprisals, will write firsthand accounts of the routine abuses currently taking place under the guise of mental health. Any mental patient who has retained their sanity, in spite of these abuses, is genuinely worthy of the apellation survivor. The only reason why such abuses have been allowed to continue unabated, ad infinitum, is because those upon whom it is heaped are mental patients. It is practically a carte blanche for abuse. Can you imagine what would happen if it's victims had been cancer patients or heart patients or diabetic patients? Every politician in the land would be clamouring for justice. Every human rights activist would be demanding accountability. Every advocacy organization across this nation would be lobbying for reform. Yet we dare to utter condemnation about human rights violations abroad? Obviously, we have never learned anything from the mistakes of history, because aside from taxes and death there is one more thing of which we can be certain: what we sow - that shall we reap.

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An American Holocaust: One of History's Best Kept Secrets

Based on figures obtained from the Center for Mental Health Services in 1994 and statistics obtained from the 1995 Funk & Wagnalls "World Almanac and Book of Facts" Page 163: Between 1950 and 1964, more people died in United States federal, state and county "mental institutions" than the number of Americans killed in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf War combined. 

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Excerpts from a National Council on Disability Report

"The American Journal of Psychiatry reported that as many as 81% of women with psychiatric disabilities have been physically or sexually abused in institutions. In the general population, some 1,000 rapes occur each day, but only 300 of them are reported, according to the U.S. Office of Victims Assistance at the U.S. Department of Justice... Each year the commission receives, reviews, and, where necessary, directly investigates about 7,000 reports of abuse and over 2,000 reports of consumer deaths... Based on my 20 years of work with the Commission, I believe too many consumer complaints or suspicions of abuse are buried with the body." (Thomas R. Harmon, Director of Medical Review and Investigations, NYS Commission on Quality of Care)       

"I have interviewed many, many people with psychiatric disabilities, and sent a survey to thousands of people, literally, and received hundreds of surveys back, and what the surveys are saying and what the interviews are saying are that people are dying, being injured, and sexually assaulted in institutions. They're being ignored and overmedicated. They're dying and being damaged in restraints. When I tried to relate the individual stories that I was getting to the research and data out in the field, what I discovered is that there is no research, or that it is terribly, terribly difficult to put together, or that it is virtually useless. The voices of people with psychiatric disabilities are silenced. Their stories are dismissed as anecdotal, because of choices we [researchers] make about what information must be gathered and what information must be systematically ignored." (Susan Stefan, J.D., National Council on Disability Report, January 20th, 2000)

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RECOMMENDED READING

the Shame of the States by Albert Deutsch (1948) is a carefully documented account by investigative journalist Albert Deutsch on the shocking mistreatment of human beings imprisoned in psychiatric facilities. While cosmetic changes have taken place sine this book was first written, anyone reading it will be left wondering why the public apathy and indifference continues to this very day in spite of the on-going mistreatment of "the mentally-ill."

"Milledgeville! The Inside Story of the World's Largest Insane Asylum" by Dr. Peter G. Cranford (1981): A fascinating yet scholarly expose of Milledgeville by its "Father Confessor." Here are 2 of my favorite "Patient Wisdom" quotes: 1. Before you lock us up, take a long look at those who bring us in. 2. There is great talk about recovery, but when you do get normal and express yourself, you're a patient again and they promptly slap you down."

"Mass Murderers in White Coats" by Lenny Lapon (1986): Survivor and activist Lenny Lapon documents the mass murder of "mental patients" in Nazi Germany and reveals how the extermination of thousands of psychiatric "inmates" set the stage in a practical and ideological way for the eventual extermination of six million Jewish civilians. Other Holocaust researchers rarely acknowledge the importance of this fact.

"Mad in America" by Robert Whitaker (2002): The definitive expose' on Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally-ill. Investigative journalism at it's best. A book whose time has come... Robert Whitaker expertly rips the lid off of "History's Best Kept Secret!" Has treatment become the illness rather than the cure?

The Spiritual Key to the Psyche: Nick Jouvanis, the author of this book delves into the often overlooked importance of the soul (or psyche) in the process of recovery and healing. It is often stated that a healthy mind leads to a healthy body (and vice-versa), but the soul has been discarded as a non-entity. While debate over the existence of the soul has gone on for centuries, it is this debate that gradually evolved into and gave birth to modern-day psychology. Have we come full-circle and has the time come for psychiatry to return to it's roots?

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History of Stigma Links: Unworthy of Life - Congresswoman Discloses  Anti-Stigma Links - Freedom of Thought  - Bioethics and Eugenics - The Missing Link

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