Biological Psychiatry and the Mass Murder of “Schizophrenics”: From Denial to Inspirational Alternative

Abstract

This article documents the murder, by psychiatrists, of a quarter of a million patients, mostly diagnosed as “schizophrenic,” in Europe during the second world war; and the sterilization of hundreds of thousands more internationally, including in the USA and Scandinavia. These sterilizations and murders were justified by biological psychiatry’s unsubstantiated hypothesis that the conditions involved are genetically determined. Gas chambers in the six psychiatric hospitals involved, in Germany, were subsequently dismantled and moved, along with the psychiatrists and their staff, to help establish some of the Holocaust’s concentration camps, in Poland. The avoidance of these facts and their profound implications, by the profession of psychiatry, internationally, over subsequent decades, is discussed. An inspirational trauma-focussed alternative to the pessimistic, unscientific ideology of biological psychiatry, involving psychiatrists 60 years later, is presented.