#502 – Psychiatry, Insane Asylums, Mental Illness, ECT, Lobotomies, Freud & Jung

Um, my own state was one of the pioneers in this process, and it continued to sterilize mental patients up until about 1960.

By the 1960s, over 60,000 sterilizations had been performed in the US, with California performing a disproportionately high number.

That's correct.

But even more serious consequences could flow from these set of- Issues.

When you start talking, one, one British psychiatrist said that if his patients that were coming into the asylum had been puppies, we'd have tied them up in a sack because they were some horrible mongrel, not a purebred dog.

Tied them up in a sack with some lead weights and thrown them in the pond and drowned them.

Yeah.

That kind of language is very, very dangerous.

And what happened, California's law surrounding sterilization was advocated for in the West.

By that I mean North America and, and Britain and much of w- Europe.

There were enough checks and balances in a democratic system that even though there were enthusiasts, the eugenicists who said, "Best get rid of these people, put them to death," uh, that never really, that never really acquired mass support.

But what happened in Germany once Nazi-- the Nazis came to power, is they seized on these notions and the, the idea that the mentally ill were, as they put it, useless eaters, people consuming resources but never gonna get better, just a burden on the state.

Their lives weren't worth living because after all, they had this serious mental illness.

So first you sterilize, and then you go, "But we're still supporting all these people." And so Hitler starts something called the T4 program after the street name of the house where this was concocted, Tiergartenstraße four.

And the mentally ill were the first people to suffer from the final solution.

It was in the mass killing of the mentally ill, which may have been as many as a quarter million people, that the technology of the gas chamber was developed, and the technology of dis- of disguising the gas chamber as showers was developed.

And so the patients were taken away to a number of psychiatric centers and systematically put to death, and they had, they had the crematoriums and the black smoke, and the local people talked about the buses that were bringing them in as killing crates.

So they were aware of what was going on.

Were they influenced by the narratives that were born in the United States-

Yes, absolutely

... about this kind of-

About that sort of thing, and lacking the check, the checks and balances that at least until recently this country had, um, it, it was relatively easy for Hitler to, to do that.

And particularly with the war looming, the idea that we're gonna support all these useless people, let's kill them.

Uh, and German psychiatry for the most part collaborated with that process.

I wonder how many people throughout that whole journey in the psychiatry profession sort of were brave enough to speak up like, "Hey, maybe the sack of puppies kind of language-"