The Pathologizing of the African American by Psychiatry
April 15, 2010 Hi everyone. I'm Gary Null. I'd like to invite you to a special presentation: an in-depth investigation into the subject, "The Pathologizing of African Americans by Psychiatry." To prepare the information for this series required years of work on the part of dozens of individuals. This could not have been done without the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Florida, and so many individuals spending thousands of hours doing scholarly research. I'm indebted to them for the information I'm about to present.
Part One.
What we see happening in the African American community today has, in the minds of many, been created: blacks-against-blacks violence, suicide and drug abuse at an all time high, children who cannot read or write and a very high level of unemployment. Psychiatrists involuntarily commit African Americans three to five times as often as they do whites. Psychiatrists diagnose African American men in public and private mental hospitals as having schizophrenia at a rate of up to 1,500 percent higher than white men. African Americans are given significantly higher doses of psychiatric drugs, major tranquilizers, and neuroleptics than are whites. More than twice as many African Americans as whites are classified as mentally retarded. Psychiatry -- heavily financed by the National Institutes of Mental Health along with this Community Mental Health Centers Program, which began in 1963 -- has been, in the minds of many, destructive in the oppression of the African Americans. Community health centers have provided numerous frontline sales outlets operating within the fabric of society, entrapping greater numbers of unwitting victims. The growth of this network parallels the declining statistics among African Americans.
William, a young African American, provokes a stark example of the psychiatric approach to mental health. William lost his job and was worried about how he was going to support himself. He could not write. He could not read. He visited a local community mental health center to talk to someone about it. Instead of listening to him, the psychiatrist asked stereotypical questions about whether he abused his girlfriend and if he felt angry. Well this frustrated him. He raised his voice. Within minutes, the psychiatrist had called in two men to involuntarily admit William to a psychiatric institution. He was held for three days against his will, and was forcibly injected with major tranquilizers. For the first two days the main question asked of William was do you have any insurance. He was told that if he wanted help he would need to pay for it. William had no money. Two hours later psychiatrists interviewed him and suddenly found he was fit to be released. Before being discharged, William was told to sign a paper that he could not read. He was later told that this form indemnified the hospital. It said that he had been fully informed about the drugs prescribed to him and he had been willingly able to take them. This is not an isolated case. It is typical of how easy it has been for psychiatrists using diagnostic procedures and repressive mental health laws to incarcerate African Americans.
This so-called scientific research on African Americans has been extensively funded by tax dollars through the National Institutes of Mental Health. The waste of taxpayer money on absurd and ridiculous studies is a scandal. Millions of dollars have gone into inner city programs for African Americans. For example, over the last 32 years Harvard University researchers have given over 2.3 million dollars to torture Rhesus monkeys while they were under the influence of mind-altering drugs. Over four million dollars has been spent on three other studies to determine violent or sexual behavior of monkeys, rats, and castrated quail in an effort to understand human behavior. At the same time, National Institutes of Mental Health planned a 50 million dollar study to investigate whether inner city youth, especially African Americans, had a violent gene, which if isolated could be controlled by psychiatric drugs. In 1963, The National Institutes of Mental Health established and funded community mental health centers after the Director of The National Institutes of Mental Health convinced Congress that "a bold new approach to the problems of mental illness was needed: the institutionalization and drugs." At the same time the African Americans were fighting to secure civil rights, community mental health programs were being implemented behind the scenes. The results have been catastrophic. African American adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 are coercively referred to community mental health centers. Fifty-five percent of outpatients visiting the community mental health centers receive a psychotropic mind-altering drug. The suicide rates since the establishment of these centers has risen 125 percent in adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19. But let us see whether or not we can actually document the undermining of the education of the African American community.
Donna, an African American mother of eight-year-old Joey, said her son was part of a special education program where children were taught about problem solving. He was shown a film, which depicted a young boy trying to kill himself by tying a rope around his neck in order to hang himself. In the film the boy talks about not being liked at school, being teased, and worried about growing up. Donna knew nothing about the program, and the school curriculum merely stated it was a social science class. Two days after her son watched the video Donna walked into his room and found him hanging by a rope by his bunk bed. Over half of the five million African American public school students are in special education programs where psychiatrists and psychologists have diagnosed at least 38 percent of them as educationally mentally retarded or EMR. More than 18 percent have a need for seriously mentally retarded status according to their studies. Many children diagnosed with EMR and SER are placed on powerful antidepressants that act as the most serious of tranquilizers. A community doctor visited a prison and found that 18 out of 23 prisoners, teenagers all of them, have been graduates of a particular psychiatric program. His comment was, "One has to wonder what they, the psychiatrists, are doing to the kids that they were nothing but criminals. It destroyed whatever decency and spirit they once may have had and gave them an utter hatred of the society that had professed to be helping them." The arrest rate of African Americans under the age of 18 for drug abuse violations has increased 2,900 percent between 1965 and 1989, and it's almost five times higher than the arrest rate for whites.
When faced with the truth, African Americans have risen to override most obstacles. This was seen when the Violence Initiative became known in 1992. When they rose up to foil psychiatry's attempt to gain more funding from The National Institutes of Mental Health to experiment on and drug 100,000 inner city youth. African Americans formed the committee to stop the Federal Violence Initiative. Through the efforts of the community working shoulder-to-shoulder with one another and other concerned groups, they defeated the plan.
I'd like to take you on a journey now, a journey of the history of psychiatry's effects upon the African American community and how that effect has translated into our perception of the mental competence and the capacity for violence that many people think the African American to be capable of. Our racism comes from some place. Our bias and bigotry comes from some place. I'm going to take you to that "some place."
"To oppress a race and then label it's reaction to the oppression as a mental illness is not only morally wrong, but it is criminal and fraud," said William Tutman, PhD, cofounder of the Committee To Stop The Federal Violence Initiative. In 1797 the father of American psychiatry, Dr. Benjamin Rush, whose face today still adorns the seal of the American Psychiatric Association, declared blacks were black because they suffered from a rare disease called Negritude. As internationally renowned author and Professor of Psychiatry, Dr. Thomas Oz wrote in his book, The Manufacture of Madness, "Rush did not believe that God created the African American black or that the African American is black by nature. Instead he believed that Negritude was a disease genetically passed on by African Americans, which he claimed suffered from leprosy. Rush argued that African Americans, like lepers, had insensitivity to pain and, compared to white people, could endure surgical operations without drugs. This might explain why South African psychiatrists up until the 1980's administered electroshock treatment to Africans without anesthesia in some macabre belief that they did not feel pain like other human beings. Rush argued, of course, that the leprosy was inherited -- a forerunner to today's eugenics movement." As Dr. Oz points out, Rush made the black a medically safe domestic while at the same time called for his sexual segregation as a carrier of a dread hereditary disease. While Rush said that whites should not tyrannize over blacks, but blacks should not intermarry for this could "spread the disease." Instead he recommended that psychiatrists should attempt to find a cure for the illness. Rush argued that blacks did not know what was best for themselves, and therefore medically they should be protected. Thus the forerunner of institutional psychiatry in the United States began.
Dr. Samuel Cartwright followed in Rush's footsteps when, in the 1840's, he discovered another new mental disease peculiar and exclusive just to Africans. Drapetomania, which literally means flight from home madness, according to Cartwright was what caused slaves to have the desire to run away. The so-called medical prevention of this psychological madness was literally a treatment called "whipping the hell out of them." Cartwright put on the medical record another "illness" supposedly indigenous to Africans - dysaethesia aethiopica, a "mental disease accompanied with physical signs or lesions of the body discovered only by the medical observer." While not a single African visited his office with this illness, Cartwright claimed it was prevalent in free Negroes. This was then legitimized by an 1840 census --(and later found to be fabricated -- that blacks living in the North under the "unnatural conditions" of freedom were more prone to insanity. Politicians took up this false technology. In the 1840's the former Vice President, John Calhoun, stated, "The African is incapable of self care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom. It is the mercy to give him the guardianship and protection from mental health."
Let's examine the IQ fraud. During the 1800's, more than 2,000 Americans were enrolled in German Universities in which aggressive nationalism and the eugenicists catch cry, survival of the fittest, were promoted. By the end of the century, two generations of American students returned from Europe believing German scientific solutions to American problems. California Eugenicist's leader of the time, Dr. Paul Poppenau from the innocuous sounding Human Betterment Foundation, authored a study in the 1920's about the "mental status of the so-called colored population in the United States." He performed army IQ tests on 18,891 blacks and concluded that the IQ of African Americans was dependent upon how much white blood they had in them. The more white, he claimed, the higher the IQ. His study states, and this was published in our leading scientific peer review journal and accepted without comment or without challenge or without criticism by any journalist or any other scientist in the United States at the time, "It is established that the intelligence of a colored man depends to a marked degree on the amount of white blood he has. No amount of education or favorable environment can obviate this condition. The Negro is mentally, therefore, eugenically inferior to the white race. All treatment of the Negro in the U.S. or elsewhere must take into account this fundamental fact."
Psychologist. Dr. William McDougal, concurred when in 1921 he said that blacks had an instinct to be "submissive." Washington, DC psychiatrist W. M. Beavis also mirrored this when he said at the time, "Negro children are bright and full of life, but their mental developments start freezing at puberty. From then on theirs is a life of sexual promiscuity, gambling, petty thievery, drinking, loafing, etcetera." One only has to look at the recent release of Charles Murphy's Bell Curve to know that psychiatry and psychology's racial justification for keeping African Americans illiterate, unemployed, drug-dependent, and imprisoned is still alive and kicking. ...Psychologist puppeteer, Richard Hermstein, made it clear that they believed African Americans do worse than whites in intelligent tests and are, "genetically disabled." What is one of the outcomes? Well you certainly can't sterilize someone that you consider your equal, but if you consider someone your inferior -- by being inferior, they are inherently inferior, so no matter how many generations they have they will always be inferior -- then you can justify it, and hence the beginning of our sterilization policies. With psychologists and psychiatrists, claiming that IQ was congenital and inherited and thus unchanging, the next step was to sell politicians and others on the idea that African Americans and other minority races were "feeble minded, and therefore a menace to the race."
In some terrified belief that these inferior people would organize a revolution and victimize the "more intelligent" sector of society, sterilizations were promoted "in the very best interest" of the poor and black. The first US sterilization law to rid the society of "defective individuals," and by the way, when I'm giving the quotes I'm giving the quotes from the actual laws or studies that were used at the time that justified the programs of the eugenicists in the United States. You could not carry on a program with such tremendous effects unless you first had the scientific community clearly behind you, so at all times at every level of society from our congress, Vice President of the United States, all the major academics within the major institutions supported this. They were all onboard at the same time. It wasn't as if there were a few rabid individuals running around. No. This was across the board in our society. This was one of those things that we don't look back on. We don't know where our bias hatreds come from. That's why I'm giving you this, and hence the quotes from their comments. So, when you hear me say, "quote," I'm giving you their words to justify it. Now the first US sterilization law to rid society of the defective individuals, as they called them, was proposed in Pennsylvania in 1905. It was precipitated in part by African Americans having held a public forum to lend greater momentum to the abolitionist's movement in 1890. Eugenicists were appalled that so-called "inferior people" had been able to conduct such a forum. They were amazed. How did they do it? How did they have the intelligence to actually get up in front of a group of people and speak?
As author Alice McGillity stated in a 1973 book, Eugenic Sterilization, "Eugenicists proposed that sterilization laws could eliminate 'feeble-mindedness, insanity, criminal tendencies, epilepsy, alcoholism, drug addiction, deafness, blindness, physical deformities, unproductive dependency such as pauperism, economic failure, and orphanism." California passed its sterilization act in 1909. As eugenics sterilization generally took place in state mental and penal institutions, such institutions "served as incarceration sites for blacks, and sterilization may be recommended by either judicial directive or by psychiatric consultants." Later liberalized abortion laws were also used to provide a legitimate vehicle for "accidental sterilization," where a quick slip and cut ended the likelihood of a future generation being created. By 1929 more than 6,000 sterilizations had been carried out on inmates of California's institutions. Dr. Paul Poppenau also argued for the sterilization of feeble-minded "stock." Poppenau claimed that sterilization was needed because "morons and unfit members of society in general are more prolific than the more intelligent human families. The least the state can do is to see that the actual lunatics do not propagate their kind." Sterilization operations, Poppenau said, "recognize that many defective or diseased individuals need protection from the strain of bearing and rearing children." After which these patients, "would have been returned to normal life with minds cured having no desire to bring unfit children into the world."
There is a link also to the Nazi movement, and one of the foundations on which the Nazi movement was founded was eugenics. One of the basics of eugenics was the unfounded element of schizophrenia. By 1932 the eugenics movement had become a worldwide enterprise with American and British psychiatrists voting in Nazi's eugenics psychiatrist, Ernst Rudin, as its world president. The movement called for the killing or sterilizing of people whose hereditary made them a public burden. Rudin's first target was the so-called "schizophrenics." Rudin's prot駩e psychiatrist, Franz Calman, provided the credentials needed to legitimize Germany's racial purity research. Calman had argued at a 1935 International Congress on Population Science in Berlin (which I have and have translated) that sterilization should not be just used on schizophrenics, but even on "the healthy relatives of schizophrenics," in order to eliminate "the defective gene." The main eugenics research was carried out at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. It was heavily funded through the Second World War by external psychiatric sources in the United States. In 1933 Rudin and his staff, as part of the Task Force on Hereditary Experts chaired by SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, drew up Germany's sterilization law and the racial purity law to ban the cohabitation of Aryans and non-Aryans. In the late 1930's Franz Calman was forced to leave his Nazi position in Germany because he was "half-Jewish." He transferred to the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University where he became Director of Research and continued propagation of his Nazi eugenics theories. I have gone back and studied every one of his reports. They are amazing. This is what Columbia University financed, completely funded and completely supported. None of his colleagues or none of the professors at the time challenged him. His research study was over 1,000 cases of so-called schizophrenia. What determined you were schizophrenic? He determined you were schizophrenic. He concluded that schizophrenics were "a source of maladjusted crooks and the lowest type of criminal offenders. Even a faithful believer in liberty would be happier without those."
Now put it in perspective...
One of the most respected institutions in the United States, Columbia University and its affiliation with the New York State Psychiatric Institute, supported a rabid Nazi who was responsible for legitimizing what would be the death of millions of Jews and who had caused the death of over 350,000 mental patients in Germany prior to the Jewish holocaust. He was considered one of the shining lights of American psychiatry clear up until his death. Now Calmun's study published simultaneously in the United States and in Nazi Germany in 1938 was used by the Nazi T-4 Eugenics Unit, which launched the scientific justification for the mass murder of all the individuals that they could find who fit the criteria. That was over 350,000 in one fell swoop, mental patients in Germany in their mental institutions. In fact, I've seen film footage of psychiatrists and nurses and staff celebrating with champagne the numbers reached at how many of the feeble-minded or the schizophrenics they were able to euthanize or kill to rid the world of these unnecessary burdens. It is from these roots that the systematic diagnosing and psychiatric imprisonment of African Americans evolved. After the war, the National Institutes of Mental Health was formed and most of the US psychiatric research had been carried out since 1948 has been funded by The National Institutes of Mental Health. This has included LSD studies being carried out on African American inmates. The 1970's Violence Initiative was planned to isolate African American leaders among inner city youth, and give them psychosurgery or lobotomies to curb "violent behavior." In the 1992, "Violence Initiative" was planned to find "violence causing genes in African American children which can be controlled by powerful psychotropic mind-altering drugs."
Dr. Thomas Oz in "The Manufacture of Madness" talks about Dr. Benjamin Rush. Rush believed the same morbid sensibility of the nerves, which was induced by leprosy, was found particularly in Negroes who compared to white people were able to endure surgical operations with ease. In fact, Rush would recall in great detail cases where he would proudly show Negroes had actually held up the upper part of a limb during amputation. No anesthetics. No pain killers. What is the psychiatric justification for coercion? Slavery as a psychiatric treatment. In May of 1851 Dr. Samuel Cartwright a prominent Louisiana physician published an essay entitled "Report On The Diseases And Physical Peculiarities Of The Negro Race" in the then prestigious "New Orleans Medical And Surgical Journal." It was one of the most respected medical journals of its day. Cartwright claimed to have discovered two new diseases peculiar to Negroes that he believed justified their enslavement as a therapeutic necessity for the slaves and as a medical responsibility for the masters. Here is a piece of the argument. In Cartwright's own words from that journal:
"Drapetomania is the diseases causes slaves to run away. Drapetomania is from draptise. A runaway slave is mania mad or crazy. It is unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptoms be absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers. In noticing a disease that, therefore, is hitherto classed among the long list of maladies that man is subject to, it was necessary to have a new term to express it. The cause in most cases that induces the Negro to run away from service is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable as a general rule. With the advantages of proper medical advice strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented, although the slaves are located on the borders of a free state within a stone's throw of abolitionists.""Dysaethesia aethiopica or hebetudes of mind, is a disease peculiar to Negroes." Let me cite what the medical literature was suggesting at the time: "This condition is a disease peculiar to Negroes affecting both mind and body in a manner as well expressed by the disease the name I have given it as could be by a single term. It differs from every other species of mental disease as it is accompanied by physical signs or lesions of the body discoverable to the medical observer, which is always present and sufficient to account for the symptoms. The complaint is easily curable if treated on sound physical principles. The skin is dry, thick and harsh to the touch, and the liver inactive. The skin, liver, and kidneys should be stimulated to activity, and made to assist in the de-carbonizing the blood. The best means is to put the patient in some hard kind of work in the open air and sunshine that will compel him to expand his lungs as chopping wood, splitting rails, or sawing with a cross-cut whip saw. Any kind of labor that will do that will cause full and free respiration in its performance as lifting or carrying heavy weights the object being to expand the lungs by full and deep inspiration and expiration thereby vitalize the impure circulating blood by introducing oxygen and exhausting carbon. The compulsory power of the white man by making the slothful Negro take active exercise puts into active play the lungs through whose agency the vitalized blood is sent to the brain to give liberty to the mind."
The justification in this rhetoric of psychiatry here is displayed in full panoply: mental diseases, physical causes, bodily lesions and ... effective treatments with bountiful benefits for patient and society alike. While the report speaks for itself, I want to underscore some of its features since the same elements continue to characterize contemporary psychiatry's claims concerning mental disease and psychiatric treatments.
although running away or escaping from captivity is ordinarily thought of as a deliberate human act, Cartwright refers to it as an occurrence caused by certain antecedent events. Drapetomania causes slaves to run away and the cause moreover is a disease of the mind.to prevent the full-blown development of drapetomania exhibited by the actual running away of the slave, whipping is recommended as medical therapy. In revealing the illusion to its historical origins, the treatment is called "whipping the hell out of them."the cure for drapetomania and the restoration of the slave to sanity requires that the patients be "treated like children with care, kindness, attention and humanity to prevent and cure them from running away."as with drapetomania Cartwright identifies dysaethesia aethiopica specifically as "mental disease accompanied with physical signs of lesions of the body discovered to the medical observer."although Cartwright mentions not a single free Negro who consulted him as a patient for this illness, he refers to the "complaint as it prevails among from free Negroes."nearly all free Negroes "that have not got some white person to direct and take care of them is afflicted with the disease."For Cartwright this alleged correlation was further evidence that, for the black man, sanity was to be subjected as slave to the white man and, for the white man, sanity was to dominate as master of the black man. Today's similar evidence makes us conclude that, for the mentally ill, sanity meaning rationality is to submit as a patient to the psychiatrists. For the psychiatrists, sanity (meaning responsibility) is to dominate as a therapist the mental patient. No wonder psychiatrists ignore their own history. Remembering it surely would make it more difficult to generate enthusiasm for DSM III or indignation over the conduct of the psychiatrists in the Soviet Union. Paraphrasing -- Hegel Shaw observed, we learn from history that we learn nothing from history. Perhaps they were right. Let's examine 28 years of sterilization in the sunshine state.
"Characterized by lack of foresight, control and judgment by the ignorance, indifference and frequently alcoholism in mentally defective persons do not limit their families, as do the college and high school graduates; hence investigations in many states agree with our researchers in California which show that educated families of the feeble-minded and the chronic paupers are not only holding their own, but are increasing." That's a prelude to the Human Betterment Foundation. Now listen to the words: Human. Betterment. Foundation. The Board of Trustees I was able to find were E.C. Gonsky, President from Pasadena, California; Harry Chandler, President of The Los Angeles Times Corporation and the great patriarch of the Chandler Publishing Empire; Henry Robinson, banker; David Star Jordan, Chancellor Emeritus, Stanford University of California; C.M. Goth, philanthropist, Sacramento; Justin Miller, Justice US Court of Appeals, Washington, DC; Charles Prisk, publisher Star News and Post Pasadena, California; Oscar Ford, former mayor of Riverside, California; R. B. Van Clemsmid; President of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Those are some. Eugenic institutions and the Human Betterment Foundation -- it's an interesting fact that much of the leadership of eugenics in the United States has been found not in the graduates of the older institutions of classical learning, but among the graduates of the agricultural colleges who are more accustomed to viewing man as an animal, and who realize that as an animal who was just as capable of improvement as were their species of domesticated animals and cultivated plants, although by a somewhat different method. Perhaps this association with the livestock industry in Arizona helped to crystallize the ideas as to the betterment of human race, which Mr. Gonsky had long entertained. At any rate, he became a convinced eugenicist at a time when people who understood the meaning of the word were relatively rare in the United States.
Now in the investigation I wanted to try to see was there an interruption in this flow or was it carried over every single decade from one group to another, so that there was a seaming together of an overall ideology, and I will lay out the evidence I have for that. Much of the leadership of the eugenics movement in the United States said that a black could only maintain a higher level of intelligence to the degree that they had white blood. The conclusion reached by several prestigious investigators and supported by the verdict of the common sense observation at the time is confirmed by several studies of the army psychologist. Much of the leadership of the eugenics movement in the United States has been found among the graduates of a particular ideology. It's one that associates anyone who is different from them as inferior. "Intelligence of a colored man depends upon a marked degree of the amount of white blood and is improved by the presence of much white blood as many of them." That was in July 1922. In the data which I'm about to present therefore it must be born in mind that the showing quote of the Negroes is improved by the presence of much white blood in many of them, and that to get at any real ability of the black man one would have to subtract no small amount of all of the scores to be mentioned. The comment that "in general the southern Negro is as much as inferior to the northern Negro as the Negroes are inferior to the whites." Now I'm just quoting you several different scientific references at the time to show you that it was not an isolated case at all. These were people who were forming public opinion.
The Rockefeller Foundation poured money into the occupied German Republic for a medical specialty known as psychiatric eugenics. This field applied to psychiatry the concepts of eugenics otherwise known as race purification, race hygiene, or race betterment. It was developed in London's Galton Laboratory, and its offshoot, eugenics societies in England and America. The Rockefeller Foundation made an initial grant of 2.5 million dollars in 1925 to the Psychiatric Institute in Munich. It gave it $325,000 for a new building in 1928 and continuously sponsored the Institute and its Nazi Chief Rudin through the entire Second World War. The Foundation paid for a 1930-35 anthropological survey of the "eugenically worthwhile population" by Nazi eugenicists Rudin, Verschuer, and Eugene Fisher and others. Only a few months after the meeting at the American Museum of Natural History, the Rockefeller Rudin apparatus became a section of the Nazi state. The regime appointed Rudin head of the Racial Hygiene Society. Rudin and his staff as part of the Task Force of Hereditary Experts chaired by SS Chief Heinrich Himmler drew up the sterilization law described as an American model law. It was adopted in July 1933 and proudly printed in the September 1933 Eugenical News in the USA with Hitler's signature. The Rockefeller Group drew up other race laws based on it, as was the sterilization law and on existing statutes from the commonwealth of Virginia. Otmar Verschuer and his assistant Dr. Joseph Mengele together wrote reports for special courts, which enforced Rudin's racial purity law against the illegal cohabitation of Aryans and non-Aryans. In 1940 and '41 IG Farbin built a gigantic factory at Auschwitz and Poland to utilize the Standard Oil IG Farbin patents with concentration camp slave labor to make gasoline from coal. The SS guarded the Jewish and other inmates and selected for killing those who were unfit for IG Farbin slave labor.
Standard Oil and German President Emil Heilfeck testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trial that Standard Oil funds helped pay for the SS guards at Auschwitz. The Rockefeller Foundation defends its record by claiming that its funding of Nazi Germany programs during World War II was limited to psychiatric research. What they do not acknowledge and have never acknowledged and should is that without their money and without their research and without their belief in a eugenics concept, the Nazis would not have a major pillar upon which they built their terror and death machine. But let's go on. Let's take a look at The National Institutes of Mental Health's participation.
The National Institutes of Mental Health was established in 1948 under the directorship of psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Felix, to promote psychiatric research. In its early years, its initial appropriation was a miniscule $870,000. Following the establishment of community mental health centers, which The National Institutes of Mental Health funded, the cost to the taxpayer was $68 million. Then today it's over one to two billion dollars per year. These are about some of the experiments that The National Institutes of Mental Health has funded.
In 1992 The National Institutes of Mental Health launched a lucrative plan under the bogus title of Violence Initiative to identify "problem black children." In reality it was to be an experiment on minority races using psychiatric drugs. It was to cost $50 million of taxpayers' money until stopped by groups such as The National Committee Against Federal Violence Initiative. At the time the director of the agency over The National Institutes of Mental Health, psychiatrist Frederick Goodwin, became infamous because of his racist reasoning behind the proposed research that inner city youth are like violent "oversexed Rhesus monkeys in the jungle." When I was researching this I wanted to see surely the Black Caucus and surely some of the black legislator and surely some of the liberal involvement in 1992 would have stopped this. No. To the contrary. The White House fully supported it. The President supported it. The President's wife supported it. I always find it of interest when people go saying they care about you. They suffer for you. They feel for you. You trust that. Then they are part of the group that are behind the idea that you are like a bunch of oversexed Rhesus monkeys that need psychiatric drugs to keep in line. Connect the dots and see if it changes perspective.
A three-year grant of $900,000 went to the Boston Violence Project in the early 1970's to carry out research to the cause of urban violence, which was aimed especially at African Americans. Indeed the selling point of this grant was the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent riots as an example of the violence raging throughout the United States. The Center claimed that it was the idea to work with the leaders in black riots to relieve them of parts of their brain through lobotomies and thus surrender them ineffective. This is a federal study, a two-year study at Duke University Medical Center at North Carolina on the "effectiveness of involuntarily outpatient commitment because African Americans had been noncompliant with treatment." The study was to look at implementing court ordered mandated outpatient treatment as a means of enforcing compliance, meaning that "you're not taking your drugs." Duke University was also given more than $738,000 in 1983 to research aggressive behavioral patterns in African American children. A 13-year study at the Center For Health Sciences, Department of Psychiatry in Los Angeles, has been funded over $415,000 by The National Institutes of Mental Health to study the sexual desires of African American men and women. Part of the research includes a study of "248 women sexual experiences to be tested on male incarcerated population ages 18 to 24 at risk for criminal activities." The first director of The National Institutes of Mental Health was also the Director of a Lexington, Kentucky drug addiction center, which carried out LSD experiments on African American inmates who were drug addicted. The experiments involved LSD and a variety of other hallucinogens, marijuana and poisons. In one case, seven prisoners were kept hallucinating for 77 consecutive days under this man's supervision. Then you have the Federal Violence Initiative comes to Chicago. Although one of the people, one of the sponsors, also believes in the importance of the environment he has stressed that the role of a biological and genetic factor in predisposing individuals and perhaps driving that person towards violence and crime. In a 1991 publication by a person named Earls, "A Developmental Approach to Understanding and Controlling Violence," he writes. "Advances in the fields of behavior, genetics, neurobiology, and molecular biology are renewing the hope that the biological determinant of delinquent and criminal behavior may yet be discovered." Dr. Reese recently told reporter, Gilbert Charles of L'Express in France, that the project is receiving $12 million per year from all sources. This multimillion-dollar effort can be considered a major violence initiative in itself. The Chicago Project is based upon "disease prevention and aims at screening and identifying individual children as potentially violent offenders in need of preventative treatment or control. Nine groups of children and youth "starting pre-natally and ages 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 21, and 24 will be followed for eight years." The study will be in "key biological, psychological, and social factors that may play a role in the development of criminal behavior." When the Center For Psychiatry first alerted the media and the public to the Federal Violence Initiative, the Department of Health and Human Services and The National Institutes of Health quickly denied there were plans to develop drugs for the control of persons identified that has "violence prone"; however, upon our investigations, we have uncovered research designed to develop just that approach. The National Research Council's "Understanding and Preventing Violence" with Earl and Reese as central figures also called for the development of such drugs. "These and other findings raise the hope that violent behavior eventually can be curbed by manipulating the chemical and genetic keys to aggression anti-violence medications conceivably," as according to The Chicago Tribune, December 12 to 15, 1993 from interviews with The National Institutes of Health.
What we have is Big Brother as a biological psychiatrist. Even more outlandish possibilities for social and political applications are raised in The Tribune series. For example, monkey research allegedly demonstrated that the more dictatorial leaders have low serotonin while more democratic monkeys had high normal serotonin. Subordinate monkeys supposedly become friendly democratic leaders after being given Prozac. The leap to drugs as a solution for widespread social problems raised the specter of Big Brother as a biological psychiatrist. The recent Chicago Tribune series and The Los Angeles Times series as well as [others] and Earl Research Project aimed at thousands of children in Chicago and The National Institutes of Mental Health studies of thousands of Chicano children, and The National Institutes of Mental Health of thousands more through the University of Illinois confirm our predictions as well as our worse fears about the Federal Violence Initiative. The threat to human rights through biomedical social control continues to mount.
"At least 18 newly born infants, of which 17 were black, were injected with radioactive plutonium. Also radioactive iodine was injected into hundreds of black poor pregnant women while receiving prenatal care at public health centers." "There's another critical issue affecting African Americans today. The National Institutes of Health plans to drug 100,000 black children it labels as genetically prone." Were any of these black women told that they were being given radiation? No. No. They were expendable.
Robert Hanna Felix ran a spectacularly unique operation. The exposure of MK Ultra scandal revealed that the CIA had funded one Dr. Harris Isabelle to carry out barbarous experiments using slave subjects nearly all of them black drug addicts at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Robert Hanna Felix is a 33rd degree mason. That is not a coincidence. He was a Director of the Scottish Rights Psychiatric Research. Also this was not a coincidence. He ran a spectacularly irresponsible program. The exposure of the MK Ultra scandal revealed that the CIA had funded them to carry out these experiments. Was there anyone challenging him? No. Not at all. He was funded by The National Institutes of Mental Health, and The National Institutes Health Director from 1949 to 1964 was a top mason. The Lexington facility had been Dr. Felix's personal project since he had been Clinical Director in 1930's. He put it under the jurisdiction of The National Institutes of Mental Health. Dr. Robert Felix and the Founding Director of The National Institutes of Mental Health was one of the chief architects of this program. He wrote, "We are entering a new era of community centered comprehensive psychiatric care. State mental hospitals as we know them now would no longer exist." He was right. During the years from 1955 to 1992 the state mental hospitals census went down to 82 percent. The Felix's Isabelle slave experiments involved LSD and a wide variety of other hallucinogens and exotic poisons. He got away with it. They were not challenged. The government supported this MK Ultra. Do your homework and take a look. It's amazing what they were able to do. Dr. Wayne Evans, Director of the US Army Stress Laboratory in Natwick, Massachusetts and Nathan Kline a eugenicist, researcher, psychiatrist for Columbia University who had set up voodoo oriented psychological clinics in Haiti in conjunction with Papa Doc Duvalier. The preface of the Evans Kline Report said, "The group concluded that the present breadth of drug use may be also trivial when we compare it to the possible numbers of chemical substances that will be able for the control of selected aspects of man's life in the year 2000. The sooner we cease to confuse scientific and moral statements about drug use the sooner we can rationally consider the types of neural chemical states we wish to be able to provide people."
African American adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 are far more likely to be coerced through a mental health center than whites. Forty-six percent of African American adolescents referred to these centers are between 16 and 17. African Americans are twice as likely as whites to enter community mental health centers through a referral agency. From a social agency, 90 percent of the adolescents entering the community mental health system are poor. An August 1998 study on arrest rates of patients at a community mental health center indicates that people attending these centers are nearly two times more likely to be arrested than the general population. Studies show that 55 percent of outpatients visiting a community mental health center receive a psychiatric drug. Summary: as Dr. Thomas Oz says, "The engine that drives the psychiatric industry today is a combination of federal and state funds, government mandated insurance coverage, commitment laws, and the threat of involuntary mental hospitalization together with false claims about effectiveness of neuroleptic drugs."
Let us look at "Camelot," a supporter for psychiatric quackery.
The election of John F. Kennedy to the Presidency put psychiatrists in a mood of celebration. Finally, a President of the United States took up the banner for curing mental illness. The scene was set for a veritable Camelot on their path. In January of 1963 for the first time in American history the President devoted a part of the State of the Union message to lecturing the American public on mental health. With insolvent hypocrisy, John F. Kennedy whose sister Rosemary was involuntarily lobotomized in the 1940's and had been incarcerated ever since, hectored the nation about its callous "abandonment of the mentally ill and the mentally retarded to the grim mercies of custodial institutions." A month later Kennedy delivered a special message to Congress entitled "Mental Illness and Mental Retardation," proposing the establishment of community mental health centers and calling for "a bold new approach in the war against mental illness." "It has been demonstrated," declared the President, "that two out of three schizophrenics, our largest category of mentally ill, can be treated and released within six months." Where did Kennedy think the released schizophrenics were going to go? Home. But they had no homes. Did anyone want them in their homes? No. Did the Kennedys want Rosemary, their own sister, in their own home? Evidently not. The miracle cure Kennedy offered was simply the psychiatry profession's latest snake oil. Drugs and de-institutionalization. As usual psychiatrists defined this latest fad as a culmination of scientific revolution and moral reform and cast it in the rhetoric of treatment and civil liberties. Psychotropic drugs relieved the symptoms of mental illness and enabled the patients to be discharged from mental hospitals. Community mental health centers provided the least restrictive setting for delivering the best available mental health services. Such were the claims of psychiatrists to justify the policy of forcibly drugging and relocating their hospitalized patients. It sounded grand. Unfortunately, it was a lie.
The forces that actually propelled the change were economic and legal. It was specifically the transfer of funding from psychiatric services from the states to the federal government, and the shift in legal psychiatric fashions from long term drugging. No one in authority challenged the assumptions on which this alleged reform rested. No one asked if it was true that mental illness is like any other illness or if psychiatric drugs made the patient mentally healthier and economically more self-sufficient. On the contrary, careers in politics, psychiatric academia, and the media are made by not asking such questions. Pretending instead that we knew the answers and were there with a resounding yes. The familiar psychiatric code words -- such as mental illness, hospital treatment, and schizophrenia -- thus remained intact and were fortified with a set of fresh code words, such as dopamine, serotonin, anti-psychotic drugs and pharmacology.
The government enters the psychiatric scene.
In 1955 Congress passed the Mental Health Study Act mandating the appointment of a commission to make recommendations for combating the scourge of mental illness in the United States. It is impossible to exaggerate the enthusiasm with which psychiatrists created this legislation. Their euphoria was justified. In effect the act ratified the recasting of the very nature of the American government changing its primary duty from protecting and promoting personal liberty and property to protecting and promoting the mental health of citizens and the community as a whole. Psychiatrists, the families of mental patients, and the general public regarded and continue to regard using the political process to define mental illness as brain diseases as monumental science as well as moral progress. Not so.
I'm Gary Null. This completes Part One of a special in depth investigation on the Pathologizing of the African American by the Psychiatric Community.
Hi everyone. I'm Gary Null. I'd like to invite you to a special presentation on Pathologizing African Americans by Psychiatry. This is Part Two. This information comes from several years of in depth investigation in scholarly research on the part of dozens of individuals. This work would not be possible without the dedicated scholarship of The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, and the diligence of the research from The Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Florida.
Studies show that up to 55 percent of outpatients visiting a community health mental center are given psychotropic or mind-altering drugs. Sixty-two percent receive a major tranquilizer. Forty-five percent receive a minor tranquilizer. Twenty-three percent of one study received three or more drugs, and as the study concluded "there was a strong tendency towards prolonged use of minor tranquilizers despite the lack of evidence of benefits from maintenance therapy and risks of drug dependency and abuse." Drug tests show these drugs create "maximum behavioral disruption," and were characterized as "chemical lobotomies," and can "produce an acute psychotic reaction in an individual not previously psychotic."
African Americans were found to suffer the iatrogenic disorder tardive dyskinesia in higher proportions than whites. The irreversible neurological disorder is caused by major tranquilizers. In short, the drug-induced reactions are of such nature that an observer could be forgiven for assuming the person's so affected was mentally ill and perhaps even dangerous. A person suffering from such a reaction even to a minor degree would experience great difficulty in being accepted by the man on the street as normal. The mental health professionals who are prepared to accept such grotesque reactions as an unfortunate but inevitable risk attached to "cure" of mental illness have lost sight of the patient as an individual. As a result they have been stigmatized: African Americans, more than any other group.
Let's examine race and tardive dyskinesia among outpatients at a community mental health center. I will do much more explaining of why I challenge community mental health centers. I believe that they are a very manipulative element, and I will document this in detail shortly. To our knowledge we are the first researchers to document that black patients receiving higher doses of neuroleptic medications and were more frequently given high potency neuroleptics. There are few drugs anywhere as troublesome. The tablets are inexpensive. One Ritalin tablet, one Talwin tablet, and a needle-- everything needed to get high-- can be had in most cities for under $25. But the concoction is addictive and the body still builds up a resistance to it, requiring increasingly larger doses - perhaps five to ten fixes a day for the desired effect. Most users are from the lowest socioeconomic brackets, so their habits quickly outgrow their means. The result is crime. Statistics released last month show 20 pharmacies in Calgary were hit by armed bandits last year compared with three the year before. Vancouver City Police Chief Staff Sergeant Glenn McDougal estimates that the bandits are responsible for between 60 to 70 percent of the crime in this city's notorious downtown eastside mainly going after these kinds of medications. Saskatoon Detective Sergeant Joe Thomas blames the drugs for half the crimes in the city's core. Edmonton Detective Dwight Lewis won't put a percentage to his estimate, but says the elimination of the Talwin and Ritalin would cause "an astounding drop in the crime rate." Acting Staff Inspector of Vice Ronald Mortimer attributes 30 percent of all the crime in downtown Winnipeg to Ritalin and Talwin prescription medications. Let's look at The Philadelphia New Observer. "We want to know just what is going on with our children," said one mother. "We are not sure that the so-called medical determination is an accurate one. If our young children are restless or over-active or inattentive, does it really mean that drugs are the only means to treat their problem? We want to be assured that their lives will not be ruined because of any poor diagnosis or for some secret experiment."
Evidence before the Philadelphia public hearings in the psychiatric drugging of school children found, I felt, they could possibly be filling our kids with unnecessary and possibly damaging drugs that could ruin their lives," said one individual. "I thought there could be a radical racial and cultural gap in which certain medical people and psychiatrists and psychologists just didn't understand the inner workings of a young black child. But too many people either saw me as a troublemaker or thought I didn't know what I was talking about." The medicine, a pill, is used to stimulate that part of the brain to allow the patient to concentrate. One parent and community activist refuses to believe that there has been an overreaction from the black community on the Ritalin use, "If some people in the health department or school district believe we are overreacting to the Ritalin drug, they need to understand that more and more of us are becoming aware of dangerous experiments conducted on people in the past. We've heard about the Tuskogee experiment and now in the news is being released other experiments and tests have been done us all without our knowledge or consent. It has reached the point that you just can't ignore what's going on around you, especially if it involves you directly. It must be proven to us that whatever is being done is justifiable and safe."
A study of 306 adult psychiatric outpatients visiting a community mental health center during one study revealed 55 percent of those patients received a psychotropic medication. Forty-five percent of the medication recipients used a minor tranquilizer as all or part of their treatment regimen. Meaning that's all they got. The most common diagnosis for patients receiving mild tranquilizers was depressive neurosis. The tranquilizers were prescribed in relatively high doses, and 57 of 77 patients who received them had taken the drugs continuously for at least six months. The study also revealed the poly-pharmacy was widely practiced. The author's suggestions for improving the quality of pharmco-therapy in a community mental health center included instituting peer review prescribing and record-keeping practice in monitoring effectiveness of medications through the application of quantitative mood scales at regular intervals. None of which had been done. As a result, if you were to stop and ask someone,
"Are you going to a mental health center?"
"Yes."
"Are you taking drugs, tranquilizers or other neuroleptics?"
"Yes."
"Has anyone actually monitored you to see are you benefiting from them? Do you have side effects from them?"
"No"
"Are you being counseled?"
"No."
"Is there any blood work being done?"
"No."
"Is anyone trying to understand what other factors may have caused you to feel a particular way?"
"No."
I'd like to examine now the labeling of mental illness, schizophrenia, and other so-called disorders. People do suffer problems in life, and do look for what is causing them. In their desperation for a solution, they are diagnosed as mentally ill by psychiatrists. If you simply take a look at psychiatry's so-called textbook on mental illness, "The Diagnostic Statistical Manual" (The DSM), you'll find that any normal behavior can be diagnosed as mental illness, and any adverse reactions to environmental influence, peer pressure and social unrest has earned a psychiatric label. If you don't wake up on time, if you sleep poorly, if you drink coffee or smoke cigarettes, or if you give up these things, if you stutter, if a child fidgets or loses things or can't wait their turn in a game, if you've ever been intoxicated, if you've had trouble with arithmetic or with grammar or with punctuation or writing expressively - all of these are now considered mental illnesses according to psychiatrists. Even teenagers who argue with their parents are, according to the DSM IV, suffering a mental disorder called "oppositional defiance disorder."
Much of the current basis of psychiatric diagnosis is rhetoric about genes and IQ creating educationally and mentally defective people. The IQ scam shows how easy it is today to diagnose anyone as schizophrenic. In the first edition of DSM in 1952 only two pages were devoted to nine different stages of schizophrenia. In 1968 the number was three pages, but the different types increased to 16. In 1980, the Insurance Guide To Schizophrenia was released in DSM III. Deregulation of the private psychiatric hospital industry began and with it, insurance companies required a formalized guide to what illnesses could be claimed against. The third edition dedicated six pages, while its revised edition in 1987 11 pages to schizophrenia. As to the point that genetic link to so-called schizophrenia was introduced with psychiatrists involved in the Germany Eugenics Movement cited as experts. In fact one of the psychiatrists cited, Carl Schneider, was a key player in the men behind Hitler and was instrumental in planning and experimenting on mental patients with drugs and then exterminating them under Nazi Operation T4. Schneider committed suicide before he could be tried at Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. This didn't stop the American Psychiatric Association from quoting his works in this prestigious diagnostic manual where terms like "familial pattern" were introduced, and we saw that biological relatives were at risk of catching this "disorder."
As schizophrenia became the cash cow for psychiatrists, the DSM IV was released last year with 24 pages devoted to schizophrenia. Statistics studies show that psychiatrists diagnose African American males as having schizophrenia up to 1,500 percent more than they do whites. One study carried out in both 1984 and 1990 in Tennessee found that although African Americans represented only 16 percent of the Tennessee population, 48 percent of the almost 3,000 involuntary committed patients and 37 percent of the 2,100 outpatients were African American for the primary diagnosis of schizophrenia. Since 1963 the number of psychologists in schools has increased seven fold from 3,000 to 22,000. Simultaneously, SAT scores for math and verbal have plummeted. The suicidal rate among African American males between the ages of 15 and 19 has increased 125 percent since 1965. African Americans special education statistics -- also a disproportionate amount of black schoolchildren are routed into special education programs compared with white school children.
A December, 1993 US News And World Report article cited "a five month examination of the nation's special education system by US News has documented a network of programs that in state after state include disproportionately high numbers of black schoolchildren. In 39 states, black students are over-represented in special education programs compared with their percentage of the overall student population. The most troubling anomaly in special education has to do with mental retardation. More than twice as many blacks as whites are classified as mentally retarded. A March, 1994 US Department of Education report giving 1992 statistics on elementary and secondary school programs showed that, although white students outnumbered black students four to one, black students were more than twice as likely to be labeled with some form of retardation than white students. Black students were also more likely to be labeled with some form of learning disability than white students and, while white students were twice as likely to be labeled as gifted and talented compared to black students, black students were more likely to be labeled seriously emotionally disturbed compared to white students." And the sources for that are the Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights Compliance Report, Office of Civil Rights, US Department of Education, I think in March 1994. Let's take a look at "The Right To Read Report," Volume One, Number Eight of January 1994, published by The National Right to Read Foundation. A Closer Look by Regina Lee Wood:
"Most Americans were stunned last year by test scores appearing in a $14 million national adult literacy survey. Though most of the adults in the survey attended school for 12 years, over 96 percent could not read, write, and figure well enough to go to college. Neither proponents nor opponents of public school education for the handicapped expected highly trained specialized education instructors to teach any but truly disabled students. They'd be surprised to learn that four million of the five million special education students in our schools have no mental or physical disabilities."
Let me give you that number again. Listen carefully. Four of the five million special education students in our schools have no mental or physical disabilities. Then my question is, why would they be there?
In 1930, 80 percent of blacks over age 14 could read. In 1990 56 percent of blacks over age 14 could read. This frightening increase in illiteracy may explain why the enrollment and appropriations for both these remedial programs have ballooned, but the number of students in public schools has shrunk by several millions since the crowd of baby boomer years of the 1960s and '70s. The enrollment in Chapter One has tripled from 2.2 to 6 million and special education enrollment has climbed by 30 percent to five million. The federal appropriations have tripled also to seven billion dollars. For special education from the state and from federal and local taxes, 23 billion. Last year 11 million of the nation's 42 million public school students were doing primary lessons outside regular classrooms in one of these programs. A glance at expenditures for 570,000 Oklahoma public school students shows how impoverishing these programs can be. Oklahoma's total education budget was 1.7 billion; per capita funding for regular students in a standard curriculum, $22,200 per 65,000 students; and $4,000 for special education students. A major difference between American straight A private schools and her straight F public schools is that most private schools never stop teaching beginners to sound each syllable whereas most public schools started teaching or trying to teach children to sight whole words. In the US 26 percent of public school's students are in special classes. In other countries, it's one percent. Understandably many informed black parents fight to keep their children out of these classes, but sadly over half of the five million black public school students are in one of these two dead end programs.
Let's look at unemployment. African Americans are on the average two times more likely to be unemployed than white. Overall the statistics went from 6.5 percent in 1969 to 19.5 percent in 1983, and increased substantially after the introduction of the SS Program started paying in 1974. In one year, it went from approximately ten percent to 15 percent. In 1983, the unemployment rate for 16 to 19 year olds peaked at 48 percent. Unemployment has gone down overall, but let's take a look at this Supplemental Security income, and you'll see how I tie it in to psychiatry and to racism. In 1974, the Supplemental Security Income Program was introduced in which people diagnosed as mentally or retarded or mentally disturbed received monthly payments of $309 and $422. For those parents stricken by poverty and unemployment, this was a financial opportunity that they were led to believe was without a snag. What they weren't told was that the tradeoff included their children being psychologically enslaved. The one thing you must do to qualify for receiving the federal funds is remain crazy and unemployed. "The Supplemental Security Income wound up promoting dependency and disability by paying for it. At the same time the fees were made too easy for states to get patients into these programs."
As of June 1994, 4,621,000 people received Supplemental Security Income for disability in the United States. The average monthly amount paid was $309. In January of 1994 the percentage of African Americans receiving this was 31 percent. Now since African Americans represent approximately 12 percent of the general population, they were over-represented in receiving the special supplemental security income by a substantial proportion. Applying this percentage to the total number of people receiving it for disability means that African Americans are being diagnosed into these programs at almost two and a half times the rate as the white population. As of June 1994 the number of children in the United States receiving supplemental security income disability payments was 838,000. According to a report from The General Accounting Office, the maximum payment to children was $446. Based upon 31.2 percent of recipients being African American, then each month African American children would receive more than $116,000,000 or approximately 1.4 billion dollars from the federal government, but it came with a price. If you want to control people, what better way than to use the disability system. The system meets the needs of racial segregation by sending people away to secluded places in the country.
We have a history of putting people away to secluded places in this country. We have a history of putting people we don't like away from us. Taken together, the numbers indicate that the states are using their authority to lock up people in mental hospitals. It's a powerful form of social control creating a system of racial segregation. "If you want to control people, what better way than to use the disability system," that's according to Curtis Decker, Executive of The National Association of Protection (unintelligible) Services. "The system meets the needs of racial segregation." One survey of nine southern states that provided admissions data by race reveals a mental health population sharply divided according to their skin color. Here are some of the findings. Blacks comprised almost 37 percent of all involuntary commitments to state mental hospitals, but only 19 percent of the population in the surveyed states. Nearly 37 percent of those committed against their will were blacks even though blacks represented only 19 percent of the population of the surveyed states. The widest disparity again occurred in Florida where blacks comprised 14 percent of the state's population, but make up 35 percent of the involuntary commitments. Three of the blackest and poorest states in the nation Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama have the loosest commitment laws allowing citizens to be confined in mental hospitals indefinitely without judicial review. Economics in the unbalanced commitment process create public and private psychiatric hospitals that are divided along racial lines. Blacks accounted for 34 percent of all residents at state mental hospitals in the south in a recent year, but only 13 percent of the residents at private psychiatric facilities. Why? Cost. The average black doesn't have someone to pay for a private psychiatric facility, but the state pays when it's a state facility. Based upon state populations blacks were over-represented in public hospitals and under-represented in private facilities in every southern state except Virginia and Arkansas.
Black patients were consistently diagnosed with more severe mental illnesses than whites subjecting them to heavier doses of drugs and longer hospital stays. In South Carolina, for example, a third of all blacks were diagnosed with schizophrenia. A figure that's 300 times higher than it is for whites. National studies indicate that this pattern of discrimination is not confined to the south. According to one survey of selected psychiatric hospitals by the National Institute of Mental Health, blacks were 2.8 times more likely than whites to be involuntarily committed to mental hospitals. Out of shame or sloppiness most states try to keep their discrimination a secret. No southern state keeps account of the number of blacks they commit to mental hospitals each year. Many of the figures in our survey had to be compiled on a hospital-by-hospital basis. Hospitals in four states Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia refused to provide any racial breakdown of their admissions. "We're never asked to break them down that way," said Janet Jenkins, Director of Admissions at Central State Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. "We break them down by sex, but not by the race." With the number of voluntary admissions to state hospitals declining in many states the racial disparities appear to be worsening. In both Texas and North Carolina, the only two states with consistent records, the number of black patients remained relatively steady between 1975 and '85, but the number of white patients dropped by 21 percent and 53 percent in North Carolina. The primary reason why blacks are committed to mental hospitals more frequently than whites is that they are easy targets for an arbitrary commitment system. A system the US Supreme Court has condemned as "massive curtailment of liberty." A full commitment hearing is usually held before a probate judge, although Louisiana allows a local coroner to have the final say in committing people to mental hospitals. The maximum legal length of commitment ranges from 45 days in Arkansas to unlimited terms in Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, which are the only three states in the nation that allow a person to be involuntarily committed and locked up for the rest of their life with no review ever. Yes. That is still in practice.
Oh where were Bill and Hillary? Friends of the blacks? I don't think so. Especially unfair, under South Carolina law all it takes to commit someone to a state hospital for 20 days is two signatures. No other state allows citizens to be detained for longer than ten days without a hearing to determine "probable cause for commitment." Even when a citizen finally receives a hearing, it's whom you know that counts. South Carolina Probate Judge Bernard Felding told the Greenville News, for example, that a fellow judge committed a man who had not yet arrived for his hearing. "It seemed that the doctor was in a hurry," so Judge Felding said, "And in order to accommodate the doctor he went ahead with the trial and said the hell with the patient." When the client arrived in court the judge sent him away saying he had "already been tried." He was black. As a result whites make up a much higher percentage of residents in private psychiatric facilities than in state mental hospitals. According to the National Institute of Mental Health 83 percent of the residents at private southern hospitals are white.
Race not only plays a central role in who gets committed against their will and where they're sent it has also shaped how patients are treated and mistreated once they enter the mental health system. According to some recent figures of the National Institute of Mental Health psychiatrists tend to diagnose minorities with more severe mental illness than whites. Black men in both public and private mental hospitals, for example, were diagnosed as having schizophrenia, one of the most severe mental illnesses, allegedly at almost twice the rate of whites. The disparity is even greater for black women. One study published by Professional Psychology revealed that schizophrenia ranked last as a diagnosis for white women admitted to psychiatric care, but it was the leading number one cause for the admission of black women. Laverne Boner, the South Carolina advocate cites the case of a black woman who was interviewed by a white psychiatrist for admission to a state hospital. When asked if she had attended college, the woman replied that she had. The doctor wrote in her records that the patient was exhibiting signs of "grandiose ideation." Boner said the woman later produced proof of her degree, but the doctor was still skeptical. "When she showed them her transcripts they said well maybe." Frank Cheney, a black patient at Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, tells similar stories of discrimination. He says he was called nigger and boy by hospital staff, and was asked repeatedly to speak to a black psychiatrist. When he put the request to his current psychiatrist, he says the doctor was eager to comply. He said, "I'll put some black shoe polish on my face, and we'll sit here and talk. Is that good enough for you boy?" Cheney recalls. Al Corne acknowledges that none of the 52 psychiatrists at the hospital is black even though four out of every ten patients are. "I wouldn't say that not having any black psychiatrists hurts the black clients," she says. Such cases of outright prejudice and cultural insensitivity also extend to poor whites. Bill Stewart, Director of the Kentucky Protection Advocacy System, says he knows of psychiatrists who have used the Appalachian expression, "I don't care," which often means yes or sure as evidence of mental retardation. Many of the legislative fights center on the slight changes in wording that can dramatically alter the criteria of commitment. Most states require that the person being committed be shown to present "a danger to himself or others," and a few even require that the threat be evidenced by some overt act, but family members and patients often disagree about what constitutes a danger. "Family groups and patient groups have different interests," says David Marshall, a former mental patient, who serves as an advocate for the mentally ill in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He says, "A big problem is what 'overt acts' means. What does it mean? It depends on what county you're in." By the way, David Ram conducted this particular investigation as an Editorial Assistant at The Institute of Southern Studies.
I'd like to take you on a journey of showing you our perceptions of who commits crime and how there is racism across the board, but not always easily recognized. The arrest rate for African Americans under the age of 18 for drug abuse violations increased 2,900 percent between 1965 and '89. It was almost 500 higher than the arrest rate for whites. While African Americans make up approximately 12 percent of the population, they account for over 44 percent of the arrests for violent crime. Now here's an example of how psychiatry in reality turns children into criminals. John was a 12-year-old African American diagnosed at school as hyperactive. His mother who had been sexually abused as a child reacted irrationally to John's touching the chest of her daughter, and called the people believing he had sexually abused his younger sister. The police took him straight into community health hospital where he was admitted, and because of answers he gave the psychiatrist was told that he was a child molester and had been molested himself. This is John's story verbatim. "I was a very happy, content typical 12-year-old when they took me to the hospital. Then I was diagnosed as hyperactive and was told I had anger, depression, self-centeredness, and that I had been molested and that I used people. I spent my 13th and 14th birthday in a living hell of head games, and physical and mental abuse. I was forcibly drugged with major tranquilizers as punishment. I was kept in full body restraints for three months and forced to face the wall for three full months 24 hours a day. I received a hip injury after being forced to sit on the floor for two weeks nonstop. In a year and a half I never received one compliment from the doctor. I was treated as a criminal. I don't consider myself a criminal, but he continually told me that I was. I learned two things from the psychiatric hospital: the staff is authority and how to control other people-- two very hideous and not useful things in modern society. I lasted 13 years without committing a crime and when I finally committed one, I thought it wasn't wrong." Within 12 months of being released from this adolescent community mental health center, John who had never previously committed any offense was arrested for bank robbery. The community doctor interviewed 23 prisoners who had been graduates of the psychiatric programs that John had been forced to participate in. Now this is the community doctor:
"One has to wonder what they, the psychiatrists, were doing to kids. The psychiatric treatment was supposedly there to help them. Instead all I see is that it taught these kids that they were nothing but criminals. It destroyed whatever decency and spirit they once had and gave them an utter hatred of the society that had professed to be helping them."
I'll summarize some of the statistics. Violent crime-- meaning murder and negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assaults-- between 1986 and '99, while blacks made up 12 percent of the population, they accounted for 44 percent of the arrests in the United States. For charges of murder blacks were over represented by 800 percent. Blacks were arrested for murder and negligent manslaughter nearly 55 percent of the cases in '91. By the way a big difference in the way they were sentenced also, and I'll get to that in a moment. In one year, blacks made up 59 percent of the arrests for suspicions compared to 40 percent for whites. One thousand and nine out of every 100,000 black adolescents were in police or court custody compared to only 287 out of 100,000 white adolescents. In 1985 the majority of youths detained in juvenile halls and other detention facilities were mostly white: 53 percent versus 33 percent black. In 1991 the majority had shifted to blacks, 44 percent versus 35 percent. In 1990 19.5 percent of black youths were placed into custody for drug offenses compared to only 10 percent of white youths for the same offenses. From 1968 to '81 the per capita arrest rate for black juveniles for drug offenses lagged behind that for white juveniles. Between '82 and '84 the arrest rate for black youths surpassed that for whites. In '85 the arrest rate for blacks for drug offenses increased dramatically and for whites actually decreased. Blacks were convicted of felony drug offenses more often than whites in state courts, and the percentage of black jail inmates charged with drug offenses increased from 34 percent to 48 percent in just five years. Black jail inmates have increased from 37 percent to almost 50 percent today. The source book is Criminal Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice.
Now according to The Los Angeles Times, "The people in this country who have destroyed the children of poor people through neglect, have decided they are not going to do anything to repair the damage," said Judge Reynolds, Philadelphia's presiding Juvenile Court Judge, "The alternative then is just lock them up, and that's what they're doing." Across the country states and counties have largely abandoned rehabilitation efforts for juveniles as the public has called for punishment through time in the lockup. One result is that the faces of those inside the juvenile detention facilities have changed. Eight years ago most were white. Now most are black and, in any case, most of the juveniles in custody are poor and uneducated. Because of the reporting disparities, figures for Latino juveniles are impossible to pin down accurately. But in California according to a study by The National Council on Crime and Delinquency Latino youngsters generally appear to be incarcerated at a rate roughly matching their percentage of the population. Opportunity seems to be the key. Juvenile justice officials say there are two underlying reasons for the change inside juvenile halls. Children with more opportunities such as good grades, good schools, good recreation, support of community organizations, involving churches and stable families, end up in court less often. "Delinquency and lack of opportunity are two things that go together," said Robert Walovich, Head of the Probation For Suburban Chicago Areas. He says, "Opportunities can mean an end to delinquency for a kid because he's less likely to get in to trouble in the first place." When children do get into trouble those who do not have working parents, support of school officials, readily available counseling facilities and support organizations are much more likely to be placed in custody and go to jail. Consequently-- just as black children make up a disproportionate share of the children mired in poverty, of those in dysfunctional families, of high school students who drop out or are expelled, of those living in desolate urban neighborhoods-- so do they bare the brunt of get-tough policies towards juveniles.
Perhaps the best example of the change that has been taking place in the complexion of the juvenile custody population can be seen in the nation's response to youths involved with drugs. Analysis shows that though murder and robbery make for bigger headlines, drug crimes are responsible for vastly higher numbers of juvenile arrests and incarcerations. In just one 15 year period the per capita arrest rate for black juveniles has increased tremendously and the total number of white juveniles brought into court on drug charges is now substantially behind that of blacks, even though blacks only make up 12 percent of the population. The disparity is even greater for violent crimes. In one year, 32,200 more white juveniles than blacks were arrested for crimes such as murder, forcible rape, robbery, assault and aggravated assault. Despite that difference, 300 more blacks than whites were placed into custody, and 2,100 more blacks than whites were transferred out of juvenile court so they could be tried in more punitive adult courts. Again, racism. Listen carefully, so you understand the meaning of this. You had 32,200 more white juveniles than blacks arrested for crimes of rape, murder, robbery, and aggravated assault. Despite that there were 300 more blacks than whites placed into custody and 2,100 more blacks than whites were transferred out of juvenile court into adult court. Across the nation this disparity is played out in almost every category of offense.
In Chicago, for example, studies show that youngsters from the predominantly black south side and west side neighborhoods who were charged with property offenses, such as minor theft, were twice as likely to be brought to trial as youngsters from the predominantly white north side. In California, according to a study by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, black delinquents were 400 percent more likely than whites to be committed to the California Youth Authority, the juvenile equivalent of prison whether it was the first offense or the third. If you were a white teenager who committed some minor offense, the likelihood is no time, and you go home. You get probation. Period. Black youngsters also were twice as likely as whites to be incarcerated for serious property or sex offense, 300 percent more likely for violent offense, 700 percent more likely for serious offense and 1,000 percent more likely to be incarcerated for a serious weapons offense than a white committing the same crime. "The whole thing really addresses resources for kids even before they start coming into the system," Raul Solis, Chief of the Juvenile Field Services for the Los Angeles County Probation Department. He says, "That's why we've been concentrating on going after young kids, at risk kids, the younger brothers of gang members before they get into trouble. That's where it is at in our opinion. These kids are very isolated from access to things that most people take for granted every day. They see this mainstream on television and their existence is very different. Many of them have never even been to a restaurant. They've never ordered from a menu. Some of these kids have never seen the ocean. Many of them have never learned how to swim because they've never had the opportunity."
Let me put it into a slightly different context. Sometimes we become so busy in our own lives that we may not be paying attention to the fact that we live in an integrated world and an integrated society. If we want that integration to be one that we can be appreciative of and interrelate to, then at some point we must surrender our bias and our built-in prejudices. Prejudice is a form of racism. To extend ourselves, as some people do-- but clearly not enough-- to see what might be done to help those people whose youth do not have the advantages that our youth have. See if we cannot help change some of the underlying structures that lead to such anger and disappointment that it can be a breeding ground for some of the negative behaviors that we sometimes see. After all a white kid is frequently encouraged to go for it, "have a dream." But we ask for that dream to be in the context where it helps the larger society, and the society will help you actualize your dream. We try to give those opportunities. Many African Americans, many Latinos, also come from families where they are encouraged to seek their dreams and do so. They graduate into their careers, and they exceed in those careers. They add to the fabric of a larger society.
What we don't pay attention to and certainly don't get close to - we stay carefully and strategically isolated from those areas and those people who do not have the resources to give some advantages to their kids. So if you go into the ghettos and you ask a parent what is the dream of your child? The dream is not to get bitten by a rat today. To make it up the steps of the building without getting shot by some gunfire. Not to get raped. Things that you would never think about. You don't think about getting raped by having your kid play in the backyard, but what if your backyard is a drug den in the inner city. Until you've been there and until you've seen it and until you've spoken with people who are there, it cannot give you the perspective you need to appreciate the dynamics of the problem. To assume that all we require are some social scientists or sociologists or the people there are unappreciative of all the money we've spent on them, and therefore they are lazy. They are worthless. Making those judgments is exactly what continues the stereotyping. It's exactly what is not constructive, and is not needed. We need, at some point, to come out of our own little safe and protected environment and venture into those of other people to understand, and therefore to see what they can benefit from and what we can offer. Then things could change. There are examples of that happening and changing.
I'll show you another area where there is a lot of racism, and that is in the average sentence length imposed on offenders sentenced to incarceration in US District Courts. These are the months of difference. White race: all offenses, 53 months. Black race: all offenses, 77 months. Violent crimes: whites, 84 months, and blacks, 115 months. Drug offenses: whites 73 months and blacks 98 months. Now how do you explain it? Two people having the same identical record, the same absolutely identical background as far as their involvement in the court, the judge gives one almost a 50 percent higher sentence rate of time that has to be spent than a white. We say the judges are impartial. Hardly. Overall the average sentence in just one year was 44 percent longer in all the United States for blacks than for whites. In one year blacks comprised 12 percent of the US population; yet during that year, blacks accounted for 46 percent of all arrests for violent crimes.
There is something that also has to be discussed:. black-on-black violence-- the cycle dynamics of black self-annihilation in service of white domination. Let me cite something from Amos Wilson, African World Info Systems. This comes from a lot, I think, of what it means when you're in the community and you can make an observation that someone outside the community cannot. This is from Frederick Goodwin on the Violence Initiative:
"Surveys reveal the following. While whites are more vulnerable to personal theft, black are more vulnerable than whites to violent crimes. A higher percentage of black households than whites and other minority households are touched by crime. Blacks have the highest victimization rates for rape, robbery, and assault. Blacks are more likely to be victims of violent crime than whites or members of other racial groups."
Now here's a question for you. When was the last time you heard about black women being raped? When was the last time you heard about black families being victimized and robbed? We had a white woman jogger in New York that was raped and brutalized. It was a terrible offense. That made news for weeks. I decided to do a little homework. During that same identical period of time that she was making headlines daily, more than 300 black women and Latino women had been raped and brutalized. Not one single mention in the media of any of them. Who then do we value more? Who's life do we feel is more sacred? I think the media speaks for a lot of people, and yet no one in the media writing the story would present themselves as racist. Goodwin joined as a Clinical Associate in 1965. Between 1981 and '88 Goodwin was the Director of the National Institutes of Mental Health Intramural Research Program. Listen carefully to what I'm going to share with you now. From 1988 to 1992 he was the Director of the now defunct Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration. His infamous February 1992 racist speech drew so much fire from black groups including the NAACP and the Black Congressional Caucus that the funding for the proposed Violence Initiative was never made. In 1992 Goodwin stepped down from Director of the one drug rehab group to become the Director of The National Institute of Mental Health. He remained the Director until his resignation in 1994. Mind you that his term was under two separate administrations. Republicans and Democrats had this man. This is what this man said in a speech given before the National Health Advisory Council on February 11, 1992. Goodwin then head of the US Department of Health and Human Services Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration likened inner city blacks to "hyper sexual monkeys." Let me give you the full context of this speech.
"If you look for example at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is the natural way of life for males to knock each other off and, in fact, there is some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the same hyper aggression monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual. So they copulate more and therefore they reproduce more to offset the fact that half of them are dying. Now one could say that if some of the loss of the social structure in the society, and particularly within the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilized evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities 'jungles.' That we may have gone back to what might be more natural without all the social controls that we have imposed upon ourselves as a civilization over thousands of years in our own evolution."
During the same speech, Goodwin revealed plans for a national violence initiative. The initiative involved principally a biomedical approach that would use "100,000 inner city children, mainly blacks and minorities, to focus mainly on brain neurotransmitter chemicals such as serotonin and their alleged role in violence. Researchers planned on using genetic and biochemical markers to "identify" potentially violent minority children as young as five years old for biological and behavioral "interventions," including drug therapy and possibly psychosurgery-- all supposedly aimed at preventing violence later in adulthood. According to Goodwin, the Violence Initiative was scheduled to be the number one funded priority of the National Institutes of Mental Health. Subsequent to his February 1992 speech, public outcry prevented the initiative from being funded, but it had been up for funding. This comes from the Science Magazine, September 11, 1992, page 1474. "Her concerns haven't stopped Sullivan who insists there are 'no plans whatsoever to scrap the initiative even as he concedes he hasn't done a very good public relations job selling it.'" Well the idea was you got something that you feel that you need to put in to effect make sure you have a good PR campaign around it. So what it came down to was this. They believed, and he specifically believed, that black children were the same as monkeys-- uncontrollable sexual urges and violent. They were worth only to society within their own groups their capacity to copulate and to kill. We had better protect society as a whole by identifying these children young in life, and that there were biomarkers that could determine a person's capacity for sexual violence and any other violence. That's why it was called the Violence Initiative. The Eugenicists were going to be able to identify the gene. Sound familiar? Identifying the gene for cancer? Women cutting off their breasts and happy to do so. Identifying the gene for colon cancer. Cutting out the colon. Being happy. So even though they were healthy. No. Cancer free colons. Cancer free breasts. Everything was as long as we can identify the gene we can give a diagnosis and give a preventative treatment. No one challenged it. Now think of it this way. The Black Caucus and the NAACP were right in challenging the racist comments, but they would have supported it had it not been for his use of the terms. If it had been just we believe we have a capacity to do gene testing to determine high rates of violence and prevent those, they would have passed. That's the unfortunate part. That the only way someone will stop is because they went so far over the top, but what if they hadn't have made those statements. Right now all across America millions upon millions of black youth would be given tranquilizers because of their biochemical potential for causing violence, and that would have been in a file. Those files would have been in registries in every insurance company, in every employment agency, in every high school and college. They would have the knowledge that, gee whiz, we have a kid here who's taking drugs because he is a sex violator and a criminal violator POTENTIALLY. The only way he's not creating the crime is because he's on a drug. Who's going to hire that person? Who's going to want to give him a mortgage? Who's going to want to have a relationship with that person? Yet it was just a five-year-old kid. Did they want to do this in the suburbs? No. Did they want to take 100,000 children five years old from executives within the United States and do it? That wouldn't be tolerated. Isn't it interesting what we will not tolerate among ourselves and we're only too happy to see it happen in other groups? So that's just to give you an idea of what's going on.
And also we have the medical evaluation field. Now this is another way they play this game. They look at the medical causes to psychiatric symptoms. Nearly two out of every five patients, that's 39 percent, had an active important physical disease. The mental health system had failed to detect these diseases in nearly half of the affected patients. Of all the patients examined, one in six, that's ONE IN SIX had a physical disease that was related to their mental disorder. It was either causing or exacerbating this disorder. The mental health system had failed to detect one in six physical diseases that were causing the patient's mental disorder. The mental health system had failed to detect more than half of the physical diseases that were exacerbating the patient's mental disorder. These are just some of the cases from different areas. What they were doing is, if you went in to a mental hospital with a mental disease and if you were black, whatever physical conditions you had were considered immaterial. They just weren't treated or minimally so because anything you would have said-- if you said, "My back hurts"-- they would have said well that's just part of your delusional psychosis. If you said, "I'm in terrible pain," they would have said "delusional psychosis." If you would have said, "I've got arthritis"-- delusional psychosis. But later, when people did examine them, they found they had real physical problems that had not been treated. There is an article that was written called Psychological Symptoms of Physical Origin by Richard Hall and Michael Pompkin.
"One of the most difficult problems encountered by the practicing physician is that of distinguishing emotional from organic symptoms. Organically based symptoms that mimics psychiatric disorders are numerous and many diseases produce them. In women, endocrine and metabolic disorders are the most frequent causes of psychiatric symptoms. Early identification and appropriate treatment can avert many emotional, physical, and even legal problems for our patients. Any condition that disrupts the brain or alters its subtle balance of stimulation and inhibition can produce psychiatric symptoms. Often these symptoms are the first and only signs of an underlying physical disorder."
What this means in lay language is this... We can have a person going to a doctor and suggesting they have a physical symptom and that it's causing such physical problems that it's manifesting in some alteration of their emotions. If the doctor doesn't recognize that, then they'll classify the person as mentally disturbed, but without trying to fix the physical condition that may have caused the emotions. I know people who have been diagnosed, put into mental institutions, given electro convulsive therapy for depression. When I worked with them, I found out they merely had an under-active thyroid. Corrected the thyroid; the person is normal. They never had depression. Hence they were maltreated, mistreated, misdiagnosed. Because they were black and they were poor, they had virtually no recourse within the current system. No lawyer wanted to take on their case and no one wanted to hear their problem.
I'm Gary Null. That's brings us up to the conclusion Part Two of Pathologizing the African American by the Psychiatric Community.
Part 3:
Hi. I'm Gary Null, and I'd like to offer you a special presentation on Pathologizing of African Americans by Psychiatry Part Three. This information is drawn from an enormous amount of research of dozens of individuals, scholars, historians, psychologists and psychiatrists working for a period of years-- to collect this information. This could not have been possible without The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International and The Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Florida's participation. I'm deeply indebted to them for their scholarship.
It's hard to imagine that when we examine carefully why we have certain views, we would be able to ascribe them to one of the founders of the United States. He was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush. In fact, he was the first psychiatrist in the United States. His head today adorns the seal of the American Psychiatric Association. It's also hard to imagine that things that you just take for granted today like diagnosis of ADHD and ADD and schizophrenia are real because they have been scientifically discovered and applied to medical procedures and insured by companies and the federal government. There seems to be no doubt about this.
There also seems to be no doubt that in some parts of the country -- and depending upon how insidious the belief system is that you're growing up with -- that if you had a choice between having a black or Latino surgeon operate on you or your child or a white one most people would chose, including unfortunately many minorities, a white. Why? Why is it that we have this prevailing idea that a person's color has automatically inferred a degree of separation between intellect and instinct? Let's understand how this evolved and how it was implemented in the programs that we now simply embrace.
How many of the Democrats in this audience for example supported the Hillary Clinton health care plan, and a part of that plan was to support community mental health centers? And of course the pharmaceutical industry it later turned out was fully in control of the implementation of that entire program. It would have destroyed all alternative health care. It would have brought alternative practitioners to the brink of complete revocation of their license, and forfeiture of their worldly possessions including their homes and imprisonment if they even offered any of the therapies that were considered unproven or unscientific. Of course, anything unscientific was anything alternative. Catch 22. Chelation therapy. Unproven. Homeopathy. Unproven. Massage. Unproven. Meditation. Unproven. In fact, anything including prayer that someone would have advocated for you to help you on any level, would have been considered unproven and hence quackery, hence a fraud, and hence a felony. Yet well-intentioned people embraced it as if anything involving the community and helping disadvantaged people must be good. Not necessarily.
It was at a time when people thought in their own poetic way that anything was possible, and we heard some great writings. When I look back on some of the people who were writing at different times in history and you think that's a very nice saying, but was it realistic. For example, Virgil said we are all capable of everything. Well would Virgil have said that about the slaves? There were slaves in Virgil's time. But we say that about everyone today. If you're a school teacher and you're teaching a class that's been labeled as dysfunction, though that's not the politically correct term so they'll use another term -- "special education." These are "special" children -- so "special" that we keep them medicated, and give them diagnoses like schizophrenia. No one questions the diagnosis. No one questions the drugs. No one questions if there may be a physical cause to this person or even just a behavioral cause that has nothing to do with a brain and biochemical cause. Are they capable of everything? No. Is the average person capable of everything? No. In fact, most people are capable in their realistic sense of a relatively limited range of expression, and all we have to do is just spend a day in the average person's life. You'll see how little of the world that they embrace, but capability is based also upon opportunity. What if you're in the minority and you don't have the opportunities? You want a job. You can't get it. You want to go to a particular place, and you're told, "not now." When? What decade? What century? I'm trying to give an understanding with this series that I'll be leaving today that we better pay careful attention to everything that has happened over the centuries. I'm going to go back and forth from historical to current.
William James said, "a great number of people think that they are thinking when they're really merely rearranging their prejudices." When I speak with people who have advanced degrees or in positions of responsibility that are policy makers and opinion leaders and I ask them about issues involving prejudice, first they deny they're prejudiced. After all, their assumption is educated people shouldn't be prejudiced. Their education has provided them with an understanding to transcend prejudice, and then you see how rampant it is. All they've done is rearrange their prejudices. So it's not as deliberate in their consciousness. There's a proverb that to do nothing is to do something. Meaning even by what you don't do you can be measured. Polius Cyrus said, "It is a kindness to refuse gently what you intend to deny." All the time I see with a political cunning how people will try to say it is certainly the responsibility of some agency or some group to take care of these problems. It's not my responsibility. Then whose responsibility is it? Let's examine the issues.
I'd like to share some thoughts by Dr. Alexander Thomas and Dr. Samuel Sillen in Racism In Psychiatry, especially myths from the past. In its long and ugly history in the United States, white racism has impoverished thousands of individuals, millions of individuals, and taken many different variations on two basic themes. The first is that black people are born with inferior brains, and a limited capacity for mental growth. That's at the heart of it. The second is that their personality tends to be abnormal whether by nature or by nurture. These concepts of inferiority and pathology are interrelated and reinforce each other. Both have served to sanctify a hierarchal social order in which "the Negroes place" is forever ordained by his genes and the accumulated disabilities of his past. Now this view has a traditional corollary. It is that the black man functions best psychologically when he stays or is forcibly kept within the limits of his handicap. Unburdened by responsibility, he is cheerful and happy. Thrust into the competitive arena, he breaks down. Social tasks and privileges that are normal for white men are stressful for the black man. Therefore, the racists argue the best interest of both the black and the white of the larger society dictate that his psychic impairment be recognized, and therefore dealt with. Hence the idea that well-intentioned people will do things that they themselves would never want anyone to do to them, but they have taken on this idea that there is a genetic limitation. That it can be popularized in racist humor and in our own highly protective isms where we stay together with people who share our common ideals and beliefs and sociology.
We look out at someone else and say, wouldn't it really be better for them if they didn't live in this neighborhood. I mean they can't afford the upper Westside so let's gentrify. I mean give them some money, and let them go live in the South Bronx where they'll be more comfortable because they'll be with people like themselves. Or let them go - and it's always they're not like us. They're different. So isn't it really in their best interest?
But even in the days of slavery, white supremacists found it expedient to unfurl the pretension banner of science. They measured a few crania and proclaimed that black people are endowed by nature with less gray matter. They cited figures in the 1940 census later to be found completely fabricated to prove that blacks living under unnatural conditions -- and what was an unnatural condition? freedom in the North -- were more prone to insanity. Now this concept of slavery was echoed by a leading psychologist. In fact he was considered the most respected psychologist of the entire generation later: Dr. G. Stanley Hall. He declared that medical treatment for the races was as different "as the application of veterinary medicine for horses is from that applied to the oxen." Dr. Beam enunciated a pervasive syllogism. The Negroes brain was smaller and he claimed had few nerve cells and fibers. The brains "efficiency depends upon the number and position of such fibers. Hence the possibilities of developing the Negro are limited." The white man was endowed with determination, will power, and self-control "with a high developmental and ethical and aesthetic facility and great reasoning powers. The black man loves melody and ostentation, lacks judgment and is incapable of devising hypothesis. We are forced to conclude that it is useless to elevate the Negro by education or otherwise, except in the direction of his natural endowments." Mind you, I'm quoting the actual verbatim writings of the most respected psychologist and physicians of their era. We never like to believe that in our time we could have people who had been given positions of responsibility to decipher the intellectual awareness of life to us who could also be so susceptible to such bias. But in every generation it's happened over and over again, as it's happening in our own.
Among the most famous European psychiatrists, there was one who was one of the most notorious rampant racists, but he was not a racist in the sense of wanting to lynch a person full out, he was an intellectual racist. They're clever and smarter. They can get around issues where they never look like what they're doing is racism, but they set the stage. How many people who think they are smart in this audience because you have studied Carl Gustav Jung? Realize he was one of the most rampant racists in the history of that foolish folly field filled with fraud and intellectual duplicity called psychology. I'm going to quote from him. Jung came to the United States to examine some black patients in a mental hospital. "If you study races as I have done, you can make very interesting discoveries." Of course, these discoveries echoed the stereotype of the American contemporary. Like them he believed that "the difference strata of the mind correspond to the history of the races, and that of the Negro has probably a whole historical layer less than the white man." Jung also said, "the energetic sexual repressions of Americans as a defensive maneuver against blacks quote the causes for the repression" -- and by the way he said this at the Second Psychoanalytic Congress in 1910 -- "can be found in the specific American complex. Namely to the living together of lower races, especially with Negroes, living together with barbaric races, such as Negroes, exerts a suggestive affect on the laboriously tamed instinct of the white race and tends to pull it down. Hence the need for strongly developed defensive measures which precisely show themselves in those specific features of American culture." Isn't it interesting how when we want to defend the actions and merits of a person we will overlook all the indiscretions no matter how vile they may be? But this was not an average person on the street making these utterances. This would be a man who had in his hands the clean- slated minds of so many thousands of people who wanted to believe in this new field of psychoanalysis. He was the father of it. Freud was a confused cokehead. Freud's writings were so utterly incoherent at times and so contradictory that they are farcical and superficial, but Jung was a little different. He was taken more seriously because he was supposed to have been at the second stage of the evolution of this movement. He was considered the greater intellect, the greater disciplinarian. He was the one who had provoked through his own mystique and his own charisma a charm, and look what came with it. Let us repeat this so we're clear. This is not hearsay. This is the actual wording at the time. Barbaric racists blacks must laboriously tame their instinct. You need to develop strong defensive measures, and it was because Americans had repressed their sexuality not to be like blacks that we were so uptight, but just look at the blacks who were nothing more than sex machines and utterly barbaric. Now imagine the kind of thought process that would put into psychoanalyst's minds, psychologist's minds, psychiatrist's minds who would go on to develop reputations for themselves in trying to analyze people's behaviors that always bring you back to the same cause.
Let me give you another example. Back in the 1970's there were only about seven holistic doctors in New York City. I knew all of them, and virtually every patient that went to one of these doctors no matter what they went for was told they had a B complex deficiency and would begin an intravenous B vitamins. They would be charged for these about $500. When I did an analysis of the actual amount of B vitamins they were given, they were given relatively small amounts by today's standards like 25 milligrams. But they were charged as if it were gold. So these vitamins in effect cost more than gold. So what you had is you had people just exploiting people, and when I spoke with one of these doctors I said don't you realize you're teaching all the other new doctors coming into the field that hey. This is very lucrative. This is very important. This is the reality. So you set the standard. You're the foundation upon which their careers will go. They work with you. Learn from you. Study from you, but it's flawed. It's not right. But he had already invested so much of his life and career. He would later lose his license, but not before he took advantage of thousands and thousands of people. Well how many people would later go out and believe that blacks were different? Now if you had gone to all of Jung's sessions and you had followed his teachings, you're going to think that blacks are barbaric. What if you're incompetent? What if you thought that all blacks were actually specially endowed sexually, and were sex maniacs? You looked at yourself. Would there be a defensive complex? Would there be anger? Would there be jealousy? Would there be envy? How would you project that? Would you want a black man to have the same opportunity you did to compete with you when you know that in the sexual area, which is primordial, which is limbic, which is so utterly distanced from intellect that you would lose? Our biases function on so many deep levels. That's what I call an intellectual racism. That's my own term. It's just a concept that we've only considered racism that, which is overt or obvious. I'm suggesting that's only a small fraction of racism because of laws today that limit a person from what they can physically or verbally do. The larger vast majority of racism is what we will not do, which is recognize this disparity and how it manifests and what we'll not change, and hence the consequences. We may now shake our heads in amazement that such crude racist formulations were believed implicitly by readers of the most prestigious psychiatric journals. So many of these journals were filled. I read all of them. They were filled with racist comments, but rather then feel superior to the united psychiatrists of past generations we should be reminded how easy it is to distort science in the service of racism.
The instinct postulates offer a seductively simple explanation for the most complex human phenomena. Wars are said to stem from man's instinct of aggression, private fortunes from instinctive acquisition, and political dictatorships from instinct of domination. As evidenced that such inborn drives exist, the instinctivists point to the reoccurrence of wars, greed, and power grabs. Understandably this circular argument has had a special attraction for defenders of such things as they are. For if our behaviors are predetermined by powerful instinct it would appear futile to strive for basic social change. As a result we don't know what to do about these instincts, and we turn them over to people who are supposed to guide us through this maze of feelings. These are the psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists. You have to remember that many people who were convicted for war crimes or suspected of war crimes were tried and punished accordingly. But if they were doing what we would now look at as barbaric war crimes, in the name of science the vast majority not only escaped any punishment, but also actually was rewarded. In 1943 there was research being done at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC. St. Elizabeth is the mental hospital where presidential assailants or other federal cases are frequently kept. The superintendent who was a Scottish Right's (?) Chief Psychiatrist, Wilfred Overhauser (sp?) was in 1943 the Chairman of the misnamed Truce Drug Committee for the Offices (unintelligible) Services. The criminal underworld was systemically being brought into that office that secretly joined activities with the government under the pretext of fighting fascism. In comes a psychiatrist. In comes one of the leading ones, and these people like Overhauser and his crew administered the hallucinogen mescaline to various test subjects. Then in the spring of 1943 they perfected the right mix of marijuana and tobacco to produce what they called "a state of irresponsibility in the subject. The official OSS story, and the OSS was the predecessor of the CIA, is that New York Mafia hit man, August Del Gracio (sp?), was put into a situation where he was given a lot of this. They wanted him to loosen up, and tell what he knew. Federal agents were thus supposedly to learn the inside secrets of drug trafficking, but not to stop it. This is part of an ongoing federal program, which organized crime czar Meyer Lansky boasts in his authorized biography that he personally arranged. Mafia thugs were brought in to work in naval intelligence offices and jointly with US agents in the ports and shipping in New York and San Francisco and Florida to more effectively intimidate our national enemies supposedly. Well former CIA staff man, John Marks, writes in the Search For the Manchurian Candidate, that Overhauser's working group included counter intelligence agents inside the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb project, and the FBI, which was also under the direction of Overhauser's Scottish Right's comrade, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The Overhauser's group gave drugs to US soldiers at army bases throughout the country supposedly to aid in the search for subversives. That was the cover. Later during the 1950's and '60s this strategist of the MK Ultra Project would utilize the same channels of influence with US security to let them transform a generation into unwilling test subjects for their drugs. I give you this as background, and I'll show you how a little later it ties into racism because we don't even like to hear that the government has done thousands and thousands of tests on unwitting, unsuspecting civilians and military personnel and prisoners and patients in the hospitals without their knowledge or consent.
What does it tell you about the value of the average person's life? Would they have enlisted their own children or their own parents in the same studies? No. Well then whom did they enlist? Predominantly wherever possible blacks. How did they legitimize this? I mean you just don't walk into an office one day and say I've got an idea. Let's come up with some type of mind-altering drug that can cause someone to do whatever you want them to do whenever we want them to do it. Who are the least important people in our society? Well they're the blacks. Okay. Let's just take a bunch of blacks and give them some drugs, and see what happens. Well someone has to be responsible. So before you can create a program like that you have to create a working group, and the working group has to have respectability. How do they get that respectability? Well they created an international congress on mental health. Who was to head it? Psychiatrists. They made sure that one psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Ewing Cameron, an infamous character, who was capable. I tell you what he was capable of, but he was the leading psychiatrist. By the way, he was not a renegade. He was a straight-laced and orthodox as you get. He had honors everywhere from all different societies. In fact he was the psychiatrist who was working in Canada, and he went over to Britain to British Crown's Tavistock Psychological Warfare Unit to evaluate the sanity of the Nazi official, Rudolph Hess, who had defected there. Cameron's unique insight into the Nazi mentality had made him a valuable part of the secret wartime psychiatric community in Washington. Cameron's ideal was and he actually commented on this to Alan Dolis (sp?) who was his OSS colleague, and later became CIA Director. Each surviving German over the age of 12 should be given electroshock therapy to burn out the remaining messages of Nazism. Now he was so proud of that. He actually immortalized that. So could you image taking the entire generation of children and saying we never want you to think another Nazi thought. We're going to make sure you don't do it, and we are the scientists. I'm a psychiatrist. We're going to give you electro convulsive therapy. It didn't happen because quite simply they didn't have the resources to make it happen. That part of the Nuremberg code dealing with scientific research was drafted by Boston psychiatrist Leo Alexander. He soon afterward joined with Auschwitz's experimental mastermind Otto Bershire (sp?) in Franz Calmun's (sp?) American Society of Human Genetics. Montague Norman picked as President of the World Federation, the Chief of the British Military Psychological Warfare Department, Tavistock Institute Chief Brigadier General John Wallings Reese. Now the Congress, which in effect founded the modern mental health movement - I mean the entire mental health profession today - all of it. Its entire foundation was based upon people from the intelligence communities, ex-Nazis, people who would research on anyone without a second thought. You had Professor Cyril Bert, Tavistock's psychiatrists, Eugenicists activists. Eugenicist is and was applied as a form of genocide, a leader of the psychological research or physical research movement. Dr. Hugh Crichton Miller founder of the Tavistock Clinic, Vice President of Jung's Institute in Zurich. He was the President of the National Association of Mental Health. Dame Evelyn Fox, a long time leader of the British Eugenics Movement, Sir David Henderson, psychiatrist in London, Munich and New York, the author of Psychiatry and Race Betterment. Lord Thomas Geev Hoarder, President of the Eugenicists Society of Great Britain, President of The Family Planning Association, President of The Anglo Soviet Public Relations Association and former physician to the King (unintelligible) the Eighth. Carl Jung. Yes. He was an occultist, psychiatrist to Montague Norman, Paul Mellon, and the Dolis family, and representative of a German psychiatry under the Nazis, Journal of Psychotherapy, which many people are not aware of that he had written during that era in the Journal of Psychotherapy. Dr. Wilfred Overhauser representative of the Scottish Right Masons, Chairman of the American Delegation of International Congress on Mental Health. So now you had the free masons in there. Haven't done any stories on them yet. Alan Kurstout (sp?), University of Sydney, Australia and President of New South Wales Home Society, and Dr. Frank Tellgold (sp?) - remember the Britain's Minister of Health on sterilization and a leading expert on mental defectives. He was a big advocate of sterilization. The Congress was run by the host British National Association whose patron was the Duchess of Kent, Widow of the Grand Master of the Masons from 1939 to '42 and mother of the Grand Master of Masons '67 to the present time, whose vice presidents were eugenicists and Masonic officials. All these people had something in common. They believed in eugenics, sterilization, and who was sterilized. Was the royal family sterilized? That certainly would have been a benefit to society. No. Blacks.
(Side Two)
So the very basis of the entire mental health movement in the United States, in Europe, and around the world I just gave you who they were and their backgrounds briefly and much of their position. I think it's very important even that Margaret Meade. Yes. Great anthropologist, but she was also present at World Federation of Mental Health in 1956 and '57 during the MK Ultra Crimes that were occurring. She was a big advocate of many of the same policies. It's amazing what happens when we can use our position on one hand of doing good, and on the other hand turning a blind eye to the activities of people that we may be associated or affiliated with can justify intellectually to those willing to accept that as an intellectual argument when in the end anyone could see it's clearly racist. The selection of individuals you do not consider to be of value of enough to society to honor and protect. Instead you try to eliminate their numbers by (unintelligible) A) segregated, B) keeping them with out rights, and C) keeping them sterilized so they can't procreate. Racism in the intelligentsia. Racism in the psychiatric movement. Racism as the foundation of the entire mental health movement in the United States. Those are facts. Not opinions. I have all their literature of thousands and thousands of articles and pages I've highlighted and underlined for my report. The foundation upon which so much of our bias is based even though individuals do not need to be biased, and even though individual psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and physicians could certain disagree with some of these underlying tenets and have Thomas Oz and Dr. Peter Bragan another. Many have challenged it. The rank and file has not. There still is a very strong body out there that is supporting the community mental health programs. Supporting the legitimacy of the diagnosis of ADHD and ADD, and also supporting the idea that there is nothing unusual about having 1,000 percent more blacks for the same identical offense sent to jail for longer terms or more likely to go to jail or even more likely to go to trial. Clearly, these are biases. So those individuals are still holding the power structure. I just want to take a little detour just for a moment into the area of what psychiatry and the so-called mental health had as some of its initial offerings.
One of them was in the 1950's just at really the evolution of the national mental health movement when it began to get some prominence and acceptability. I've given you the background on who the founders of this movement were and some of their positions. There was an operation called MK Ultra. It was very secret. In fact it would be years before any of us knew this existed. It was denied at every level of government including by the agencies and oversight committees that did know this existed. It's one thing for an agency to deny it. You can understand it if it was engaged in illegal activity. It's something else for the legislatures and their committee members who are there to oversee that these agencies do not exceed their mandates, and clearly they did and they were covered for. That has been historical. Rare is the person like Senator Frank Church who stood up to them, and paid a price, but who had hearings that exposed this. It was one of the rare times in the intelligence agencies history where there were open hearings. It was not behind closed doors. A lot of this came out would that cause them embarrassment. Think of when was the last time there were hearings on clandestine or illegal activities by any of the intelligence agencies.
The outrageous perpetrations of Dr. Ewing Cameron, the psychiatrist, became the most notorious aspect of the postwar Anglo American mind control program. Cameron had trained at the Royal Mental Hospital in Glasgow under the eugenicist Sir David Henderson, and founded the Canadian branch of this organization with his friend John Ree and the World's Federation of Mental Health. In the various member countries and subdivisions these channels of British intelligence operations are known as the National Provincial and State Mental Health Associations. Cameron was also elected President of the Canadian American and World Psychiatric Associations. He became famous after the CIA was sued by some survivors of his work because the CIA had financed his tortures. Cameron would drug his victims to sleep for weeks on end. Waking them daily only to administer violent electroshocks to their brain. Now mind you that was before many of them were even given anesthetics. Now if you watch a person who's given electro convulsive therapy, another barbaric procedure completely unscientific that is used as if it's as common as aspirin being given for a fever. There's rarely a challenge to its safety and efficacy, but at that time people would thrash around. They had to be restrained, but even in being restrained the body can heave up. When it heaves up because suddenly it's being invaded by this grand mal seizure, this enormous amount of electricity going through the brain, it's only doing one thing. It is destroying brain cells. It is destroying neurons. It is burning them out. They thought they could control what part of the brain would be damaged. No the intentional damaging destruction of brain tissue and also the central nervous system was also adversely affected. Many people undergoing electrical convulsive therapy never regained full physical mobility. It permanently wipes out parts of the memory. Now when I say permanent I have interviewed people, including African Americans, who have undergone electro convulsive therapy and not elected to do so. It was forced upon them. They could not remember anything whatsoever about their backgrounds, and even basic things like how to brush their teeth or how to comb their hair. They had to be taught all over again. Now what if you are a single parent and your child knows more than you do? Now your eight-year-old child has to teach you, but now the child can't. So they take away your child because you're considered too unfit to take care of the child. No one ever sees these stories. They exist. One of the big proponents of electro convulsive therapy was Cameron. He didn't care whether or not there were violent reactions or whether or not people could break their necks. Break their backs. Break their wrists or bones. This was immaterial to him. Cameron tested the South American poison called curare, which kills a victim while simulating natural heart failure. Cameron claims to have used it only in non-lethal doses to further immobilize his subjects while they were kept in sensory deprivation tortures for as long as 65 days straight. Then they would be given lysergic acid diethylamide, which is LSD, for in his words "programmable hallucinations." Now this is important. Repeatedly in his writings and memos he states about the ability to control a person's thoughts and alter their mind, and give them hallucinations so they could not tell reality from non-reality until the point where you could convince them to do something they would not normally do. Remember this is at the height of the Cold War also. There was one weapon that we knew that would be important and undetectable: a person who would do whatever they were told to do with no fear for their own life. If you have someone willing to take a life and not be concerned if their life is taken in the process, that's an extraordinarily lethal agent. That's an assassin, a suicide bomber or whatever. They don't care if they get killed. Amazing how many African Americans they found to do this to, but this were not volunteers. For the CIA he was a major asset.
When the subject was sufficiently devastated, Cameron and his assistant, a veteran of the British Royals Signal Corps would begin "psychic driving." That's what they called it in their own writings. Psychic driving. Through a loud speaker hidden under the pillow or through irremovable earphones they would play a tape recorder over and over and over again to burn certain phrases into what was left of the victim's memory. By the way this is after electro convulsive therapy. See they knew that electro convulsive therapy, shock therapy, which 300,000 Americans will get this year without anyone ever questioning. The New York Times praised. The New York Magazine praised. Everybody praises. Well they knew that this would destroy permanently brain cells and memory, and so they did this. Then what would happen was that they would then take this memory that had been vacated with all rights and wrongs because once you get to the point is it right to kill someone. Is it wrong to do this to someone? When they no longer know that it's right or wrong because that part of their conscious conditioning has been gone then you put in what you want - hence psychic driving. They did this to a lot of people. By the way it was never undone. You had all these people who were conditioned to follow out orders, but no one ever decommissioned them. The CIA was found to have financed these horrors as well as ghastly experiments in other locations using a front called The Society For the Study of Human Ecology. It sounds like a good organization, The Society For the Study of Human Ecology. The society gave a grant for a study of the effects of circumcision on young Turkish boys. The grantees were to be in Istanbul. Studying five to seven-year-olds and the problems with their genitals. It was claimed that this was intended to give a cover to the CIA front as a real academic organization. Now Carol Greene has demonstrated in her book Test Tube Murder, the case of Charles Manson. Before he committed mass murder, he himself was a research subject. He had been through this process. Manson was released from a California prison in March 1967. He was required by law to report regularly to a parole officer who was based at the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic in San Francisco. This was a National Institute of Mental Health project designed to observe and in effect supervise the first large scale drug addiction of white teenagers, thousands of whom were the clinic's clients. The clinic director was also the publisher of The Journal of Psychedelic Drugs and a leading national advocate for the legalization of narcotics. Within the clinic arrangement, Charles Manson's parole officer was officially commissioned to scientifically investigate the effects that various kinds of drugs had on addicts served at the National Institute of Mental Health clinic. Charles Manson took up with a cult group, and one that I investigated in depth because of the effects just as an aside to my own investigation.
For almost two years I was doing a quiet undercover investigation of a group that was spin-off from Scientology that was located throughout the United States. On the outside seemingly okay, but then I got to meet some people who were inside the church on a deeper level. They had some celebrities. It was of interest because one of the immediate blood relatives of a famous singer came to me talking about the problems that this person's relative was going through. Never had any money. When I did a series of interviews with this person found out that they felt fine. You know outside of just enjoying their work and doing their entertaining. Making their music, but they had made out a series of checks, and on a regular basis made out a check. The check was to a church and tax deductible, but they couldn't really tell me anything about the church. They couldn't tell me why they gave that amount of money. Didn't even remember giving that amount of money, but on a regular basis. Then it got to where the person really had no more money. They were broke. They had given virtually all this money over a period of time to this church. But they did not know a thing about the church. This person had gone through that particular process, and it was clear that that person was being affected by posthypnotic suggestion, post mind control suggestion. Then the idea was hey. If you get some famous people who are entertainers who you're able to affect their behavior, you get them to send you money. They don't realize that they're sending you the money. Or they're doing it through some front organization that seems like a legitimate organization. So if their books were ever audited or if anyone ever looked they said well. Nothing is out of the ordinary. Well something is out of the ordinary because a person was in effect putting himself into bankruptcy when he didn't have to. Anyhow after about six months this person was able to regain some of their memory, and to their trauma they had really been used.
Anyhow, Charlie Manson was a part of that. He was a part of that at that time in the summer of 1967. Its British founders had put the US headquarters of the cult in the Haight Ashbury section two blocks from where Manson was living. They recruited from among the so-called flower children for the jobs of drug running. In fact, David Berkowitz convicted in New York Son of Sam serial murders was an initiate of that same cult. Manson is most widely known for his communal family, which carried out the Satanic Tate-Bianca murders, but you ought to note that Lynette Squeaky Fromme who became the head of the family after Manson was arrested in October 1969 was herself in prison for the 1975 attempted assassination of US President Gerald Ford. Another associate of the Manson family who also went through that same process, Sarah Jane Moore, was also in prison for a failed assassination attempt on President Ford. Yet no one in the mainstream media ever picks up on any of this. As if this is just some you know hair brained schemes from people who are kind of lunatics at the fringe. They ought to be in a psychiatric institution, and they never looked at the fact that they were in a psychiatric institution. They did undergo mind control with drugs sponsored by psychiatrists prior to their involvement with Charlie Manson.
Let me jump ahead here. Time permitting I want to complete as much as we can. When we look at psychiatry's experiments on African Americans the record is extreme. It's extreme. It shouldn't be at all, but it's extreme by any measure of decency and ethics. African Americans have been the objects of psychiatric experiments over the past 45 years. Let me just share a few of the examples. In 1974 a UCLA psychiatrist categorized African Americans as a violent race, and attempted to appropriate more than one million dollars from the government to establish a violent center at an army missile base in California. Some of the studies that this psychiatrist proposed included the forced administration of a chemical castration drug to all of the men. The detection of violent people through chromosomal studies that he claimed he could do, and the use of remote bioelectrical changes in the brain of human subjects. He wanted to implant electrodes so that any time an African American had any impulse towards anger or violence it would release a drug into the brain that would sedate them. This person is a highly regarded psychiatrist at UCLA. Radiation experiments were carried out on pregnant African American women. They were given lifetime doses of radiation at a single time. An experiment used psychiatric drugs for treatment of delirium tremens was carried out on 33 African Americans and one white individual. Two patients died, and there were four other serious complications, including one African American male patient who attempted to jump from the third floor of the hospital where he had been given anal injections of a paraldehyde, extremely caustic and toxic. It would be like pouring high-powered bleach up your rectum. Two of the patients who had been given these injections stopped breathing, but were later revived. African Americans were used for psychosurgery brain operations in New Orleans in 1950. An Australian psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Bailey, performed the operations with CIA funded psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University. Bailey boasted to nurses that they used African Americans for the experiments because "it was cheaper to use niggers than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals." In the 1960's physically healthy African Americans were subjected to an experimental army drug called BZ, which is 100 times more powerful than LSD. That's just a tiny sampling of what was done to the African Americans. It was all without their consent, all without their knowledge of the effects, and all by psychiatrists. All these were some of the founders of the psychiatric mental health movement in the United States.
There was a Dr. Fred Abraham, a neurophysiologist, and he accused his colleagues, Wes and Erwin (?) of being more concerned with mind-altering surgery than the dangers the experiments of psychosurgery could have on these individuals and also the racial overtones. He said a disproportionate number of racial minorities would be involved because there are more minorities in prison. I have from The Los Angeles Times, Sunday, March 31, 1974. UCLA scientist warns of psychosurgery peril. "With such biological treatments deterioration of intellectual and emotional capabilities are often so great that individuals are no longer capable of realizing their own deterioration of caring," Dr. Fred Abraham. Now as far as some of the drugs, they are mentioning two of the drugs here. For treatment of severe delirium tremens, and it says this. These are from the Osler Medical House Staff, Baltimore, Maryland, and Alan Johnson, MD, Wilson Madri (sp?), MD. This was "all of the study patients required physical restraints to prevent injury to themselves and their attendants." Results. "Serious untoward reactions during treatment of delirium tremens alone treated with the paraldehyde occurred in nine patients. Two patients died. Two patients had sudden apnea. Stopped breathing. Both patients were promptly resuscitated and survived. One patient seriously wounded his intern by biting after induction of the paraldehyde. One patient broke from restraints and was caught as he jumped from a third floor window." Discussion. Now mind you these are their own writings. This is what they're talking about. "The use of paraldehyde was associated with reactions of under dose and overdose. In five patients prolonged and extreme agitation led to serious complications of therapy. Four patients given paraldehyde experienced apnea." It goes on to talk about "finally a rather bizarre threat exists in that it is theoretically possible to develop so-called ethnic chemical weapons." Listen again. Finally a rather bizarre threat exists in that it is theoretically possible to develop so-called "ethnic chemical weapons," which would be designed to exploit naturally occurring differences and vulnerability among specific population groups. Thus such a weapon would be capable of incapacitating or killing a selected enemy population to a significantly greater extent than the population of friendly forces.
Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton wrote of the Mind Manipulators: Electrodes in the Brains. Dr. Robert Heath at Tulane University told The New York Times that a CIA doctor had approached him in November of 1962 to talk about his work with the CIA. Heath had done pioneering work with a technique of implanting electrodes deep within the brain. According to Heath, the CIA physician said that the CIA would provide funds for the study of "the pain center of the brain." He told The Times that he found the idea "abhorrent." He said, "I took the stand that if I were going to be a spy, I'd be a spy. I wanted to be a doctor and practice medicine." When The Times contacted the other doctor for the CIA, they heard a slightly different story. The doctor stated that he did not offer Heath any money, and that he was not interested in changing the direction of Heath's research. CIA documents demonstrate however that Heath did do research for the CIA, but not on depth electrode implantation. Two memos (unintelligible) chemical agent, an alkaloid of Dutchman's breeches (?) in large doses the drug produces "catatonia and stupor." According to the memos, the Soviet Union had already tested this, and the CIA was anxious to test its own "psycho chemical" properties on humans. Particularly the CIA sought information as to whether the drug causes loss of speech, loss of sensitivity to pain, and loss of memory. Loss of willpower, and an increase in toxicity in persons with a "weak type of central nervous system." Heath agreed to test the drug on animals, and then on African American prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Heath told The Times that he was asked by the CIA to test a purported "brainwashing" drug. When he found out that it was this particular drug, he told the CIA agent "this is no so secret drug. You could find this in the literature. You can't wash any brain with this drug." Heath denied testing the drug on humans. What is significant of course is that Heath appears to have been willing to test "brainwashing" drug on prisoners, but only declined to do so when he discovered it would not work. Contrary to his statements about choosing not to be a spy, Heath was indeed willing to lend his experimental skills to the improvement of covert operations. In one year, he did research for the army involving the use of LSD on some of the patients on whom he had implanted depth electrodes.
There are many more subprojects of MK Ultra. One involved the attempt to activate "the human organism by remote control, and the possible synergistic action of drugs, which may be appropriate for use in abolishing consciousness." Little however is known about any of the MK Ultra subprojects at this time, but from their scope and purpose there emerges a clear picture of the intention of the CIA regarding its mind manipulation goals. No avenue of experimentation was ignored. No population was ruled out as being unfit to act as experimental guinea pigs. Primarily men, women, children, prisoners, mental patients, the elderly, and even the terminally ill were used by the CIA. The CIA has failed to accomplish that goal. Not for lack of trying. In particular, the CIA sought information as to whether the drug causes loss of speech and loss of sensitivity to pain. The Sydney Morning Herald had an article titled The CIA Link To Deep Sleep Research. Fearing that the Soviet Union and China had acquired the power to control human behavior by brainwashing the CIA commissioned far-reaching research on the mind. How did it work? Was it breakable? Could it be controlled? The agenda was set up by the CIA. Was it possible to "get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self preservation?" the CIA asked. For more than a decade prominent psychiatrists in the United States and around the world tried to find an answer. Again, what do we see? We see psychiatry raising its ugly head, and being the primary tool that no one criticizes. No one challenges to use human beings as human experiments.
Dr. Thomas Oz has not been used in such a way. He's a psychiatrist at New York University and a crusader against invasive psychiatric practices. He has challenged this. He's one of the few who have stood up. The CIA has agreed to pay $750,000 in damages to seven former psychiatric patients who were the unwitting victims of mind control experiments. How many more were there? We don't know. How many people did Dr. Hugh Cameron hurt or destroy? We don't know, and never will. Well that brings us up to the end of another program. There is always going to be more information evolving, and as it does, I will do another part to this series. But for now that gives us a conclusion to our first three parts to Pathologizing African Americans by Psychiatry. I want to thank you very much for listening. I'm Gary Null. Have a nice day.