The misuse of psychiatry as a tool of political repression has a long and sordid history

Enemies of the State

By Peter Farmer (Bio and Archives)  Wednesday, June 5, 2013

The misuse of psychiatry as a tool of political repression has a long and sordid history. In the modern era alone, repressive regimes – from Nazi Germany to Castro’s Cuba to Mao’s China – have used involuntary psychiatric imprisonment, false diagnoses of mental illness, and other pseudo-scientific methods as a means of marginalizing, neutralizing or destroying dissidents, ideological enemies and other individuals troublesome to the state. However, perhaps nowhere else were these methods used so extensively or with such great refinement as in the Soviet Union.
During the political rule of Josef Stalin, those who displeased the party, the state or Stalin himself could expect to be taken into custody by the secret police - the dreaded NKVD or later the KGB - and either imprisoned or summarily executed with a bullet to the back of the neck after being interrogated and tortured. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the de-Stalinization of the U.S.S.R. began under Nikita Khrushchev and the party sought ways to improve its image in the western press, notwithstanding the on-going Cold War or the proxy wars the Communist Bloc was then fighting with NATO and its allies. After the close call of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and further into the 1960s and 1970s, these efforts intensified. For propaganda value and a variety of other reasons, the Kremlin was not anxious to derail the détente and gradual thawing of relations then beginning with the west.
The Soviet state still maintained a vast network of gulags (prison camps) across the Soviet Union, and while the secret police were just as capable of breaking bones and taking lives as before, the party sought more subtle means of handling its internal enemies. Enter the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, the division charged with maintaining “internal security” against artistic, political and religious dissent. By then, the KGB had perfected the use of psychiatric medicine as a tool of the state and had used it against such dissidents as writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, among many others.
The simple, almost elegant beauty of this method lay in the fact that the state could punish its enemies and remove them from society without any of the negative propaganda or poor public relations attendant to harsher, visibly crueler techniques. The tools of medicine, developed to relieve and heal human suffering, could be turned against enemies of the state without anyone being the wiser that the “patient” was in fact being punished and systematically stripped of his rights. Indeed, in its “mercy,” the party propagandists could claim that the state was helping the individual in question – who was obviously sick - by making sure that he received the finest medical care available.
In reality, the “patient” was usually a dissident or someone else causing trouble for the regime; after a pro forma medical-psychiatric examination designed to provide the appearance of normalcy, the subject could then be committed to a mental facility. Later, when attention was elsewhere, if necessary he could be sent to the gulag or discretely executed and buried in an unmarked grave. His family would receive notification from the state that he had died in hospital. Or, if it suited the party, the malefactor – suitably “rehabilitated,” of course – could later be released, again for positive propaganda value. 
It would be nice to report that the civilized world has seen the last of such methods as those outlined above, but unfortunately, that is not the case.  The Obama administration has resurrected some of the old Soviet methods, dusted them off, added a few 21st century modifications and is now attempting to use them on the American public. Rather than openly impose Soviet-style psychiatry by decree, Obama and his allies have instead opted for a more-subtle approach using the legislative process to hide their intentions within the 2000+ pages of the “Affordable Care Act” – a.k.a. Obamacare - and co-option of key power centers within the medical establishment, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association.
Sometime in the summer of 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) will release the latest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, more commonly known within medical circles as the DSM. The latest version, the DSM-V, will serve – like its predecessors – as the standard diagnostic reference for the identification and treatment of psychiatric disorders. So far, so good. However, a closer look at the new reference provides some disturbing, even chilling, information on exactly what is now considered a mental illness. The DSM-V vastly-expands the number of psychiatric disorders and also widens considerably what is to be identified as mental illness. Consider the following examples[1]…

• Adults over the age of fifty-five who occasionally forget everyday information, such as where they last left their car keys or the like, are now considered to have neurocognitive disorders.
• Children or teenagers who occasionally throw a temper tantrum or challenge authority are now said to have disruptive mood dysregulation disorder.
• If you stockpile food, water or other disaster-preparedness supplies, you are now considered to be suffering from obsessive-compulsive hoarding disorder.

There are many other similar examples – too numerous to list - of new psychiatric “disorders,” but a pattern can clearly be discerned – the DSM-V treats much normal human behavior consistent with human variety, difference and eccentricity as social and/or medical pathologies.
In and of themselves, the new categories of psychiatric disorders and illnesses are not damaging; the danger lies in the misuses to which they may be put by medical personnel, government bureaucrats, judges, the police, and other authorities.
The DSM has long-been recognized as authoritative under the law and is admissible as a reference in cases involving psychiatry or psychology.
Attached to a specific diagnosis rendered by a suitable mental health professional, it is conceivable that the new DSM could be used to strip Americans of their legal and civil rights to own firearms, to raise their children and to otherwise conduct their private lives as they see fit.
It is not mere conjecture that such a deprivation of civil rights will occur sometime in the future; it is already happening. As reported by Douglas Hagmann [2] at CFP, Jason Egroff, a 28-year old web designer and Christian radio broadcaster, was taken into custody by Scranton, Pennsylvania, police and held for psychiatric evaluation and questioning based solely on an anonymous tip from an unidentified “psychiatric health” worker. Mr. Egroff, who has been an outspoken critic of Barack Obama’s policies, did not have a criminal record, broke no laws and has been, by all accounts, an upstanding citizen. It is a matter of public record that the Veteran’s Administration has sought, without due process, to deprive certain military veterans of their constitutional right to bear arms using questionable diagnoses of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and other illnesses. There are other examples.
According to one estimate, under the new DSM-V guidelines, some fifty percent of the American population can be classified as “mentally ill.” 
How convenient all of this is for Obama and his statist friends. Gee – wouldn’t it be nice to know if those “fifty percent” correspond to that half of the nation who did not vote for him in the last two elections and who stand against his policies?
Lutheran Pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) once said:

“First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

We are not yet in the same dire circumstances as Pastor Niemöller and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once were - stripped of their rights and freedom, and standing alone and defenseless before an all-powerful state - but we are fast-headed in that direction if something is not done to stop the neo-communists from recreating a 21st century facsimile of the Soviet Union right here on U.S. soil. The APA has been co-opted by Obama and his statist allies, and thus far, the leadership of the medical community at large has not raised the alarm sufficiently at the dangerous and wholly unconstitutional abuses of medical authority now taking place. Nor have enough physicians spoken out against the rampant politicization and corruption of their once-honorable profession – or the fact that medicine itself is being used as a political and ideological weapon.
An expanding state leviathan existing symbiotically with a psychiatric establishment willing to sell out in the name of the all-mighty dollar, ideology and political expediency spells trouble - not just for the mentally-ill, but for all Americans.
Copyright 2013 Peter Farmer
1 - Mac Slavo, “You are Crazy: New Psychiatric Guidelines Target Hoarding, Child Temper Tantrums, and a Host of Other ‘Illnesses’”, 4 June 2013.
2 - Doug Hagmann,“Psychiatry as a weapon to silence religious and political opposition” 24 August 2012.

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Peter Farmer is a historian and commentator on national security, geopolitics and public policy issues. He has done original research on wartime resistance movements in WWII Europe, and has delivered seminars on such subjects as political violence and terrorism, the evolution of conflict, combat medicine, and related subjects. Mr. Farmer is also a scientist and a medic.