Psychiatry by Szasz Thomas;

Psychiatry by Szasz Thomas;

Author:Szasz, Thomas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2019-03-25T00:00:00+00:00


The grand jury duly recommended “improvements” and appropriated “$1,000,000 more than was ever before given for the benefit of the insane.” Who benefited from these funds and the billions more that politicians have since then poured down the rat hole of institutional psychiatry? The psychiatrists and others employed by the asylum system. No one then in authority wanted to see, no one in authority wants to see, that psychiatric “reforms” are counterproductive. Chattel slavery needed to be abolished, not reformed. The same goes for psychiatric slavery.

I

In modern life, there are many situations in which society invites, as it were, psychiatrists to play the role of protecting people from certain perils. Protection from the perils of military service stands high on this list of psychiatric diagnosis as excuse-making. The first total war, based on the mobilization of the entire adult male populations of belligerent nations, was World War I. This war rendered the threat of conscription for military service a danger to men subject to the draft. Staying out of military service as well as trying to get out of it became powerful motives for malingering. In this situation, psychiatrists often assumed the roles of humanitarian doctors, diagnosing malingerers as suffering from hysteria, thus protecting them from the “death sentence” of having to return to the trenches.5

Before the war, the standard psychiatric treatment for hysteria was the so-called electric treatment, or “faradism,” a procedure consisting of the application of interrupted DC (direct current) stimuli to the patient’s supposedly affected muscles and nerves. Its effect, if any, was owing solely to suggestion. In his early years of practice, Freud routinely used this method. Its employment for the treatment of “war hysteria”—in other words, war neurosis, traumatic neurosis, shell shock, today anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder—was an extension of this standard psychiatric therapy to military malingerers treated by doctors pretending to believe that the shirkers were sick.

On November 11, 1918, World War I formally ended, and the next day the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed. Some veterans lost no time accusing medical officers of torturing them with painful electric currents in military psychiatric hospitals. Sensational charges in newspapers followed. The scandal quickly embroiled the most revered Austrian physician, Julius Wagner-Jauregg. Although only one person, named Walter Kauders, filed formal charges against him, and although Wagner-Jauregg was quickly and completely exonerated of any wrongdoing, his celebrity guaranteed that the affair would become a dramatic chapter in the history of psychiatry, specifically the history of malingering and hysteria-neurosis.

Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940) was a professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Vienna Medical School. He was the discoverer of iodine deficiency as the cause of cretinism (1884) and of fever treatment for neurosyphilis (1917), for which he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927. Though he remained a civilian, Wagner-Jauregg volunteered his services and used electrical treatment on patients diagnosed as suffering from war neuroses. In December 1918—barely one month after the cessation of hostilities—the provisional Austrian National Assembly appointed a commission to investigate the charges.



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