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 âimprovementsâ and appropriated â$1,000,000 more than was ever before given for the benefit of the insane.â 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 âreformsâ 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 âdeath sentenceâ of having to return to the trenches.5
Before the war, the standard psychiatric treatment for hysteria was the so-called electric treatment, or âfaradism,â a procedure consisting of the application of interrupted DC (direct current) stimuli to the patientâs 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 âwar hysteriaââin other words, war neurosis, traumatic neurosis, shell shock, today anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorderâwas 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 (1857â1940) 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 1918âbarely one month after the cessation of hostilitiesâthe provisional Austrian National Assembly appointed a commission to investigate the charges.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Administration & Medicine Economics | Allied Health Professions |
Basic Sciences | Dentistry |
History | Medical Informatics |
Medicine | Nursing |
Pharmacology | Psychology |
Research | Veterinary Medicine |
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi(7233)
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker(5615)
Paper Towns by Green John(4152)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot(3808)
The Sports Rules Book by Human Kinetics(3570)
Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery by Eric Franklin(3471)
ACSM's Complete Guide to Fitness & Health by ACSM(3452)
Kaplan MCAT Organic Chemistry Review: Created for MCAT 2015 (Kaplan Test Prep) by Kaplan(3412)
Introduction to Kinesiology by Shirl J. Hoffman(3289)
Livewired by David Eagleman(3096)
The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks(2980)
Alchemy and Alchemists by C. J. S. Thompson(2896)
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen(2884)
Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio(2718)
Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre(2712)
Kaplan MCAT Behavioral Sciences Review: Created for MCAT 2015 (Kaplan Test Prep) by Kaplan(2477)
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee(2473)
The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (The Princeton History of the Ancient World) by Kyle Harper(2419)
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee(2412)