Page "Anti-psychiatry" Paragraph 7

Psychiatrists around the world have been involved in the suppression of individual rights by states wherein the definitions of mental disease had been expanded to include political disobedience.

Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined to mental institutions and abused therein.

Psychiatry possesses a built-in capacity for abuse which is greater than in other areas of medicine.

The diagnosis of mental disease can serve as proxy for the designation of social dissidents, allowing the state to hold persons against their will and to insist upon therapies that work in favour of ideological conformity and in the broader interests of society.

In a monolithic state, psychiatry can be used to bypass standard legal procedures for establishing guilt or innocence and allow political incarceration without the ordinary odium attaching to such political trials.

Under the Nazi regime in the 1940s, the ' duty to care ' was violated on an enormous scale.

In Germany alone 300, 000 individuals that had been deemed mentally ill, work-shy or feeble-minded were sterilized.

An additional 100, 000 were euthanized.

These practices continued in territories occupied by the Nazis further afield ( mainly in eastern Europe ), affecting thousands more.

From the 1960s up to 1986, political abuse of psychiatry was reported to be systematic in the Soviet Union, and to surface on occasion in other Eastern European countries such as Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

A " mental health genocide " reminiscent of the Nazi aberrations has been located in the history of South African oppression during the apartheid era.

A continued misappropriation of the discipline was subsequently attributed to the People's Republic of China.