Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know about Shock Treatment

Chapter 3: Eugenic Conceptions II: Useless Eaters

28 3 Eugenic Conceptions II useless eaters Within memory of those still alive today is a time when it was not only acceptable to speak of mental patients as worthless defectives and malignant growths, it was possible for those at the highest levels of society and within organized psychiatry to act on these beliefs. The eugenics movement—advocating segregation, forced sterilization, and even the killing of mental patients—blossomed in America in the early to mid-twentieth century, thanks to funding from men with household names like Kellogg and Eastman. And the movement’s agenda was not carried out in secret, but was promoted by eminent scientists at some of America’s top research universities. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller bankrolled the work of Harvard biologist Charles Davenport, the leading eugenics crusader in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1910, Davenport established the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, the epicenter of the American eugenics movement. Its purpose was to transform eugenic ideas into laws. In practical terms, this meant hiring workers to go into mental hospitals to compile data on “the burden which the unfit place upon their fellow-men.” The Record Office pressed for the segregation of those considered insane in asylums, and for laws requiring that they be forcibly sterilized to further ensure they would not produce others like themselves. It was clear that the desired “permanent segregation” of mental patients was not for therapeutic purposes, but for the good of society. Eugenicists tried to cloak their mission in science, turning out studies designed to prove that mental illness was inherited. In the 1920s, top scientists , including prominent psychiatrists like Adolf Meyer and American Psychiatric Association president Floyd Haviland, came together to found the American Eugenics Society. Its mission was to sell eugenics and promote sterilization laws to the American public. Its tools were textbooks, CH003.qxd 12/6/08 2:20 AM Page 28 Useless Eaters 29 pamphlets, advertising campaigns, and even exhibits at state fairs—such as one that drew the passerby’s attention with large type proclaiming: “Some People Are Born To Be A Burden On The Rest.” By the 1930s, the chief of research at the New York State Psychiatric Institute wrote that “mankind would be much happier” if society could rid itself of schizophrenics, who were not “biologically satisfactory.” One eugenics advocate dismissed any opposition as follows: “It is the acme of stupidity to talk in such cases of individual liberty, of the rights of the individual . Such individuals have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born.” The New York Times opined in 1923 that mental defectives should not be allowed to marry, and, in fact, by 1933 there were no states in which those deemed insane could legally wed. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization was legal, making America, and not Germany, what historian Robert Whitaker calls “the first eugenic country” on earth. Not only did mainstream America (including major medical journals, the New York Times, and the American Public Health Association) support forced sterilization laws, but calls for killing defectives or “euthanasia” were made publicly and shamelessly in this country in the first decades of the century. For instance, Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize–winning physician at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, proposed that the insane “should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases.” The year was 1935. By 1941, the popularity of eugenics among the American intelligentsia was at its peak. In May of that year, Foster Kennedy, a leading neurologist and a professor at Cornell University, spoke at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association on “The Problem of Social Control of the Congenital Defective: Education, Sterilization, Euthanasia.” The following year, Kennedy published his views in the country’s most prestigious psychiatric journal, the American Journal of Psychiatry. He advocated that “feebleminded ” (a broad and ill-defined category that included those labeled with schizophrenia and manic-depression) children, “nature’s mistakes,” be killed upon reaching the age of five. For a safeguard, he proposed three medical examinations before “euthanasia.” Only if doctors agreed would CH003.qxd 12/6/08 2:20 AM Page 29 doctors of deception 30 the “defective” be “relieved of the burden of living.” He claimed that parents would want...