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To: bdeaner

As it happens in my view, your desire to prevent the mentally ill from receiving standard medical treatments for their illnesses is a form of genocide, in this cse against the insane, who were the first target of Hitler’s genocide in the 1930’s. It is not surprising that someone who wishes to repeat Hitler’s genocide would ally themselves with the 9/11 terrorists.


101 posted on 01/31/2009 7:50:15 AM PST by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (All of this has happened before and it will happen again!)
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To: Lucius Cornelius Sulla
As it happens in my view, your desire to prevent the mentally ill from receiving standard medical treatments for their illnesses is a form of genocide, in this cse against the insane, who were the first target of Hitler’s genocide in the 1930’s. It is not surprising that someone who wishes to repeat Hitler’s genocide would ally themselves with the 9/11 terrorists.

HAHAHAHA. Good try, attempting to project your endorsement of genocide onto my arguments here. That's a good one.

First of all, nothing I have said on this post or elsewhere can be reasonably interpreted as an endorsement of the view that psychiatric patients should be deprived of their medication. I've said repeatedly that psychiatric medication is sometimes the right choice of treatment for a patient. I would not endorse the view that psychiatric drugs should never be used. That would be a dumb argument. So, in your apparent anger at my pointing out your statments on Muslums amounts to genocide, I suspect you became enraged and this has distorted your perception of my statements.

Secondly, I'm glad you brought up Hitler and the Holocaust, because it will give me the opportunity to provide readers of this post with a lesson in history (I doubt you are in a state of mind to hear it). In a subsequent post to this, I will demonstrate to you that Hitler was not the first to endorse and carry out sterilization of the mentally ill. It was first conducted here in the United States, and a court case in California was cited by Hitler as a validation of his eugenic project to exterminate all people with mental illness. I will follow up with more details, but first I must address your third point, which really takes the cake.

It is not surprising that someone who wishes to repeat Hitler’s genocide would ally themselves with the 9/11 terrorists.

It really takes a twisted logic to derive anything I have said as an alignment with Hitler's genocide or the 9/11 terrorists. I am morally repulsed by the 9/11 terrorists and all terrorists. I am morally repulsed by all violence based on blind hatred. I am not aligning myself with the 9/11 terrorists against you. I am aligning myself against what YOU share with the 9/11 terrorists: A blind hatred for what you do not understand and a willingness to de-humanize and kill that those who you hate. That's what led Hitler to his demise, what will lead the terrorists to their demise, and what will lead to your demise, unless your repent in your ways. Spiritually, this is a view that leads only to darkness. I will pray for you.
103 posted on 01/31/2009 8:13:55 AM PST by bdeaner (The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? (1 Cor. 10:16))
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To: Lucius Cornelius Sulla
Here is a little lesson in psychiatric history --an excerpt from Robert Whitaker's Mad in America that should send chills up your spine:

The "insane" in the U.S. began to lose their right to marry in 1896, when Connecticut became the first state to enact such a prohibition. North Dakota quickly followed suit, as did Michigan, which threatened the insane with a $1,000 fine and five years in prison should they dare to wed. By 1914, more than 20 states had laws prohibiting the insane from marrying, and, in 1933, Popenhoe, in the book Applied Eugenics, matter-of-factly reported that there were no states left where the insane could legally tie the knot...

When this didn't work to prevent the "insane" from reproducing, a movement grew to endorse compulsory sterilization of "defectives." As early as 1882, a year before Galton coined the term "eugenics," William Goodell, a well-known gynecologist in Pennsylvania, had proposed castrating the mentally ill in order to prevent them from bearing "insane offspring." Goodell, who reported that surgical removal of a woman's ovaries could cure "ovarian insanity," predicted that in a "progressive future," it would "be deemed a measure of sound policy and of commendable statesmanship to stamp out insanity by castrating all the insane men and spaying all the insane women." His views were echoed by F.D. Daniel, editor of Texas Medical Journal, who believed that castrating insane men would also keep them from masturbating and thus "would be an advisible hygienic measure."

In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass a compulsory sterilization law. It did so in the name of science, the bill stating that heredity had been shown to play a dominant role in the "transmission of crime, idiocy, and imbecility." Over the next two decades, thirty state legislatures approved sterilization bills, and repeatedly did so based on an argument that science had proven that defectives breed defectives. Their list of degenerate hereditary types were often long. In its 1913 bill, Iowa said that those in need of sterilization incided "criminals, rapists, idiots, feeble-minded, imbeciles, lunatics, drunkards, drug fiends, epileptics, syphilitics, moral and sexual perverts, and diseased and degenerate persons"--a catch-all description, in essence, for people viewed as social "scum" by the legislature.

Despite the enthusiasm of state legislatures for such measures, states--with the notable exception of California--did not begin sterilizing their "defectives" in any great numbers, at least not until 1927. Opponents, which naturally included Catholics and non-English immigrant groups, argued that such laws violated constitutional safeguards against cruel and unusual punishment, due process of law, and equal protection of laws--that last flaw arising because the bills regularly authorized sterilization only of institutionalized people, as opposed to all people with supposed hereditary defects. By 1923, laws in Iowa, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Michigan, Indiana, and Oregon had been declared unconstitutional in state courts. Governors in Pennsylvania, Oregon, Vermont, Idaho, and Nebraska vetoed sterilization bills, with the most stinging and wittiest rebuke coming from Pennsylvania own Samuel Pennypacker. Rising to speak at a dinner after his veto, he was roundly greeted with boos, catcalls, and sneering whistles. "Gentlemen, gentlemen," he implored, raising his arms to silence the crowd of legislators," you forget you owe me a vote of thanks. Didn't I veto the bill for the castration of idiots?"

As a nation, America was having a difficult time making up its mind about sterilization. From 1907 to 1927, about 8,000 eugenic sterilizations were performed--a significant number, yet only a tiny percentage of people [with mental illness]... Was it constitional or not? Was this a practice consistent with the governing principles of the country?

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court--by an 8-1 majority in the case of Buck v. Bell---ruled that it was.
In his written opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes supported the decision by noting "experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, etc." Bad science had become the foundation for bad law....

At that moment, America stood alone as the first eugenic country. No European nation had enacted a statute for compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and other misfits. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision, the number of eugenic sterilizations in the United States markedly increased, averaging more than 2,200 annually during the 1930's. Editorials in the New York Times and leading medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine spoke positively about the practice. A 1937 Fortune magazine poll found that 66% of Americans favored sterilizing "defectives." By the end of 1945, 45,127 Americans had been sterilized under such laws...

Although the U.S. Supreme Court spoke of sterilization as a small "sacrifice" that the unfit should make for the national good, no society likes to perceive of itself as mean-spirited toward its misfits. Nor do physicians want to see themselves as implementers of social policy that might harm their patients. They want to provide care that is helpful. Those two needs, for society to view itself in a good light and for physicians to view themselves as healers, were revealed early on in California, where, by the end of World War II, nearly 50% of all sterilizations of the mentally ill in the United States had been performed. There, physicians came to view sterilization as providing patients with a therapeutic benefit, one that, or society society was told, evoked gratitude in most patients.

California approved its Asexualization Act in 1909, a law pushed by a physician, F.W. Hatch, who was then named superintendent of the state's mental hospitals. He promised to use the law to ensure that asylum "defectives should leave behind them no progeny to carry on the tainted and unhappy stream of heredity." Two amendments to the law, in 1913 and 1917, broadened the definition of who was to be considered defective and authorized the state to sterilize such people without their consent. By 1921, nearly 80% of the 3,233 eugenic sterilizations done in the United States had been performed in California.

As California doctors conducted such operations, they constructed various rationales to explain why sterilizations benefited the mentally ill.... [A] story of humanitarian care was being woven. [They claimed d]octors found sterilization to be therapeutic; the mentally ill [were brainwashed to desire] it. In 1929, the Human Betterment Foundation--a state eugenics organization led by wealthy banker Ezra Gosney and Popenoe--reported that 85% of the sterilized mentally ill were either thankful for the operation or at least indifferent to it...In 1935, 83% of all Californians favored eugenic sterilization of the mentally ill....

America's embrace of eugenic sterilization as a progressive health measure had consequences for the mentally ill in other countries as well. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed it constitutional, Denmark passed a sterilization law, and over the next few years, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland did too. America's influence on Nazi Germany was particularly pronounced, and it was in that country of course that eugenics ran its full course.

Prior to World War I, eugenics was not nearly as popular in Germany as it was in the United States. Germany's parliament defeated a sterilization bill in 1914, and the country didn't pass any law prohibiting the mentally ill from marrying. However, after the war, eugenics gained a new appeal for the German population... In 1925, Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf, hailed eugenics as the science that would rebuild the nation. The state, he wrote, must "avail itself of modern medical discoveries" and sterilize those people who are "unfit for procreation."...

After Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany passed a comprehensive sterilization bill. The German eugenicists who drew up that legislation had gone to school on the U.S. experience, which American eugenecists noted with some pride. "The leaders in the German sterilization movement state repeatedly that their legislation was formulated only after careful study of the California experiments," wrote Margaret Smyth, superintendent of Stockton State Hospital, after touring Germany in 1935. "It would have been impossible they say, to undertake such a venture involving 1 million people without drawing heavily upon previous experience elsewhere."

-- From Robert Whitaker, Mad in America, pp. 56-65 (bolded text added)

This history proves that psychiatry is capable of doing just about anything and will then turn around and rationalize that the practice is in the best interests of the patient.
105 posted on 01/31/2009 10:33:42 AM PST by bdeaner (The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? (1 Cor. 10:16))
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