The introduction of psychoanalysis inter alia as an officially acknowledged healing method in many countries of the West has widened the influence of psychiatry far beyond the limits of psychiatric illnesses. Since there is no proof of therapeutic efficacy in psychoanalysis and since it is a much-applied method in psychiatry now, reaching, of course, the "walking wounded" rather than those suffering from severe psychiatric illnesses, it can influence -  and mislead - many of our fellow citizens.

It is evident that there are enormous new potentialities for political and ethical influence (and control) in this “new psychiatry" - which, of course, is less psychiatry than one more manifestation of the modern plague of pseudo-sciences in the medical profession.  We are confident, however, that by being critically and honestly alert to the problem, we will be able to overcome the swindle of outside interference in mental health care in the long run.

GEP’s information bulletin (Rundbrief) 2/03 of November 2003 is strengthened by important supporters,

1. High-ranking clerics within the Vatican, e.g. Archbishop Dr. Cordes, head of the PONTIFCIUM CONSILIUM ‘COR UNUM’, who has fought against the detrimental influences on some Catholics of the “psycho-industry”, specially of socalled “group dynamics” after we (together with others) had warned of fraudulent “psycho-technologies” spreading even within the Catholic community. He has encouraged us to continue our quarter-century campaign against abuses of psychiatry and psychology for political ends.

2. The British linguist Robert Wilcocks Ph.D., a professor for  Modern French Literature at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and a prominent participant in the international campaign against psychoanalysis or better: against fraud in psychotherapy. (A text of his can be read in the English section of GEP’s website: www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de, the review of the books of an American psychiatrist and an American psychologist on Freudian “cornerstones.”)
 
As we have often done in recent years, we have shed some light on the present state of the (mostly evasive) discussion of psychiatric abuses to curb political dissenters in the former GDR. We then have considered the strange situation in Western psychiatry and the influence of psychoanalysis in it. The political aspects we see and demonstrate here, of course, are not seen by all of those who write in this newsletter. But all of them agree that the Freudian tenets are fraudulent and proven to be fallacious to such a degree that their dismissal from all parts of society and specially from the “healing professions” is long overdue and – should it take place in the near future (as we are sure it will) - could have political repercussions.

We congratulate some of our American psychiatric colleagues for having taken up the issue and fight against the swindle which has corrupted our pro fession internationally to a large extent morally and politically - and which has been spread over the world earlier specially from American psych iatry. Such scandals like the move for “normalizing” pedophilia at the latest annual con vention of the APA in San Francisco in May 2003 or the long lasting silence to Soviet psychiatric abuses during the 1970s have to be seen as “small fish” if even basic assumptions of the profession turn out to be clearly fallacious but tolerated not only in the “leading” Western nation but internationally. The credibility not only of the psychiatric profession but of the Western system is at stakes.

We have addressed these and similar problems fairly gently for over quarter of a century. In this newsletter we address them more bluntly - the "softly-softly" approach not having achieved the appropriate response over this long period of time. Since there is new support for our positions inside and outside our association we have new hope that the problems will be solved in the near future. The time is ripe. The INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF FREUD CRiTICS has begun its work.

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Summary of Bulletin 1/03

GEP’s new bulletin (Rundbrief 1/03, February 2003) tackles “group therapy”,  “group dynamics” primarily. Rudolf Willeke, a retired school director in Westphalia, who has long studied their different tenures and practices and has published books on the issue, explains how they could become the most influential psycho-technologies. And he explains their devastating effects as the prevailing method of modern brainwashing. 

Willeke, an engaged catholic, deplores the wide expansion of  “group dynamics” within many institutions of his church. Recalling what Malachi Martin has described in his book: Windswept House (Doubleday, New York, 1996), Willeke refers to many of the present difficulties and even scandals of the church originating in the intrusion of these “dynamic” tenures going back to Freud. Freud and his psychotherapy are questioned more than ever today, especially in English speaking countries (see the presentations on “Psychoanalysis” in the English section of our website). Remember that group therapy, a therapeutic swindle like large parts of individual psychotherapy, has been conceived as a means of  “reeducation” from its very beginning - not only of the Germans after WW2 but of all peoples, a means for re-evaluating all their values and thus a means for better manipulating them (see our presentation of General Chisholm’s lecture of 1945 in our website - Glimpse into the History of Psychiatric Reform). Now that some tiny resistance is arising, at least within catholic rows, there is hope that our and other peoples will eventually come to grips with the impact of  psycho-technologies. 

Our bulletin further tackles questions of psychiatric abuse in the former GDR. A realistic assessment of these practices in the former communist part of our country is taking place there, after more then a decade. This provides a hopeful sign that political facts are recognized with growing understanding and commitment to truth and justice within our society against the many distractions and distortions of the media, the medical and psychological associations and the politicians.

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Summary of GEP's Bulletin 2/02

Our Rundbrief 2/02 of November 2002 treats recent developments in issues of political abuses of psychiatry. Attention to such malpractice taking place now in China has been directed recently by influential organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry (GIP). Having once been associated with the latter, we felt it appropriate to distance ourselves from it, since their judgments on what and where is psychiatric abuse and what is to be done on behalf of its victims seemed to us to be rather arbitrary and dependent from foreign influences. Abuses e.g. in the former communist part of our own country were ignored and even denied by GIP. Half information is better than nothing but can be harmful sometimes.

From the beginning of our work we observed the reactions of national and international bodies on psychiatric abuses. Great national and international health organizations, the media, and the political class have often been quite hesitant or even evasive in severe cases of these human rights violations. At the same time political influences on Western psychiatry appeared more and more dubious. Psychiatric “reform” for example, having been initiated by politicians in many countries, has different aspects some of which in our opinion are scientifically unfounded and even politically dangerous.

The reform is enlarging the outreach of psychiatry to ever greater parts of the population and is focussing it more and more on directives of political bodies. It is transforming the discipline, at least in our country, more and more to that of former communism: an instrument of the rulers for influencing or even aligning the values and thoughts of the people, embarrassing their rights and freedoms and making ruling easier for rulers. This totalitarian drive, of course, is supported now by our red-green government but has been initiated by the former conservative faction of rulers as well.

The new outreach of psychiatry has been effected in the first instance by incorporating ever greater parts of pseudo-science, especially psychoanalysis. By teaching Freudian (Freud-Marxist) ideology to students of different professional directions, doctors, psychologists and still more frequently social workers and other “social engineers,” the politicians have created the manpower for staffing new psychiatric-psychological services and  institutions and thus enabling themselves to condition the political thoughts according to their ends. In the last decades they have pushed German psychiatry into a new dubious and often fraudulent condition - making scientifically unsubstantiated claims, giving untenable promises and hiding totalitarian perspectives. Freudian ideology, however, has been the backbone of this reform. Most saddening is that it has been quite impossible in this country to speak out against the flourishing untruth within the profession, its perversion in the former GDR as well as its present move in this totalitarian direction.

However, new hope has arisen since stringent criticism is mounting against Freud in Anglo- and Francophone countries now (look for literature into our website: Psychoanalysis). Some of our psychiatric colleagues there fortunately have kept their reason also in other issues of the discipline. Many of the results of the Freudian swindle may collapse over night now. Much suffering prolonged or even produced by it unfortunately will hardly do so. All those who have supported the fraud, many psychiatric bodies up to the World Psychiatric Association and the WHO and many of their international supporters in policy and the media, prestigious foundations, GIP etc. could be blamed deeply tomorrow. But, of course, since there are many who think they can profit from fraud in medicine it is by no means decided how the matter will develop.

In any case we feel encouraged to continue the fight against dishonesty in mental health care and its political abuse.

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Summary of GEP's News Bulletin (Rundbrief) 3/01

Our Newsletter "Rundbrief 3/01" is starting from the terror which has stricken America. Political deliberations can not begin otherwise in these days. This atrocity has been declared by some newspapers to be "a reaction to the globalisation". Its trademarks are free trade, open mindedness, free information, but also a lot of rather disputed re-valuations of values such as abor-tion, euthanasia, genetic alienation and - concerning the issues of our association - psychic manipulation, open and disguised fostering of drug consumption, open and disguised abuses of psychiatry and psychology for politi-cal ends, for influencing and controlling people on behalf of their "Superiors" (A. Huxley). Brave New World is basing in first instance on psychological programs. Re-cently, there have been warnings of Brave New World even in president Bush's surroundings. Since long time we have uttered such warnings and have been scolded for them.

Our new Rundbrief is mentioning different con-tributions of psychiatry and psychology to such a ques-tionable future. We discuss the new drug liberation which our red-green federal government is introducing in spite of sharply increasing numbers of addicts and drug related deaths. We ponder upon the ongoing influence of Freudian tenets. Since long we accuse our German medi-cal associations and the politicians of having elevated this pseudo-science to an acknowledged "health disci-pline" regardless of lacking proofs of its therapeutic effi-ciency, regardless of ongoing attempts to pretend its effi-ciency and regardless of all the human damages resulting therefrom. But are all these developments not more an international affair? We highly appreciate the sophisti-cated critical studies on Freud which have appeared in some English speaking countries in recent years. But it seems that these committed critics, too, ignore the last-ing dominance of Freudianism in international "mental health care" and its political background. We remember to V.E. Frankl's Logotherapy as a real non-reductionist alternative in psychotherapy.

And we point out to Dr. G.B. Chisholm's re-markable words of 1945: "...'good' is recognized as just as great a menace as 'evil'... They are fruits of the one tree and are different aspects of the same thing... The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the con-cept of right and wrong... these are the belated objec-tives of practically all effective psychotherapy... If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility… to root out and destroy the oldest and most flourishing parasitical growth in the world, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil… Man's freedom to observe and to think freely is essential to his sur-vival…" (PSYCHIATRY, Vol. 9, February 1946, No.1). These words have been supported by highly ranking politicians from the very beginning. Obviously they were the base for an enormous augmentation of psycho-professional services in all Western countries and for a lot of deviations within the psycho-professions and our so-cieties after World War two.

Undoubtedly, there is some reason in Chisholm's deliberations. Would our world, however, have really been or would it be better off before, in or after 1945 by renouncing "right" and "wrong", "good" and "evil"? Are the disasters of those times and of our present time like the recent one in America not more likely the results of the evaporation of these principles? So big a problem the categories of good and evil, right and wrong (e.g. the "war of the good against the evil") may contain, can we afford to give them up? Aren't they the base of all civilisation? Are the pseudo-scientific tenets of Freud & Co. more reliable than the wisdom of centuries of cultural development? And are we psychiatrists and psychologists really in a position "to take the responsibility for" their "eradication", let alone that we have never been asked whether we are all ready to take it - we psychiatrists who are well prepared to treat mental illnesses but recur to nothing but faith or ideologies (and pseudo-science) when it goes beyond these limits? Are Chisholm's words not suitable to evoke doubts about the moral condition of Western psychiatrists and psycholo-gists and, eventually, of all Western culture?

Chisholm's deliberations have obviously been the base for all social widening of our discipline. Obviously it has been the reason for its repeated and widely spread disregard of psychiatric abuses yesterday in the Soviet Union, later also in the Eastern part of our country and today in China, for acceptance, acknowledgement and promulgation of Freudian and other reductionist pseudo-sciences, for acceptance of drug liberalisation and increasing drug distribution by medical and state's agencies - all this being accompanied by never ending self-adulations of the heads of our profession on national and international grounds thus immunizing themselves against criticisms from within and outside the profession.

Chisholm's ideas and the political support they have received from the very beginning have brought the change of Western values from their Jewish-Christian origin to today's neo-liberal, neo-Marxist or even Huxleyan set of values. Are they the "Good" for which we have to fight now? Neither the Taliban-terror nor a Brave-New-Worldian dictatorship which President Bush has addressed recently can be our aim!

We assess broad international discussions of our professional affairs to be necessary. More information at:

www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de

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Summary of GEP’s Bulletin (“Rundbrief”) 2/01 (of March 2001):

25 years ago our Association  had begun to fight political abuses of psychiatry when pertinent news came in from the former Soviet Union. Since the most atrocious crimes had happened in German psychiatry during Nazi rule before – mass-murder initiating the holocaust - we, a group of German psychiatrists and “laymen”, felt specially committed to resist politically inspired crimes in this professional field wherever they newly arise, be it also in milder forms. We became rather amazed at the composure which some of the official psychiatric organisations in our country and in other countries including the WPA and the WHO displayed in front of this new category of human rights violations. Eventually, together with other groups we could move them to take a stronger stand. But they all dropped the issue completely when the Soviet Union ceased to exist and free information became accessible from Eastern European countries for the first time. Just at that time we got knowledge of psychiatric abuses even from the Eastern part of our country, the former G.D.R. This issue, of course, is of special interest for us. The German text of our information bulletin 2/01 (Rundbrief 2/01) gives more information about this topic.

“Abuse of science” in mental health care, however, is a theme in other connections, too. In her extraordinary book MANUFACTURING VICTIMS the Canadian psychologist Tana Dineen for example speaks about such “abuse” in regard to the inflationary expansion of offers of professional “help” for psychic problems which often are void promises only presenting a kind of modern “Psychology Industry”. Other moves in some Anglo-Saxon countries are going a similar direction. By the works of Frederic Crews (Unauthorized freud), Richard  Webster (Why FREUD WAS WRONG), Allen Esterson (SEDUCTIVE MIRAGE), Han Israels (in German: DER FALL FREUD), Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and others the base of Sigmund Freud’s construction was put in question. Many psychiatric associations, however, go on to advocate and foster the Freudian swindle as they have done during long times of the last century, already. How many suffering people thus have been put off or even ridden into more suffering? How much money has been wasted?  In 1999 when the spell of psychoanalysis has been broken in wide parts of the world, already, the German doctors’ Assembly (Deutscher Aerztetag) has acknowledged the fraud. It was considered as a true medical speciality.

There is still another problem in the field of psychiatry and psychology which is close to  abuse. “Psychiatric Reform” has been widely propagated by the professional associations and the media as a mere set of charity with psychoanalysis at its top. Of course, every social institution is to be “reformed” continuously. In fact psychiatry has experienced a decisive “reform” - by real scientific progress. By the new pharmaceutics the fate of many patients could improve greatly, many psychiatric wards could be closed etc.

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“The world is changing very fast, leading to new stresses on many individuals which make them more vulnerable to psychiatric diseases or in need of professional help…”

Prof. J.J. López-Ibor, President of the world Psychiatric Association, inviting to a new congress taking place in Madrid, Spain, in next May – not asking how many colleagues and laymen in the world are weary of such unfounded phrases.

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All stressing of “change” in psychiatry and all the emphatic glorification of its “reform” by the associations and the media, however, are by no means aiming to further improve the situation of the sick. The primal aim of most of the emphatic “reformers” obviously is to expand psychiatry and psychology for influencing and controlling the “normal” individual and social life. This is no mere suspicion. This is printed and you can read it in published psychiatric literature, e.g. in Dr. G.B. Chisholm’sThe Re-Establishment of Peacetime Society (Psychiatry, Vol. 9, No.1, February 1946). According to these deliberations the professionals are planned to be “social influence purveyors”. Dineen has quoted so the Canadian lawyer A. Scheflin. And, obviously, for this purpose the politically well adapted leaders of “soul-sciences” push all “reasons” far fetched, right or wrong, and  all stuff to impress people and tout clients – no matter whether highly sophisticated or junk science such as psychoanalysis. Psychiatric associations are by no means less active in this respect than psychologists trained in the liberal arts. Most of their promises and exaggerations of “changes” and “needs” mostly strive for more money and more influence only.

In European countries where health service is more socially (or socialistically) regulated than in the United States the proponents of Psychiatric Reform try to get more money specially from public sources. They do so even if all “mental health service” thus will be dictated fully by state’s bureaucrats and ideologists such as the Neo-/Freudo-Marxists of the 1960s. Their theoretical base was largely laid by Freud’s neo-analyst off-spring like Dr. Chisholm. Here you find the blueprint for all the “re-education” and “value changing” and other harm “psychology-industry is doing to people” (Dineen). When some professional organizations (according to Phyllis  Schlafly - www.eagleforum.org) e.g. the American teachers’ organization NEA are regarded to be the best partisans of the value-changers the psycho-professional organizations can be considered of no less capability.

At least, in our country the reform of psychiatry has been the real product of the 1960s’ cultural revolution whose representatives serve not only as ministers in our Federal Government, today but are in many other influential posts as well. In psychiatry they have reached their aims by less violent means than casting stones and firebombs against the police. In 1974 they only broke up doctors’ parliament (Deutscher Aerztetag) when psychiatry and psychiatric abuse were discussed in a way they did not like. Today some of them are heads of psychiatric hospitals. You must not be amazed that they earlier have played down psychiatric abuse in the USSR and deny any abuse in the former GDR, now. Perhaps the experiences we have made with fraudulent psychiatric (and medical) authorities in this country in former times are helping at least some of us now to keep sound distance from them whenever non-scientific but ethical and political questions are at stake.

Beside other points our bulletin tackles the drug problem which has been introduced in Germany by our (Neo-)Marxists and which is sustained and widened by them until now. Drug substitution has been the favourite topic of our left wing parties. The resistance of the conservative side, however, has been amazingly weak over the years so that the impression has arisen that the origin of the problem might not be as leftist as it mostly seems.

By all its obvious bias and its unfounded claims “psycho-industry” meets more and more criticism around the world. Change is overdue. But, as Dineen has pointed out,  „...a change of this magnitude can not come from within the professions, the fraternal organizations and the licensing boards which have failed to protect the public and continue to promote the industry”. It has been politicians who have created the psychiatric, “psycho-industrial” problem (see Chisholm). So it would not be inappropriate if politicians would help to solve it, now. Such a change would be beneficial for those in poor health and in good health and would help our societies as a whole. Last but not least it would help to re-establish truth in science.

Of course, one can ask why to oppose just the special scandals in psychiatry. Are modern life, modern medicine not full of questionable developments? In the Netherlands doctors are killing their old and sick patients legally, now. The killing of unwanted unborn children has become legal almost world-wide. Cloning and the utilisation (or abuse) of human lives for the well being of those who can afford it are in progress in many countries, too. Distribution of drugs, manipulating of minds, declaring opponents to be mentally ill can be considered to be minor medical faults in comparison, sometimes even as expressions of freedom. And obviously they are widely considered to be correct and therefore, discussed critically in the public no more. You can also ask: Is the responsibility really with the doctors or is it more within the “democratic majorities” in all our countries where the development is taking place. Or is the responsibility, eventually, at the international “classe politique” which is backing or even leading it by their media and/or their “social influence purveyors” in psychiatry, psychology and social work etc? In this case the (Western form of) “abuse of psychiatry for political ends” would even be the most basic problem of all the others we have mentioned above.

Sometimes it seems that there are more questions than answers. We can only invite you to discuss them thoroughly with us.

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Summary to GEP’s Bulletin 2/00 (of July 2000)

This bulletin (Rundbrief 2/2000) refers to the systematic abuse of psychiatry in the former communist part of our country or – to be more specific - to its systematic denial in today’s state of “democratic legality.”

Then it covers the alienations of psychiatry which after WW2 were conceived in some Anglo Saxon countries for the re-education not only of the Germans but also of those democratic populations in the West which just had crushed Nazism. The concept of Re-education written down e.g. in Psychiatry, Vol.9, No.1, 1946 by G.B. Chisholm M.D. has been the base of the cultural revolution of the 60s and of all those reforms of psychiatry which were enforced at the same time in many western countries. They are enforced now in the countries of Middle and Eastern Europe by high political bodies, Big Money (and a former ally, the Geneva Initiative of Psychiatry). For long times the concept was hidden from us and from most citizens (psychiatrists included) in all other countries, as well. According to Chisholm et al. the purpose of  the “Re-education” is the preservation of an ever lasting peace. If this purpose is  1.) real and 2.) is to be reached by the means of psychiatry and psychology would their implementation for such ends be appropriate? Or would it represent more a political abuse of these sciences?

The preservation of peace has often been the pretext of communist dictators for the preservation of their regimes and it is a calculated bait also in A. Huxley’s totalitarian concept of Brave New World. Sometimes it seems that our leaders in politics, the media and in “psycho-sciences” are prone to realize this “postmodernist” concept. This would explain why the terror of  communist psychiatric abuse was of little public concern in the past and continues widely to be played down today, as well.

Re-education and the cultural revolution of the 60s have been based on Freudianism from the beginning. Detrimental results appear more and more in our societies. So we notice with satisfaction that Freudianism is seriously questioned in the USA today. Even the APA which has promoted this pseudo science continuously all over the world seems to be forced to retreat from it, eventually. We think it is time to discuss these developments more thoroughly now on an international base.

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Summary to GEP’s Bulletin 4/99 (November 1999)

In this circular letter we present and explain the new name of our Association of psychiatrists and lay people: Walter-von-Baeyer-Society for Ethics in Psychiatry.

Then we expose further details of psychiatric abuse in the former German Democratic Republic. It is being negated by almost all in the political and professional community in Germany and abroad, e.g. at the last World Congress of Psychiatry in Hamburg, August 8-11, 1999. When this practice occurred in the Soviet Union in the 60s and 70s, it was played down for long time, too. Others, however, including our Association considered it to be a real crime against humanity and, eventually, defeated it. So we wonder about the reasons for the present international denial of these human right violations in the former GDR. 

We also expose other dubious developments in psychiatry e. g the backing by highly ranking psychiatrists of ill-advised drug politics in many countries. We further discuss some schools of psychotherapy that are increasingly challenged in Anglo-Saxon countries as being pseudo-sciences (e.g. by Frederick C. Crews, Unauthorized Freud). They are supported by medical and state agencies in Germany.

According to some American critics, many of these dubious developments originate or were promoted in the United States by leftist circles; other say: by “Big Money”. As it may be: we highly appreciate that there are also many well-established organisations in the States that fight these developments and defend traditional values. We only wonder why many of them restrict their activity to their limited issues, politically and geographically, and refrain from contacts with others who fight the same battles within their own respective countries. Those who strive to change values, “persons and societies” in the direction of  Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dictatorship, were effective to high degree by maintaining broad international connections. We discuss why their opponents are not.

Some of our psychiatric opponents, especially those who negate psychiatric abuse in the GDR, claim that we “believe in conspiracies” implying something delusional. We refer to Marilyn Ferguson’s book “The Aquarian Conspiracy” where the American sociologist has disclosed an “Open Conspiracy” and many contributions of psychiatry to “ personal and social transformations”. In former circulars, we have demonstrated that “soft” forms of psychiatric abuses are spreading in some European countries as a weapon in political debates. A commission of the German parliament (Bundestag) has publicly considered members of  “sects” and “fundamentalists” to be in a dubious mental condition whereas large parts of the Catholics and members of other Christian denominations, including the Pope, are openly defamed by the media to be “fundamentalists”. Some highly ranking psychiatrists give support.

In the United States, there are similar conflicts between those who want the “transformation” of men and society and those who oppose it. We think that increasing attention should be given to the double nature of psychiatry and other “human sciences”. Beside help for sick people, they always encompass the danger of abuse by their political leaders. Widening the scope of psychiatry to “Social Psychiatry” means widening and increasing government controls of our personal lives in all our countries. Those who are concerned are invited to contact us.

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Summary to GEP’s (the former DVpMP’s) Bulletin 1/99 (February 1999)

This edition of DVpMP’s Rundbrief (circular of the German Association on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry, a group of lay people and psychiatrists) covers two main issues, firstly the question of psychiatric abuses in the former GDR and their assessment in Germany nowadays, secondly - and strangely connected with this point - the complex of psychiatry, psychotherapy and so called psycho-groups. Calling „cultists“, „fundamentalists“ etc. those who dissent with the mainstream of „modern“ thought of „political correctness“ (and sometimes of demoralization) and thus implying that they are in a dubious psychic condition, are evidently spreading not only in post-communist Russia (see our Rundbrief 2/98) but also in some Western countries, especially in Germany. This is even more alarming as some psychiatrists participate in this kind of defamation. Obviously, this is part of a „cultural war“ which widely goes on - under the German name „Kulturkampf“ even in the United States (see page 5). It is  bordering upon a new kind of psychiatric abuse for political ends. The connections with our original theme of Soviet psychiatric abuse are manifold.