Psychiatry possesses a built-in capacity for abuse that is much greater than in any other area of medicine. Politicians realized that and abused psychiatry for blaming their opponents as mentally sick, retarded and dangerous. It was happening all around the world but was mostly prominent under authoritarian and totalitarian socialist regimes. Now it became a part of the arsenal of the political Left here which is completely crazed about the counterrevolutionary results of the last presidential elections.
Following the tradition of Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao and Brezhnev “27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts” including Noam Chomsky and Gail Sheehy, who are as much of being psychiatrists as I am an Emperor of China, published a political pamphlet “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (by Bandy X. Lee, Robert Jay Lifton, Gail Sheehy, William J. Doherty, Noam Chomsky, et al).
It is the exactly same type of abuse of psychiatry as was condemned by the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA). The Section 7, of APA’s Principles of Medical Ethics says:
“On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement”. Known as the “Goldwater principle” it is fully shared by the American Psychological Association.
In gross violation of APA’s Principles of Medical Ethics Anti-Trump political activists masquerading as “scientists” can just “diagnose” someone based on prepared speeches, tweets and TV appearances. Fanatics of the Left see no end in their crusade to trash, defame and remove President Trump from office. Bandy Lee apparently can evaluate someone she’s never met and conclude that Trump is mentally unstable, with the potential of turning violent, even though he’s never demonstrated any of such symptoms.
Diagnosis “in absentia”
During the Nazi era and the Soviet rule political enemies were labeled as “mentally ill” and subjected to inhumane “treatments”. In the period from the 1960s up to 1986, abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was reported to be systematic in the Soviet Union, and even internationally renown Nobel laureates like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov were all declared paranoiacs and schizophrenics. The fame of the chief KGB psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky who gave the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia to numerous “enemies of the people” in absentia including Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky and concluded that they were worthless. The prevalence of Snezhnevsky’s theories directly led to a broadening of the boundaries of disease such that even the mildest behavioral change could be interpreted as indication of mental disorder[1]. His numerous followers in the West definitely include Bandy X. Lee, Robert Jay Lifton, Gail Sheehy, William J. Doherty, Noam Chomsky and other 22 American “psychiatrists” who never met or examined Trump but “diagnosed” his disdain of socialism as a mental disease.
The practice of incarceration and torture of political adversaries in psychiatric hospitals in Eastern Europe, PRC, and the USSR damaged the credibility of psychiatry as a science in these states and internationally. I was blessed to know a great psychiatrist Tom Szasz who led a movement against psychiatry as it was and still used by Bandy Lee and her ilk as another form of coercion and violence against us. I recommend his “Idleness and Lawlessness in the Therapeutic State”[2]to everyone to read as it is a classic of our time. Political abuse of psychiatry taking place in the US today should be condemned; otherwise all of us can discover ourselves restrained in psychiatric wards.
[1] Bloch, Sidney; Reddaway, Peter (1985). Soviet psychiatric abuse: The shadow over world psychiatry. Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-0209-9.
[2] http://www.szasz.com/idleness.pdf
