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Sterilization of mental patients was also once used here in the U.S. -- not just in Nazi Germany.

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Spirit: Is it true that the U.S. eugenics movement deeply influenced Nazi Germany?

Whitaker: Eugenics got its start here in the United States, not in Nazi Germany. So it was here that it was nurtured as a "science." It was here where we first put in social policies based on eugenics. We started saying the mentally ill couldn't marry. We said that the mentally ill have a defective gene, and that mental illness was a single-gene recessive disorder, like blue eyes. They said to keep that "insanity gene" from being passed on, in addition to preventing them from marrying, we need to lock them up.

So asylums changed from places that were, theoretically, shelters and refuges where people could be nursed back to health, which was the original idea in the 1800s. They became places where we would lock up the mentally ill because we didn't want them out on the street where they might have kids and pass on their quote-unquote "insane gene."

As part of that, we started putting people in asylums and not letting them out. As we did that, we started believing that you couldn't ever get better from mental illness. Whereas in the 1800s, you see over 50 percent of people going into a mental asylum being discharged within 12 months, and many never coming back. All of a sudden you see, in the first part of the 20th century, people being put into asylums and not being let out for years or decades until they passed their "reproductive age."

And who are we locking up? Well, it's immigrants who are more likely to be put in asylums, it's the poor, it's African Americans. So, in other words, it's everybody but the ruling class, basically, who is most likely to be so labeled and diagnosed and to be put into these asylums for years. Now if you follow this forward and look at how eugenics absolutely shaped and, in a way, continues to shape our treatment, it's that we devalued those people. Under eugenics policies we said, "They're a threat to us." We started talking about the mentally ill as a social cancer that needs to be cut out of the body politic. In fact, it's here, in this country, where doctors first started talking about killing the mentally ill, mercy killing.

Spirit: Yes. Mercy killing "with proper gases" in "euthanistic institutions" as one American doctor put it.

Whitaker: Yeah, with appropriate gases. As early as 1921, a Connecticut legislature tours an asylum, and a man who was manacled to an iron bed is exhibited as a case for "mercy killing." And this is reported in the New York Times as absolutely understandable. There's no outrage. This is all well before Hitler came to power.

Spirit: And prominent psychiatrists parroted the eugenics line that mental patients were genetically deficient and argued for compulsory sterilization?

Whitaker: Oh, absolutely! Certainly, forced sterilizations had a lot of support among mainstream psychiatrists. I will say that, as the eugenics movement started rolling in the 1920s and really got going, you did have a splinter group of psychiatrists starting to say that it was awful. So you really see psychiatry bifurcate in the late 1920s and 1930s, and some starting to protest against it. But by and large, there are certainly plenty of psychiatrists who are giving support to this idea of forced sterilization and they're doing it.

Spirit: Some of these practices were then emulated in Nazi Germany by their psychiatrists and carried out full force.

Whitaker: Well yeah, exactly. You follow the dominoes forward. What happens is the Nazi movement comes to power in 1933 and the eugenicists that are part of Hitler's government have close ties to American eugenicists. They even talk about going to school on California's sterilization program and - this is fascinating -- the German Nazis say that California has been doing a good job of sterilizing its mentally ill, but there's not enough protection, not enough due process with the California way of doing it!

They wanted to make sure there's some due process in Nazi Germany. They actually said they're going to make their sterilization program more just, more legal. So they thought they were putting in place a more humane and more legal program for forced sterilization. And now they start sterilizing people in good numbers. Well, now the American eugenicists start complaining that the Germans are beating us at our own game.

Spirit: Our eugenicists actually envied the Nazis for outperforming them in sterilizing psychiatric clients?

Whitaker: Absolutely. Our eugenicists here are complaining that they're getting ahead of us. So we actually sent people over there to study how Nazi Germany is ramping up their sterilization process. Who is the first group that Nazi Germany finally does kill? It's the mentally ill. That's where euthanasia got started. Then, of course, they expanded it to Jews and others, but it began with the mentally ill.

So you follow that story forward, and what you have here is an American nourishment of a belief system that horribly devalues the mentally ill. And then you see social policies arise out of that devaluation - forced sterilization and segregation from society. Then you see Nazi Germany pick up on that and implement it. And in those early years of Nazism, 1933, '34, '35, you don't see America saying that it's terrible. American eugenicists were saying we've got to keep up with the Germans!

Something else that's quite amazing. When did sterilizations peak in this country? In the 1940s and 1950s. As we fought the Nazis in the 1940s, we didn't even look into our own selves and see that our own sterilization programs were part and parcel of the same thing.

Spirit: Part of the same value system that looked down on mental patients as subhuman?

Whitaker: Exactly. So we continued with our sterilizations after the Germans stopped. And, in fact, these brain-damaging therapeutics - forced electroshock, metrazol convulsive therapy and lobotomy - they definitely arise out of the eugenics era where you devalue these people.

Well, the Germans, after World War II ended, were trying to come to grips with their Nazi past, and many Germans looked upon lobotomy with horror, because they saw it as consistent with that eugenic past. But meanwhile, we were treating it as a form of medical brain surgery. We were still forcibly sterilizing patients, repetitious electroshock, lobotomy - we didn't examine our own eugenic past, unfortunately.

Source: Psychiatry's Untold Story: An Interview With Robert Whitaker

See also: What They Left Behind


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