APPLICATION FORM

STATUTES

UN: "Insanity defence" must be-

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights acceptetd our demand put forth in our statutes article 2.(B) h. to abolich the UN resolution 46/119 of December 17, 1991 on the treatment of "mental patients": In a report to the General assembly of UN of "on enhancing awareness and understanding of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities" the High Commissioner definitly states, that

• the Insanity defense "must be abolished" (see Article 47 below)
• and that the "Convention radically departs " from the UN resolution ...on treatment of "mental patients" (see Article 48 below)
• that all mental health laws using the pretex "as the likelihood of them posing a danger to themselves or others" "must be abolished" (see Article 49 below)

"47. In the area of criminal law, recognition of the legal capacity of persons with disabilities requires abolishing a defence based on the negation of criminal responsibility because of the existence of a mental or intellectual disability.41 Instead disability-neutral doctrines on the subjective element of the crime should be applied, which take into consideration the situation of the individual defendant. Procedural accommodations both during the pretrial and trial phase of the proceedings might be required in accordance with article 13 of the Convention, and implementing norms must be adopted.5. Right to liberty and security of the person

48. A particular challenge in the context of promoting and protecting the right to liberty and security of persons with disabilities is the legislation and practice related to health care and more specifically to institutionalization without the free and informed consent of the person concerned (also often referred to as involuntary or compulsory institutionalization). Prior to the entrance into force of the Convention, the existence of a mental disability represented a lawful ground for deprivation of liberty and detention under international human rights law.42 The Convention radically departs from this approach by forbidding deprivation of liberty based on the existence of any disability, including mental or intellectual, as discriminatory. Article 14, paragraph 1 (b), of the Convention unambiguously states that “the existence of a disability shall in no case justify a deprivation of liberty”. Proposals made during the drafting of the Convention to limit the prohibition of detention to cases “solely” determined by disability were rejected.43 As a result, unlawful detention encompasses situations where the deprivation of liberty is grounded in the combination between a mental or intellectual disability and other elements such as dangerousness, or care and treatment. Since such measures are partly justified by the person’s disability, they are to be considered discriminatory and in violation of the prohibition of deprivation of liberty on the grounds of disability, and the right to liberty on an equal basis with others prescribed by article 14.

49. Legislation authorizing the institutionalization of persons with disabilities on the grounds of their disability without their free and informed consent must be abolished. This must include the repeal of provisions authorizing institutionalization of persons with disabilities for their care and treatment without their free and informed consent, as well as provisions authorizing the preventive detention of persons with disabilities on grounds such as the likelihood of them posing a danger to themselves or others, in all cases in which such grounds of care, treatment and public security are linked in legislation to an apparent or diagnosed mental illness....

41 Often referred to as “insanity defence”.
42 See for reference the Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and the Improvement of Mental Health Care, A/RES/46/119, available at: http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/46/a46r119.htm.
43 In the course of the third session of the Ad Hoc Committee on a Comprehensive and Integral International Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities, proposals were made to add the word “solely” to then draft article 10, paragraph 1 (b), so it would read “any deprivation of liberty shall be in conformity with the law and in no case shall be based solely on disability.

The report in English | French | Russian | Spanish | Chinese | Arabic

Article in Haaretz / Information on the exhibition "Deadly Medicine" in the Jewish Museum/Berlin and the Hygiene Museum/Dresden

The 50th anniversary edition of the epochal book by Thomas Szasz "The Myth of Mental Illness" is launched in February 2010. Read the new foreword by Thomas Szasz here.

Thomas Szasz conducts 90th birthday seminar in Europe: 'The Myth of Mental IIlness' 50 years On.
Inner Circle Seminar 153 (13 June 2010)

Archive of previous articles
in the Szasz Column

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#18

"The Shame of Medicine:
Alan Turing Redux"

by Thomas Szasz
The Freeman, Volume: 60•Issue:2 • 3/10

In my May 2009 column I recounted the tragic story of the medical-legal persecution of the famed British mathematician and World War II code breaker Alan Turing. In June, John Graham-Cumming, a British computer programmer, created a petition on the “No. 10 Downing Street” website asking for a government apology for Turing’s mistreatment. On September 10, Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology on behalf of the U.K. government, stating, in part:

Brown was clueless. Turing had nothing in common with LGBT activists. Comfortable in his identity as a homosexual man, he killed himself because the “treatment” “transgendered” him in ways he did not expect and was not told about. Calling Turing “a quite brilliant mathematician” was another of Brown’s gaucheries. Turing, Brown continued, “was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely.” Would Turing have been less deserving of belated compassion if he had been just another Englishman caught in the web of his country’s anti-homosexual laws?

“Laws,” warned Solon, the sixth-century B. C. Athenian philosopher, “are the spider’s webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.” The special irony of the Turing case is that he was not treated as any ordinary violator of the prohibition against gay sex would have been: He was allowed to choose between imprisonment and “medical treatment.” He made the wrong choice. Despite his high intelligence and familiarity with medical crimes in the Third Reich, Turing failed to understand that medical criminals abound in all modern societies, most insidiously in so-called “free societies.”

Brown says that Turing was “treated inhumanely.” That’s not exactly true. He could have gone to prison, where he could have worked, had visitors, and would have been unmolested by psychiatrists, and from which he would have emerged physically and mentally undamaged, as had Gandhi, Nehru, Castro, and many other prominent historical figures. Turing was treated inhumanely because he as well as his doctors failed to heed George Washington’s famous warning: “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

Physicians who work for the government’s law-enforcement apparatus do not practice therapeutic medicine and are not healers. They practice anti-therapeutic prosecution, governed by the principle Primum nocere (first, do harm): They are professional injurers who define the harm they do as help. Such doctors are medical criminals, the gravity of their crimes depending on the particular laws they help to enforce and the methods they use.
Therapeutic Scapegoating

Turing was blind to the nature of the political system that victimized him. Brown is blind to the nature of the political system over which he presides and the fundamental similarities between it and the system he criticizes. Many more people are now persecuted in the United Kingdom (and in the United States) for “abusing” drugs than were persecuted for “abusing” sex. Neither of these modern (quasi-religious) scapegoat-persecutions could have occurred without the approval and assistance of medical professionals. Yet it does not seem to occur to Brown to mention the role of doctors in the Turing affair, much less blame them or suggest that they, too, owe apologies to Turing and others.

German politicians have apologized for the Holocaust. American politicians have apologized for slavery and post-Pearl Harbor concentration camps. Psychiatrists have not apologized for their institutionalized misdeeds. The American Psychiatric Association (or the Royal College of Psychiatrists) is not about to declare:

As an aside, it should be noted that the past medical treatment of homosexuals had included procedures such as surgical sterilization, carbon dioxide inhalation (a kind of suffocation by “gas-boarding”), and electric shock therapy.

Psychiatrists will never apologize for their crimes because they never acknowledge responsibility for harming people. For example, when criticized for depriving people of liberty, they assert that they do not commit mentally ill persons to insane asylums—judges do. “Mental health professionals must understand,” explains Robert Simon in Psychiatry and Law for Clinicians, “that it is not they who make commitment decisions about patients. Commitment is a judicial decision that is made by the court or by a mental health commission.” Psychiatrists call ordinary criminals who deny responsibility for their misdeeds “psychopaths” and say they have no conscience. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, and the press call psychiatrists who deny responsibility for 300 years of psychiatric slavery “conscientious physicians” and honor them as medical healers. Reality, not just history, is written by the victors.

As long as psychiatrists are accepted as medical specialists possessing the privilege to forcibly classify persons as patients and impose tortures on them as treatments, they will not apologize. Acknowledging that the classification of homosexuality as a disease was a mistake would open a Pandora’s box of doubts about the disease status of currently fashionable mental illnesses.

Brown ended by exulting, “This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality, and long overdue. . . . Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was convicted, under homophobic laws, were treated terribly.”

Turing was not a victim of homophobia. Many persons are still “homophobic”—and “phobic” as well of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and atheists, among others—but they have no power to deprive the persons they fear and hate of liberty. Turing was the victim of medical doctors who declared male homosexuals ill and declared torturing them a form of humane “medical treatment.”

The Freeman, Volume: 60•Issue:2 • 3/10

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Thomas Szasz (tszasz@aol.com) is professor of psychiatry emeritus at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. His latest books, both from Syracuse University Press, are The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays and Psychiatry: The Science of Lies.

Dr. Szasz latest book: The Science of Lies (Syracuse University Press) 2 Reviews at amazon.com