We are putting the banner in place.
(In the background is the famous Dresden cigarette factory Yanidze)

World Psychiatric Association Congress
on Coercive Psychiatry
Dresden,
6th – 8th June 2007

For three days (and nights) the second most important topic besides the G8 summit in
the German media – the main newspapers and state TV-channels – was our
humorous enterprise of promoting the nomination for the Nobel medicine
Prize of Mr. Gert Postel, a postman who decided one day to be a false
psychiatrist, for his experimental proof that there is no such thing as
“mental illness”. Since we invited Mr. Postel to lecture about his
experience in the City Hall in Dresden, the German media who was
attracted to this event covered at the same time our protest against
this congress, delegating the World Congress itself to a background
role of our activities!…

Gert Postel impersonated a psychiatrist, applied for work and
was accepted, later even promoted to head psychiatrist, and in the
meantime invented “mental illnesses” which were accepted by the other
psychiatrists. He was discovered – by chance – got sentenced to prison
and now has the time of his life selling his book relating his
adventure and being very popular in Germany. So we invited Gert Postel
to be part of our protest against the World Congress. Additionally, by
promoting his nomination for a Nobel Medicine Prize, we wanted to
emphasize the truth which he uncovered by his lie: that there is no
such thing as “mental illness”, rather only an empty and mystifying use
of jargon.

The point about Gert Postel is that psychiatrists and their
“mental health consumers” present themselves as caring for the welfare
of the patients, and here the patients are running a campaign to
nominate an imposter for a Nobel Medicine Prize. The other point is
that the Gert Postel experiment is a completing counterpoint of the famous
Rosenhahn experiment.(This is a link to the full text which
Stanford University refused to publish!) In this experiment, students
pretended to be mental patients and hospitalized themselves and were
diagnosed accordingly. Persistant rumor claimed that Foucault declared
this experiment worthy of a Nobel Prize for Humor in Science. Of
course, fake patients we can have by the dozen, the cleverness of the
Postel experiment is the proof that also on the other side, you don’t
need to be a psychiatrist – i.e. a person who studied medicine – to
churn out diagnoses. That means that both sides are fake. We just
needed to wait until a person would show up in the role of psychiatry
and publicly admit that he is a fake.

Last month, in a response to our outcry against the violation
of human rights, the media obtained from the organizer of the WPA
congress, Thomas Kallert, a public statement that “Naturally,
coercive measures in psychiatry are justified.” since we knew that
several of our colleagues are going to participate in this congress, we
felt it is important to notify them in advance about this official
statement of the organizer. Apparently this did not deter them. While
we put our protest banner outside the congress hall, David Oaks from
the North American organization “Mindfreedom” came out of it to us
shouting why it is important to collaborate with the psychiatrists. On
the right you can see him trying to convince Alice… One reason for
his shouting was soon discovered: he was recording himself in order to
broadcast “Live from Dresden” to his internet radio. I figure out that
the shouting meant to prove to his intended listeners that he is also
protesting… Another reason was discovered after seeing the SCI website:
photographic documentation of the collaboration between, from left:
Prof. Juan Mezzich (President of the World Psychiatric Association),
“our” David Oaks and Judy Chamberlin, Prof. Thomas Kallert
(Torture-Congress Organizer) and last but not least: Peter Lehmann
(from the European Network of Users and Survivors). We feel that this picture below
deserves a special title so we are announcing here a world-wide contest, with 3 prizes of up to
50€, to find the appropriate title. See the results
here.

The German media constantly confronted the
psychiatrist Kallert, who organized this evil WPA congress, with Gert
Postel’s claim that there is no such thing as mental illness and
anybody, even a postman, can  be a psychiatrist. Kallert had no
other reply than to say: “Gert Postel was a convicted imposter.”
To the best of  my knowledge, this is the first time anywhere in
the world that the mainstream media ever put this question to a
psychiatrist, and one that organized a world psychiatric congress at
that. So it is a record of some kind.

And in an even more bizarre reaction to our action, the
German consumer association, which unshamingly participated in the
torturer’s congress, issued a statement to the media, complaining that
our action would be “a slap
in the face of those with psychological health problems. The allegation
that there is no mental illness would degrade them to simulators”,
proving that without this rhetoric of “illness” they cannot be truly
sick! After a more careful examination on the internet of this press
notice, it turned out that it was composed by an organization of
psychiatrists and social workers at the direct request of the organizer.
When we settled in front of the congress center, we noticed the low
attendance of this event.
Our group separated into three, one holding the big banner, one
occupying the tent, on the other side
of the road, with the slogan “Forced treatment is torture! Here in this
center it is being perfected.” The third distributed flyers.

We were referred
to in the media as “Postel fans” – see below.
You must admit this term is a much nicer one than to be described as a
mental health consumer.

In the afternoon we folded the banner and the tent

and we walked through the streets of the center of Dresden with our
posters until we reached the Dresden City Hall.

The crown of the media coverage of our Postel
enterprise was the state TV-channel MDR news, broadcasted at prime
time. There you can even notice inside the empty halls of the WPA
congress the lonely  stand of the courageous “critics”, who braved
themselves to enter into this lion’s den of psychiatrists to promote
whatever … You can also compare the flocking of the city folks
(approx. 400) to the lecture of the false psychiatrist Gert Postel with
the low attendance to the WPA congress. The TV interviewed some of them
about their reason for attending his readinig. (see the TV report here:
http://www.iaapa.de/mdr_postel.mpg
)

After the
reading, several of the audience remained to discuss with Gert Postel
personally.

The lesson all of us activists around the world can learn, is
that  with humour and inventiveness you can hijack a very well
financed event which is accepted by international and national bodies.
Also that we can advocate our stand without demeaning ourselves by
joining in with self-proclaimed psychiatric torturers.
Since only the Postel experiment forced psychiatrists to answer the
media questions about forced treatment being justified. It is important
to support this nomination of him for the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
Please fill out this form
here and send it.
For those of you who can read Hebrew, you can read and see pictures in
our association blog here.

Asked for his statement by
the above newspaper, the organizer and speaker of the WPA Congress,
Prof. Kallert, let the cat out of the bag by making the following
declaration:

Thus Professor
Kallert himself unmasked the fact that the invitation of “critics” of
coercive treatment was only a cunning evasive maneuver. The actual goal
of the congress however was never to place this practice of coercion
and violence in psychiatry in question but instead to come to an
agreement on an international level on how the coercive methods can be
perfected and standardized. The is exactly the goal which we strongly
criticize and we therefore demand the strict termination of all
psychiatric coercion – be it “coercive treatment”, “compulsory
custodian-ship” or “only” involuntary labeling with so-called
psychiatric “diagnoses”. 

We are of the opinion
that psychiatric coercive treatment is a despicable form of torture or
comes close to being torture.  According to
the Anti-Torture Convention of the United Nations, coercive psychiatric
treatment fulfills all criteria for the definition of torture:

1. Humans are subjected
   to great physical and mental harm by being locked up or the compulsory
   mechanism of a guardianship (so-called “support”), by the forced
   administering of harmful drugs (psychopharmacological drugs),
   electroshocking (so-called ECT), binding (so-called
   “four-point-restraint”), by slandering as allegedly “mentally ill”, by
   the loss of dignity and one’s self-determination and lasting social and
   physical consequences of coercive treatment. 
   
2. It is not only a
   matter of persons just being tormented by others, it happens on the
   basis of national laws such as the “PsychKG” (German mental health
   laws) and custodianship law and is also exercised by “persons with
   official status” e.g. the social psychiatric service.  
3. Psychiatric coercive
   treatment fulfills the criteria of the UN definition by torture in as
   much as humans are intimidated and/or forced into a confession, with
   the goal of  “illness insight” so that the
   victim remains permanently under the control and thereby becoming a
   “customer” of psychiatry in order to standardize people’s behavior and
   thoughts. Psychiatry is thereby an instrument of power and social
   control. (Here you can read a detailed account of the direct proximity
   of coercive psychiatry and torture: “Coercive psychiatry, a torture
   system”:  www.iaapa.de/zwang2/halmi_english.htm).

Psychiatric
coercive treatment cannot be justified as medical or therapeutic
treatment, because informed consent is necessary for it. The
self-determination over one’s own body is an inviolable human right.
The only purpose of so-called psychiatric “diagnoses” is to divide
adults into two categories: “humans” and the “mentally ill” and to rob
the latter of their human rights, in order – under the pretext of the
medical treatment – to make them submissive.


History
has proven how the medical libel of the psychiatric diagnosis
“Schizophrenia” can lead to criminal acts: the psychiatrist Eugen
Bleuler, inventor of this term, committed the typically Nazi crime of
coerced sterilizations, based on this
diagnosis.

Nobody
demonstrated the complete void of contents of psychiatric jargon better
than Gert Postel. The postman Gert Postel successfully impersonated a
psychiatrist and was promoted to the position of head physician of a
Saxonian psychiatric institute. As a result of this undercover
“adventure” he knows the power apparatus of coercive psychiatry from
the inside. So he can report from the inside of a power which is based
only on the mystification of a non-existent knowledge and the
gullibilty of its subjects. We therefore call for the nomination of
Gert Postel for the Nobel Prize for Medicine:

It is time to
apologize.

In the long
ongoing discussion on the responsibility of science regarding crimes
against humanity, one institution was omitted:
The Nobel Prize.

We, the signatories, call for remembrance of the immoral granting of
the Nobel Prize for lobotomy to Antonio Egas Moniz in 1949. Lobotomy,
especially being applied alongside force and violence in psychiatry,
was an obvious crime against humanity. Having it rewarded with the
Nobel Prize gave this cruelty the aura of good medical practice and
promoted its use.

As the Nobel Prize cannot be recalled, we appeal to the Nobel Prize
Committee and Assembly as well as to the universities which are
entitled to create a nomination of the candidates for the Nobel Prize,
to apologize for this by a deed of its own: namely by rewarding Gert
Postel, a successful impostor of a senior doctor of psychiatry, with a
Nobel Prize in Medicine. Since 1981 he has thrice proved the mere lie
of any psychiatric knowledge and thus denounced it as an act against
humanity. He proved with his existential experiment that within science
there is a moral voice which is indeed necessary to limit the
possibilities of science-based techniques and medical practice.

This aspect of Gert Postel’s work has to be rewarded, despite all
controversy as to whether or not he used criminal methods
in falsifying a non-existant doctor’s license in psychiatry and
therefore diametrically opposing a principal dogma of the medical
profession.

Gert Postel accomplished the famous David L. Rosenhan experiment and
proved that it could be repeated at any time just as well on the
doctors’ side and therefore gives empirical evidence that there is no
such thing as „mental illness“.

Resolution
of the General Assembly of the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft
Psychiatrie-Erfahrener e.V. on 15.5.2007
Resolution of the General Assembly of the International
Association
Against Psychiatric Assault on 24.4.2007
Resolution of the Plenum
of the Werner-Fuss-Zentrum on 23.5.2007
Resolution of the Board of the Landesverband
Psychiatrie-Erfahrnerer
Berlin-Brandenburg e.V. and  Irren-Offensive e.V.

News
flash

Gert Postel,
48 year-old imposter, is to
receive the Nobel Prize for
Medicine. That at least is the opinion of the Federal Association of
Psychiatric Survivors (“BPE”),
which started an appropriate campaign together with other associations.
Already
two years ago the “BPE”
determined in a resolution that Postel
had proved “with his existential experiments several times the fact
that
there is no psychiatric knowledge, but is rather only a deception,
based on a
fraudulent feigning of scientific by use of jargon”. With
“existential experiments” the association describes how the postman
with falsified certifications procured employment as a physician and in
the
nineties was for two years a “Head Physician” and
“psychiatrist” in Saxonian Zschardrass.
For this the Leipziger regional
court condemned Gert Postel
to four years detention.

Imposter as hero

The
false doctor Gert Postel
appears today in Dresden at the protest agains the Psychiatry Congress.

By Heinrich
Löbbers

This would be the
crowning event of one of
the most curious careers in the whole country. A trained postman who
made a career as a false doctor and convicted imposter is to receive
the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
That at least is the demand of the Federal Association of Psychiatric
Survivors (Bundesarbeits­gemeinschaft
Psychiatrie-Erfahrener).
According to them, Gert Postel had apparently proved that there is no
such thing as psychiatric knowledge and that psychiatry is directed
against humanity.

In fact, in the 90’s
with false references
Postel hoaxed his way into the position of Head Physician at the Mental
Clinic in Zschadraß near Leipzig and nearly even became Head
Physician of the psychiatric hospital in Arnsdorf near Dresden. His
imposter escapades made for quite some embarrassment.

The story of the
Nobel Prize is a crazy
idea, which certainly won’t be followed up. However, Postel is honoured
once again. Today he has his big appearance in Dresden – as patron of
the anti-psychiatry movement. He is to lead the protest of the
“psychiatric survivors” against the international congress organized by
Prof. Thomas Kallert from Dresden. Several hundred doctors plan to
discuss coercive treatment there. Kallert is of the opinion that
coercive measures are certainly justified, however for the protesters
it is nothing but torture.

This was a project
for Postel, who in
the meantime had sat out a jail sentence, wrote a book called “Playing
Doctor” (“Doktorspiele”) and is currently writing a second one. The
48-year-old, who now lives in Marburg, isn’t at all regretful but
rather proud of his professional career. He did a “society critical
thing” and boasts at having held up a mirror to psychiatry.

Today in Dresden he
will read from his
book and pronounce “critical comments” on the congress of the “World
Psychiatric Association”. “The Power of Psychiatry” is the name of the
event, for which the council
hall is being provided at the City Hall at 19h.

In addition to this,
protest
demonstrations will be held in the next few days in the vicinity of the
Congress Center.

From the
viewpoint of the “Psychiatric
Suvivors”, Gert Postel “provided empirical evidence that there is no
such thing as mental illness”. In their eyes, the imposter is a hero
who now even has his own fan club in the internet. In Dresden his fans
will be able to pay tribute to him personally.

A fantastic report showing a full house in
the City Hall in sharp contrast to the almost  empty WPA Congress
and with which absurd jargon one can become a Head Psychiatric
Physician is documented in this news report of a state television
broadcaster. It is Prof. Kallert who is to be thanked for the prompt
confirmation of this fact in the MDR interview. He gives brilliantly
precise information about his knowledge.

• Radio ColoRadio Dresden:
  Interview with René Talbot
  and
  an announcement of the counter-event at the City Hall

• Radio Dreyeckland Freiburg
  on the 1.6. with René Talbot
  and
  an announcement of the counter-event at the City Hall
  and on the 13.6. a report from the lecture of Gert Postel
• Sachsen Radio:
  Interview with Gert Postel and
  an announcement of the counter-event at the City Hall

• Radio Corax Halle:
  Interview with René Talbot on the unfolding of the events

• Dissidentenfunk:on 14.6. with a comprehensive detailing of the event
• Radio Unerhört
  Marburg:
  Interview with Alice Halmi on the unfolding of the events

Deutsche Erklärung
von die-BPE