The choice of Berlin as a location for the 17th World Congress of Psychiatry is a provocation. Since 1939 the systematic mass murder in psychiatric institutions and asylums (the “Aktion T4”) was planned and organized in Berlin. That was the blueprint for the subsequent murders in the gas chambers of extermination camps in occupied Poland starting in 1941.

The doctors used the Nazi regime to implement their plans for the elimination of
those who they declared to be untreatable. In professional circles these plans were discussed a long time in advance. The medical diagnosis led to a death sentence. The killings survived the end of the Nazi regime and continued until 1949. Thereafter lobotomy (brain mutilation) and electric shocks experienced their bloom, regularly taking place against the will of the victims. Today, coercion and violence is an integral part of psychiatric procedure. Forced incarceration, fixation, isolation, forced medications and forced electric shocks still exist until today. These facts have also been criticized in the assesment of the German State Report in Geneva.

A World Congress in Germany, and especially in Berlin, demonstrates solidarity with German psychiatry in order to whitewash its crimes.

      We therefore call for a protest against the WPA 2017 Congress in Berlin.