Magazine of the INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION AGAINST PSYCHIATRIC ASSAULT No. 2 – September 2004

A debate about torture?

By René Talbot Coercive psychiatry and the torture debate in the western world

The
emphasis of this edtion of “ZWANG”, “Coercive psychiatry is
torture”, serves to prove that the following Articles in the statutes
of IAAPA and the „Irren-Offensive“ do not only show the subjective
view of the psychiatric survivors but also describe a valid “objective”
situation:
“We declare as forms of torture all psychiatric persecution, psychiatric
incarceration and psychiatrically forced bodily acts and intrusions, such
as treatment with drugs, electroshock, psycho-surgery, four point restraint
and others.” Since the existence of coercive psychiatry, individuals
everywhere in the world have again and again designated these measures as
being torture, independently of whether the medical personnel designated the
person as being “incapacitated” and the place of these measures
a “medical institution” named a “hospital”.

With this proof
the monstrosity of coercive psychiatry can be grasped conceptually; it means
no more nor less than that by applying the analysis of “torture”,
the whole occupation network of coercive psychiatry becomes criminalized:
The psychiatrists who write the expert opinions, their subordinates helpful
in the practice of torture; and the judges, who actually use the margin of
judgement of the right to illness against the person concerned.

In order to clarify
the dimensions of the horror of coercive psychiatry, it is very helpful to
consider the current torture debates in the USA and Germany: on the one hand
Abu Ghraib as a symbol for apparently dozens of torture centers of the US
secret services world-wide and on the other hand the opening of criminal procedures
against the vice-president of the Frankfurt police, Mr. Daschner. In both
cases the official phraseology seems to uphold the idea that torture (in international
expert jargon is: “cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment”) is
and remains a crime.

In 2002 in the
USA the president and the Ministry of Defense got an judicial expert opinion
made which tries to divide torture into a permissible and an inadmissible
form of intimidation. Here it is interesting to note that the forced administering
of “mind altering drugs”, even with this attempt to legitimize certain
forms of torture, is regularly regarded as an extreme form of torture. See
the report of the NY Times on June 27, 2004 “Word for to Word” by
Kate Zernike: www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/weekinreview/27word.html

In Germany, regarding
Mr. Daschners threats of physical abuse to the murderer and kidnapper, the
spotlight was more on the circumstances of the torture, namely the false hope
at the time of being able to save the life of a child. More important however
for our context is the widely spread judicial agreement of the despicableness
of the act and the important fact: torture is already torture, even if one
is only threatened with it. The option of being consigned to a locked psychiatric
ward and the usual coercive treatment there is already coercion, which makes
the whole psychiatric system a Gulag, a “dungeon system with torture
regime” (Foucault).

Compulsion, the
threat of the use of force and applied force, are thus located in the center
of the term “torture”. It is this compulsion to extract a confession
which makes torture out of coercive psychiatry, the compulsion to extract
the confession of recognizing a non-existent “illness” (“disease
insight”), the compulsion is thus to extract a slanderous lie. The objection,
that if one equates coercive psychiatry with the extreme physical, sometimes
even deadly forms of torture, these bad crimes and/or the effect on their
victims would inadmissibly be played down, must be strongly opposed. On the
one hand torturers use ever cleverer methods, in order to leave no physical
traces of the torture after the victim is released, so that those bad crimes
can be more intensely pursued yet that is not played down. On the other hand
it is precisely the attention on the “unspectacular”, almost “harmless”
seeming torture which presents a protection from their more drastic forms,
because in this way the attention and the recognition of dehumanising actions
is sharpened as a whole.

Although now
in Germany, as in the USA, the softening of the term “torture” was
publicly debated, it was finally also rejected by the White House. Once again
that throws more light on the enormous blind spot which prevails in the perception
of psychiatric coercive practices. Even without the hope – as with Mr.
Daschner – of protecting a kidnapped child from death, people continue
to be locked up, threatened, humiliated, cruelly and inhumanely bound to a
bed, administered mind altering drugs by force, given forced injections and
even forcibly electro-shocked. All of these would be recognised crimes of
the state agencies if they were not applied to persons arbitrarily declared
to be “mentally ill”. Applied to individuals who, 60 years after
the end of Nazi rule, thereby – from a legal point of view – still have the
status of sub-humans (“untermenschen”).

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