Fascism, Eugenics and Psychiatry (2009)

Today the threat of fascism has receded. The link between the cult of the superman and medicine is eugenics. Medicine in its fascist apparition manifests itself in the form of psychiatry. Eugenics or selective breeding to create a superman weeds out the weak or the political dissident. Truly, psychiatry represents the awful horror of the Apocalypse standing in the place of curative medicine.

In 1856, Gladstone, a liberal and contemporary of Darwin, manifested his own worldview of the ‘Survival of the Fittest’ with his Lunatic Asylums Act, Ireland. Psychiatric hospitals were built by the landlords to replace the fever hospitals and workhouses.

At the level of ‘nursing’ the cult is one of hate, violence and slander as the nurses provide the doctors with the raw materials of their assessments. No depravity is too much for these self-appointed guardians of public health and safety. In Germany between 1939 and 1945 violence turned into the outright murder of those deemed to be ‘mentally sub-normal’.

In the psychiatric hospitals, one often encounters the religious not just the over-keen but religious men and women who have, in a previous time and place, found themselves in the Gulags. In Ireland, Britain and Germany, they are judged by the middle class to be suffering from ‘religious mania’ and confined without trial.
In 1856, the large numbers of Irish Republicans who took root in the United States attracted the intervention of Gladstone who also passed a Coercion Bill against illegal drilling and the possession of arms. The Fenians in Ireland soon filled the psychiatric prisons. In our times, Republicans in Leitrim knew the Sligo Psychiatric Hospital as the Sligo-Leitrim Hotel.

In the times before licensing laws were properly established, poteen (or illicit spirits) poisoned and thereby provided the psychiatric hospitals with a lot of their cannon-fodder.

In modern times as the secret state records many political dissidents are locked in with the genuinely mentally ill i.e. those who harm themselves, abuse alcohol or take street narcotics. For the genuinely mentally ill, the asylum provides a haven from the pressures of life.

Fundamental change is required. Compulsory confinement must be restricted to those who have been sentenced to such places by a Magistrates Court. A medical audit commission composed of Trade Unionsts,(well-paid) lawyers and general practitioners must decide on whether the human horror of premature death in psychiatry should lead to the imprisonment (for life) of psychiatrists.