Eugenics considered the mentally ill to be the most unfit
In the eugenic view of humankind, the severely mentally ill were seen as among the most unfit. Negroes, the poor, criminals—they were all viewed as unfit to some degree. But insanity, it was argued, was the end stage of a progressive deterioration in a family’s germ plasm. “Madness, when it finally breaks out, represents only the last link in the psychopathic chain of constitutional heredity, or degenerate heredity,” said Austrian psychiatrist Richard Von Krafft-Ebing. Henry Maudsley, the most prominent English psychiatrist of his day, conceptualized insanity in similar terms. The insane patient “gets it from where his parents got it—from the insane strain of the family stock: the strain which, as the old saying was, runs in the blood, but which we prefer now to describe as a fault or flaw in the germ plasm passing by continuity of substance from generation to generation.”
There’s a few things to consider here. Psychiatry plays a moralizing role for society by defining behavior in terms of normal and abnormal, and psychiatric diagnosis’ can distort and control dissenting information by regarding rebellious behavior as a product of mental illness. And if we consider on top of this that psychiatric diagnosis is dependent on subjective judgement rather than empirical tests, then this means that psychiatry, in conjunction with eugenics, i believe was being used simply as a means to reify societal beliefs and social norms and then have an excuse to eradicate those who do not conform to these supposed laws of behavior, with psychiatrist serving as societies the judges as to who gets to reproduce or live.
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 76). New York, NY: Basic Books.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychiatry Status:☀️