Through a glass, darkly : Nazi era illuminations of psychiatry, human Rights and rights violations

This chapter and its companion (Chapter 38) evaluate the lessons and legacies of the Nazi era for human rights and mental health: specifically, understandings, practices, and remedial and preventive responses related to genocide, mass human rights violations, and state-based abuses of psychiatry and mental health. Nazism is not a closed episode. Like nuclear war and environmental destruction, It warrants universal concern. Mental health and helping professionals have played key roles in waging the 'war on terror'. A British doctor recently (2007) attempted to bomb Glasgow airport. Che Guevara, Radovan Karadjic, and doctors supporting Hamas provide other examples of doctors or psychatrists allied to state violence. Though it is imperative that helping professionals ponder professional abuses and their origins, contemporary bioethics generally neglects this record (Caplan 2007:70-71). Individual professionals may exploit patients in a manner universally regarded as criminal or in breach of codes, but also may follow political-institutional or state-based rules without necessarily knowing (or perhaps 'knowing'-that is, they are denying at some level) that their behaviours are abusive. Such systemic abuses frequently involve loyalties divided between patients and third parties-in this case, the state. (Corporations are considered elsewhere (Philip Mitchell, Chapter 18)).