People With Mental Illness Are Too Easily 'Othered'

"Anyone who is under psychiatric care, or loves someone who is, may want to read the book The Devil's Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today, by Susanne Paola Antonetta. If you care about history, particularly the history of eugenics, you may be interested as well. The book may offer us more respect for the mind, for consciousness, and its diversity."

"It's time to reconsider the influence of Emil Kraepelin on psychiatry, the German psychiatrist who promoted eugenic theories and trained some of the worst in the Nazi medical profession. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, was created by a group of U.S. psychiatrists, many of whom called themselves "neo-Kraepelinians." They embraced Kraepelin's beliefs in a biologically based, brain disease model of mental illness, the same one used to isolate and dehumanize German citize"

Nazi Germany enacted a euthanasia program beginning in the late 1930s that targeted people with mental diagnoses and installed gas chambers inside asylums to exterminate them. The program affected various disabilities, with most victims being adults with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. Medicalized language and the disease lens enabled rapid othering and targeting; Jews became coded as ill and psychopathic vectors, and the rhetoric used against the neurodivergent expanded to justify persecution of others. Emil Kraepelin's eugenic influence and a biologically based brain-disease model shaped psychiatric practice and contributed to isolation and dehumanization. Greater respect for mental diversity and reconsideration of care approaches are needed.

Read at Psychology Today