Campaigns Against Racist Federal Programs by the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology
by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.

The following report was originally published in: Journal of African American Men 1:No. 3, 3-22. Winter 1995/96

The Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology was founded in the early 1970s to organize my international campaign to stop the resurgence of lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery or psychiatric brain surgery. Initially, I had no idea that my campaign would end up focusing on the racist intentions of federally funded biological psychiatrists and neurosurgeons.

I certainly could not have anticipated that twenty years later, the Center would once again be fighting a government-sponsored racist psychiatric program. This report tells the story of the first and second violence initiatives and the Center's efforts to counter them.

THE FIRST VIOLENCE INITIATIVE
In 1971, I discovered that psychiatrists and neurosurgeons were planning and implementing a worldwide revival of psychosurgery. At the time I was not an activist, but I was aware that no one had publicly opposed the first round of lobotomies in the 1940s and 1950s. I decided to take a stand.

My medical training convinced me that improving the techniques of psychiatric surgery-for example, by replacing the scalpel with hot electrodes--would not make the interventions any less damaging. Without harming the brain, there could be no "therapeutic" effect.

The surgery must destroy enough function to flatten the patient's emotions. There is no way to accomplish that without creating more widespread mental devastation, including the relative loss of essential human qualities such as creativity, spontaneity, personal responsibility, self-insight, social sensitivity and awareness, and judgment. Research and my personal experiences would confirm this initial impression.2

Psychosurgery, Individual Vulnerability, and Public Health
Shortly after beginning my opposition to psychosurgery, I came under attack in the national media from an unexpected source, three Harvard professors-psychiatrist Frank Ervin and neurosurgeons Vernon Mark and William Sweet. Sweet was director of neurosurgery at perhaps the most respected hospital in the world, the Massachusetts General. Mark was head of the department of neurosurgery at Boston City Hospital.

As the controversy heated up, a physician who asked for anonymity directed me to published remarks made by the three doctors concerning the use of brain surgery to suppress black urban rioters.

Soon after, in 1973, I received a brown envelope from an unidentified source in the Department of Justice (DOJ). It contained an in-house memo documenting that Mark and Ervin were receiving funds from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for experiments in psychosurgery for violence control.

Meanwhile, Ervin was also receiving money from the Department of Justice for research on genetic factors in violent crime. Sweet was involved as a supporter, co-author, and a member of the private foundation that funneled the government funds to Mark and Ervin.

In a 1967 letter entitled "Role of Brain Disease in Riots and Urban Violence" in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Mark, Sweet and Ervin, much like current violence-initiative advocates, focused on individual vulnerability rather than upon larger social, economic or political factors. They asked, "if slum conditions alone determined and initiated riots, why are the vast majority of slum dwellers able to resist the temptations of unrestrained violence? Is there something peculiar about the violent slum dweller that differentiates him from his peaceful neighbor?"

Mark, Sweet and Ervin went on to suggest that this "peculiarity" was "brain dysfunction." They called for large-scale studies of the inner city to "pinpoint, diagnose, and treat those people with low violence thresholds before they contribute to further tragedies." In a supportive "Medical News" report a few weeks later, JAMA lauded Mark and Ervin's psychosurgery as a "public health" measure.

Mark and Ervin must have felt they were on a heroic, Nobel Prize-winning endeavor-providing a solution to worldwide mayhem, and especially to America's urban uprisings. In 1968, a year in which they were aggressively experimenting on patients, they wrote in Psychiatric Opinion that "brain dysfunction" was "equally important" to "poverty, unemployment and substandard housing" as a cause of urban violence. They estimated that tens of millions of Americans might be violence prone as a result of brain damage.

In testimony on civil disorders before a New York State legislative committee in 1968 (Bird, 1968), William Sweet "said mass violence might be touched off by leaders suffering from temporal seizures of the brain." Sweet made a pitch for the electrical stimulation of surgically implanted electrodes as a method of calming violent people.

Mark, Ervin and Sweet had their greatest PR coup when their work made the cover of Life on June 21, 1968 (Rosenfeld, 1968). Life observed, "The psychobiology approach, new as it is, is gaining adherents so fast that it might almost be called a movement." Life seemed to endorse their efforts toward biomedical social control:

In a slum neighborhood, everyone may live under the same frustrating set of pressures and tensions, but only a small minority will engage in rioting, and even among the rioters only a handful will actually burn down a building or assault another person. Thus psychobiology proceeds on the premise that violent acts are carried out by violent individuals, even if the individuals are part of a mob. The article gave a big spread to Mark and Ervin's psychosurgery for violence.

The fate of Thomas R
In their book, Violence and the Brain (1970), and elsewhere, Mark and Ervin described Thomas R (sometimes called Leonard K) as a young white man largely saved from epilepsy and completely saved from violence by psychosurgery. When describing his outcome, they mention no serious side effects. He was their star patient.

The patient's mother, Mrs. G., read my criticism of Mark and Ervin in the Boston Globe and realized for the first time what had been done to her son. She wrote to me that in reality he had been reduced almost to a "vegetable." Thomas's tragic story is retold in detail in Breggin and Breggin, The War Against Children.

Mark and Ervin Lose Their Funding
As a result of the antipsychosurgery campaign, all of Mark, Ervin and Sweet's federal funding for genetic and psychosurgical experimentation was cut off. As a long-delayed satisfaction to us, we learned this year that the Center's campaign against the DOJ's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) funding for Ervin had brought about a dramatic reversal in official government policy.

A guideline entitled "Use of LEAA funds for Psychosurgery and Medical Research" was signed by the LEAA administrator, Donald E. Santarelli, on June 19, 1974. The guideline declared that any future grant applications for psychosurgery would be denied. It further stipulated that all "medical research," unless risk-free, would be denied and referred instead to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW, now DHHS). It forbid states to use LEAA block grants to do psychosurgery or medical experimentation.

OPERATING ON LITTLE BLACK CHILDREN
As far as we know, Mark and Ervin did not perform their psychosurgery experiments on any African Americans. With more limited political aims, perhaps, another surgeon was operating on numerous black children. When I began researching the return of psychosurgery in the early 1970s, I quickly came upon the work of O.J. Andy, director of neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi-Ole Miss-in Jackson. He was publishing reports on multiple surgical interventions into the brains of small children, ages five to twelve, who were diagnosed as aggressive and hyperactive. Of his 30-40 patients, he wrote me in 1971, most were children.

Before the controversy hit the press, l phoned Andy, who told me he could not recall the race of any of the children. Later I contacted a civil rights attorney in Mississippi who was able to determine that most of them were housed in a segregated black institution for the developmentally disabled. The attorney got onto the wards, where the nurses told him with frustration that Andy had a completely free hand in picking children for psychosurgery.

In 1966 Andy described J. M., age nine, who was "hyperactive, aggressive, combative, explosive, destructive, sadistic." Over a three-year period Andy performed four separate mutilating operations involving at least six lesions with implanted electrodes. The youngster was at first said to be doing well. In a subsequent 1970 article, Andy again claimed that J. M. is no longer so combative and negative. Then he added, "lntellectually, however, the patient is deteriorating."

While Andy did not take an activist political position like Mark, Ervin and Sweet-he did tell B. J. Mason, a reporter for Ebony, that black urban rioters "could have abnormal pathologic brains" and "should undergo tests with whatever capacity we have now."

Following world-wide publicity about his operations during the antipsychosurgery campaign, in 1973 a committee of his peers at the university declared his research experimental. When Andy did not establish appropriate experimental protocols, he was prohibited from operating. Andy himself declared in 1980 that he had been forced to stop operating due to "sociological pressures" in his home community.

VIOLENCE CENTERS THROUGHOUT URBAN AMERICA
In his 1973 State of the State message, California governor Ronald Reagan announced plans for the establishment of a biomedical facility, the Center for the Study of the Reduction of Violence. Supported by state and federal funds, the first center was planned for the psychiatry department at UCLA, headed by Louis Jolyn "Jolly" West, a flamboyant psychiatrist known for his ability to hitch himself to hot topics. An early draft of West's proposed UCLA center described using schools in Chicano and African American neighborhoods to screen for possible genetic defects.

It also mentioned the possibility of psychosurgery. The suggestion of psychosurgery for control of violence was especially menacing in California because Santa Monica neurosurgeon M. H. Brown was strongly advocating it. In a January 22, 1972 letter to the Los Angeles Times, he wrote "It is either this [psychosurgery] or a further escalation of violence and chaos in society that does not serve the best interests of the United States."

Meanwhile, Frank Ervin left the collapsing Boston project and came to join West at UCLA. Ervin's arrival at this critical juncture alerted people to the center's potential dangers. Despite denials from psychiatrists West and Ervin, the discovery of references to genetics and psychosurgery in the original proposal proved politically fatal. Opposed by the Center and a coalition of west coast reformers,3 the planned string of federal violence centers never got off the ground.

The Kaimowitz Trial
In 1972 the State of Michigan and the Lafayette Clinic of Wayne State University began planning an experimental psychosurgery program for the control of violence, using "voluntary" inmates of the state hospital system. Gabe Kaimowitz, at the time a Michigan Legal Services lawyer, heard about the upcoming medical event, and intervened in the court on behalf of "John Doe" and two dozen other state psychiatric inmates scheduled for eventual enrollment in the experimental program.

Comparing Blacks to Bulls
Ernst Rodin was the chief neurologist and the moving force behind the Lafayette Clinic's psychosurgery project. In 1972, Rodin wrote a lengthy speech describing psychosurgery and castration as fitting treatment for some of the violent behavior displayed in the riots that had raged in his city of Detroit. Rodin voiced doubts about doing psychosurgery without sterilization, because with psychosurgery alone "the now hopefully more placid dullard can inseminate other equally dull young females to produce further dull and aggressive offspring."

Rodin argued that children of limited intelligence tend to become violent when they are treated as equals. He wanted them brought up in an "authoritarian life style," and declared that many of them, like aggressive bulls, should be turned into docile oxen by means of castration. In the neurologist's own words, it was time to "get down to cold-blooded medical research dealing with individuals rather than masses."

The Verdict
Kaimowitz invited me to testify as his medical expert and during two days on the stand, I gave a history of state mental hospitals and psychosurgery. I wanted the three judges to understand that state mental hospitals are similar to Nazi concentration camps in how they suppress and humiliate their involuntary inmates; and I wanted to suggest the applicability of the Nuremberg Code.

The Nuremberg Code was originally written into the final opinion of the judges at the first War Crimes Tribunals in postwar Germany. It consists of ten principles for "permissible medical experiments." The first principle states in part that the human subject "should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion" (Trials of War Criminals, 1946-1949, pp. 181-182).

The Nuremberg Code meant that Jewish inmates of concentration camps were not actually volunteers when they seemingly agreed to participate in medical experiments, such as being frozen in ice water. If they did acquiesce to these experiments, their consent was coerced by fear of other worse alternatives, such as torture or death in the gas chambers.

After hearing a spectrum of witnesses, the three judges agreed with the substance of my testimony, including the devastating effects of the most modern psychosurgery.4 Their official opinion cited the Nuremberg Code and used it as one reason for prohibiting consent to psychosurgery in the state mental hospitals of Michigan.

The judges found that "involuntarily confined patients cannot reason as equals with doctors and administrators over whether they should undergo psychosurgery." They declared that under First Amendment freedoms the "government has no power or right to control men's minds, thoughts, and expressions. If the First Amendment protects the freedom to express ideas, it necessarily follows that it must protect the freedom to generate ideas."

The opinion was never appealed and stands to this day. It continues to inhibit the performance of psychosurgery throughout the country, especially in state mental hospitals and prisons.

As described in The War Against Children, there are contemporary attempts to revive lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery, although none of the advocates now dare tie their work to political aims. What keeps advocates of psychosurgery from proceeding ahead full-throttle? Is it their own scientific caution or ethical concerns? In Psychosurgery, (1992), Rodgers quotes Donlin Long, the Johns Hopkins director of neurosurgery:

``You'd also need an institutional commitment to absolutely pristine science and the guts to tell the Peter Breggins of the world to stuff it,' he [Long] added, referring to psychiatrist Peter Breggin's lifelong battle to ban psychiatric surgery.

RESULTS FOR THE FIRST VIOLENCE INITIATIVE
Overall, the Center's activities-supported by other activists and organizations around the country-resulted in victory over the first violence initiative. The most effective activists were found in the black community, especially the Black Congressional Caucus. Louis Stokes (D-OH) and Ronald V. Dellums (D-CA) became founding members of the Center's board of directors, and have remained with the Center for the past twenty years. The single most important media event was probably an article in Ebony written by B. J. Mason (1973) in which he exposed the whole racist agenda.

In a surprising coalition, white conservatives in the U.S. Senate were also instrumental in opposing some aspects of the first violence initiative, especially the resurgence of psychiatric brain surgery. Their chief concern was not racial justice but morality. To many of them, tampering with the brain for emotional or behavioral control robbed individuals of personal responsibility and was therefore unethical.

After the debacle of the late 1970s, leaders of biological psychiatry avoided linking their efforts to anything that might be construed as a racist political agenda. Unhappily, they could not be silenced or held in check indefinitely. The rise of violent crime, renewed racism, and economic stresses in the early 1990s provided them fertile ground. The polarization in the country was symbolized, this second time around, by a tragic political reality: Unlike their position in the first round, conservatives would support the new biological racism.

THE SECOND VIOLENCE INITIATIVE
Rhesus Monkeys and Inner-City Youth

At the head of now disbanded Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA), psychiatrist Frederick Goodwin was the federal government's highest ranking psychiatrist and one of the world's leading biological psychiatrists. He was thrust into the hot lights of national media attention in early 1992 after he allegedly made remarks that compared inner city youth to monkeys who live in a jungle, and who just want to kill each other, have sex and reproduce. The statements in question were made at a February 11 meeting of the prestigious National Advisory Mental Health Council. One person in attendance, an African American government employee, was offended enough to phone the Washington Post.5

Ten days of escalating media debate and criticism ensued, at the end of which Goodwin issued an apology. On February 21, 1992 he said he had "learned all too painfully that the absence of malice or bad intentions does not excuse the insensitivity" of his comments, adding, "In an effort to shed light on the violence problem, I juxtaposed primate research to the problems in our cities in a careless way. I regret this insensitivity."

Media controversy continued, but as yet no one had seen the actual transcript of Goodwin's speech to the National Advisory Mental Health Council. Meanwhile, Goodwin resigned as head of ADAMHA; but Louis Sullivan immediately appointed him to a post he was already scheduled to assume, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Goodwin remained well-placed to lead the violence initiative.

Defending Goodwin
The media coverage of Goodwin's apparently racist remarks was considerable, and Congressman John Conyers, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, demanded Goodwin's resignation. But then Conyers came under fire from the Wall Street Journal in a March 9 editorial titled "The Speech Police." The Washington Post followed with an editorial on March 21, "The Fred Goodwin Case," stating that an otherwise great scientist and psychiatrist had made an unfortunate slip. The newspaper commented, "this is the political high season. When the going got tough, Dr. Fred Goodwin was out."

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© June 2005 by Afro Staff