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

DISCOVERING THE SECOND VIOLENCE INITIATIVE
In an effort to lend support to Congressman John Conyers, Ginger Ross Breggin and I visited his office on March 17, 1992. There we read the newly arrived verbatim transcript of Goodwin's remarks to the National Advisory Mental Health Council. The transcript not only confirmed Goodwin's comparison between monkeys and inner-city youth, it contained something far more threatening.

The government was indeed planning a program of urban biomedical social control aimed at identifying and treating children with presumed genetic and biological "vulnerabilities" that might make them prone to violence in later years. Goodwin described this inner city psychiatric intervention as "one of the planning initiatives that is the top priority of the agency now for its planning for the future-and what we mean here is the 1994 budget."

Goodwin emphasized NlMH's unique expertise and role in identifying the vulnerable individual-the youngster who might grow up to be violent. He spoke of "early detection" and "preventive interventions." While he acknowledged that "psychosocial variables" do contribute to crime, he focused on psychiatric concepts of "impulsivity," "biological correlates" and "genetic factors." He said that genetic factors in violence and crime "are very strong."

He discussed the need to identify specific populations for "extensive and expensive productive interventions." Because the interventions would be costly, it would be necessary to "narrow your focus on your population that you are going to intervene in" to "hone down to something under 100,000."

Goodwin noted the public's concern over violent crime, and suggested that there would be more political support or "leverage" for focusing on individuals rather than on social reform or "large social engineering of society." He cited gun control as an example of social engineering that would draw less support than focusing on individual criminals. It was in this overall context that Goodwin had made his comparison between inner-city youth and monkeys in a jungle:

If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is the natural way of it for males, to knock each other off and, in fact, there are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the same hyperaggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual, so they copulate more and therefore they reproduce more to offset the fact that half of them are dying.

Now, one could say that if some of the loss of structure in this society, and particularly in the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't t just careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles, that we may have gone back to what might be more natural, without all of the social controls that we have imposed upon ourselves as a civilization over thousands of years in our own evolution.

In March 1992, immediately after we obtained the transcript of Goodwin's remarks to the National Advisory Mental Health Council, we began to organize a national campaign against the government's plans. We started by sending out hundreds and eventually thousands of reports from the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology and by attempting to arouse media interest.

Goodwin at the American Psychiatric Association
By the spring of 1992, the government was trying to evade the flak that Goodwin had drawn over his comparison between monkeys and urban youth living in a jungle. Our efforts to interest the media and the nation in the even more ominous concrete plans for the violence initiative met with little initial success. Then on May 5 Goodwin spoke to the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association on the subject of "Conduct Disorder as a Precursor to Adult Violence and Substance Abuse." It would be the last time he elaborated in a public forum on his views about violence prevention.

After carefully couching his remarks, Goodwin reached his main interest, "focus on the violent-prone individual." He brought up the genetic question and stated, as if it were a proven fact, "There is a genetic contribution to antisocial personality disorder." According to Goodwin, while the genetic factor in crime and violence is not "overwhelming," it is a prerequisite.6 Without directly saying so, he was making clear that violent inner city men have a predisposing genetic makeup.

Finding the Preliminary Plan
Under the Freedom of Information Act, we submitted requests to the government for all documents pertaining to biological and medical research into violence and Goodwin's proposed inner-city interventions. Stuffed within one large batch of papers was an unsigned, three-page document dated March 9, 1992 that bears a striking resemblance to Goodwin's May 1992 speech at APA. It may have been a draft that was prepared prior to the outbreak of the controversy. This document indicates that as of March 1992 someone at NIMH-very possibly Goodwin himself-was relating the violence initiative to pharmacological interventions, specifically including Prozac.

Was There a Written Plan ?
We always suspected that Goodwin's speeches-with their emphasis on individual vulnerability, biology and genetics-reflected a formal written plan for the 1994 budget. It was not until later in our campaign that a source who wishes to remain anonymous provided us with a nine-page single-spaced typewritten manuscript entitled "Violent Behavior: Etiology and Early Intervention." The heading identifies it as a section from "ADAMHA 1994 Planning Documents" and Secretary of DHHS Louis Sullivan confirmed its authenticity as ADAMHA's proposed violence initiative for the 1994 budget. It probably dates from the first months of 1992 or earlier.

The plan's one-paragraph abstract summarizes that "minority populations are disproportionately affected" and then points to "An emerging scientific capacity to identify the individual determinants of behavior-at the biochemical, psychological, and social/environmental levels." The proposal further states, "Although the problem is societal in scope, our solutions must reflect increasing scientific and clinical capacities to isolate and target the individual determinants of violence." It emphasizes, "ADAMHA will focus on individual vulnerability factors."

The 1994 budget planning document maintains that "the precursors of violent behavior are evident at an early age." As the "precursors of future violent behavior," it lists a broad spectrum of childhood behaviors: "physical aggression, deviant behavior, attention deficits and hyperactivity-manifest early on."

The goal is to develop new treatment approaches for the targeted children-"to tailor clinical as well as population-based interventions to [these] behavioral risk factors." ADAMHA will stress "the importance of individual risk factors... in identifying and treating those who are likely to engage in violent behavior." These treatments are linked to genetic abnormalities in brain chemistry.7 Perhaps most potentially menacing, the plan proposes research centers for "the testing of a variety of interventions aimed at the individual, family and community."

>>> Part 2

© June 2005 by Afro Staff