Why People Learned to Fear Psychiatry — From Nazi Germany and MKUltra to Scientology and Modern Distrust
I have a degree in psychology.
For much of my professional life, psychology has represented something quite straightforward to me: an attempt to understand human behaviour, emotional suffering, relationships, trauma, addiction and the extraordinary complexity of the human mind.
Recently, however, I began encountering a very different interpretation.
According to this view, modern psychology and psychiatry are not primarily helping professions at all. They are instruments of social control. Some versions connect them to Marxism. Others point towards government mind-control experiments, MKUltra, pharmaceutical companies, the Second World War, Nazi Germany or intelligence agencies. Scientology goes further still, portraying psychiatry as an inherently destructive institution.
Initially, it is tempting to place all of this into the category of conspiracy theory.
But once I began looking at the history, I discovered something more uncomfortable.
Some of the most disturbing events cited by critics of psychiatry actually happened.
Others are exaggerations.
And still others take documented historical events and use them as evidence for much larger claims that the historical record does not support.
That distinction matters.
So instead of asking:
“Is psychiatry evil?”
I became interested in a different question:
How did professions created in significant part to understand and alleviate human suffering become regarded by millions of people as institutions capable of controlling human beings?
The answer takes us through some extraordinarily dark chapters of modern history.
Psychiatry Has Always Had an Unusual Kind of Power
There is an important difference between psychiatry and most other areas of medicine.
If a cardiologist diagnoses heart disease, the diagnosis generally describes something occurring within the cardiovascular system.
Psychiatric diagnoses are more complicated.
They involve human thoughts, perceptions, emotions and behaviour.
That means psychiatry inevitably encounters questions such as:
What is normal?
What is abnormal?
When does unusual behaviour become illness?
When is someone sufficiently unwell that other people may make decisions for them?
And perhaps most importantly:
Who gets to decide?
This gives psychiatry a form of institutional authority that few other medical specialties possess.
At various points in history, psychiatrists have been involved in decisions concerning institutionalisation, compulsory treatment, legal competency and whether someone presented a danger to themselves or others.
Most of those decisions are intended to protect patients and society.
But history also demonstrates what can happen when that authority becomes entangled with ideology, prejudice or government power.
And nowhere is that clearer than Nazi Germany.
Nazi Germany: When Medicine Became an Instrument of the State
The Nazi persecution of people with mental and physical disabilities is not speculative history.
It is extensively documented.
Beginning in 1939, Nazi Germany implemented what became known as the “euthanasia” program, eventually associated with the code name Aktion T4.
The word euthanasia was deliberately misleading.
This was not compassionate end-of-life medicine.
It was systematic killing.
People with psychiatric, neurological and physical disabilities were classified as genetically defective, economically burdensome or possessing lives supposedly not worth living.
Physicians and medical professionals participated in identifying people for death.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that approximately 250,000 disabled men, women and children were ultimately murdered through the Nazi “euthanasia” program and its extensions. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)
The process is chilling partly because of how bureaucratic it became.
Hospitals and institutions received questionnaires requesting information about patients. Medical experts reviewed documentation. Patients were transferred to killing centres. Some were murdered with carbon monoxide gas; others died through lethal medication, starvation and other methods.
T4’s own records documented 70,273 institutionalised disabled people killed at six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941 alone. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)
Doctors weren’t merely standing nearby while politicians committed atrocities.
Medical expertise helped provide an intellectual and bureaucratic framework through which certain human beings could first be classified and subsequently eliminated.
That distinction matters enormously.
Because it demonstrates something that later critics of psychiatry would repeatedly argue:
A diagnostic system can become dangerous when medical authority and political ideology merge.
That doesn’t mean psychiatric diagnosis itself leads to fascism.
It means professional authority is not automatically immune from the values and prejudices of the society in which it operates.
This Problem Was Not Exclusive to Nazi Germany
It would be comforting to tell ourselves that such thinking belonged exclusively to Nazis.
It didn’t.
Eugenics had supporters across Europe and North America before the Second World War.
Politicians, physicians, academics and scientists in several countries supported ideas about improving human populations through selective reproduction.
Compulsory sterilisation laws existed outside Nazi Germany.
This does not make other countries equivalent to the Nazi regime.
It does demonstrate that respectable scientific institutions are capable of embracing ideas which later generations recognise as profoundly unethical.
That is an important lesson when considering contemporary distrust of psychiatry.
Institutions do not become trustworthy merely because their members possess qualifications.
Trust must also depend upon ethics, transparency, evidence, accountability and respect for human autonomy.
World War II Changed Psychology Too
Psychology’s relationship with government expanded dramatically during wartime.
Psychological knowledge had obvious military applications.
Governments wanted better ways of selecting soldiers, assessing intelligence and aptitude, understanding morale, treating combat trauma, designing propaganda, interrogating prisoners and predicting behaviour.
None of that automatically represents wrongdoing.
A psychologist helping traumatised soldiers is using psychological science for treatment.
A psychologist improving military selection may simply be helping place people in appropriate roles.
But something significant had happened.
Governments increasingly recognised that understanding the mind could also mean influencing the mind.
And after WWII, that interest accelerated.
The next battlefield was the Cold War.
The Fear of Brainwashing
After World War II, tensions between the Soviet bloc and Western nations rapidly intensified.
Then came the Korean War.
Reports emerged of American prisoners making confessions, criticising their own country and apparently adopting ideas sympathetic to their captors.
The concept of “brainwashing” entered popular Western consciousness.
Western intelligence agencies became deeply concerned that communist governments might have developed sophisticated techniques capable of manipulating human consciousness.
How sophisticated those techniques actually were is another question.
But intelligence agencies took the possibility seriously.
And the logic quickly became:
If our enemies are studying methods of controlling behaviour, we need to understand them too.
That thinking contributed to one of the most notorious intelligence programs in modern American history.
MKUltra Was Real
This is where discussions of psychiatry and conspiracy theories become particularly difficult.
Because MKUltra was not a conspiracy theory.
It was an actual CIA program.
A United States Senate hearing held on 3 August 1977 was explicitly titled:
“Project MKULTRA, The CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification.” (Senate Intelligence Committee)
CIA material subsequently released describes MKUltra as part of research examining possible means of influencing human behaviour.
The areas considered extended well beyond LSD. CIA documentation references drugs alongside electroshock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and other approaches to behavioural influence. (CIA)
The program involved universities, researchers, hospitals and other organisations.
And in some cases people were experimented upon without knowing what was happening to them.
Perhaps even more damaging to public trust, much of MKUltra’s documentary record disappeared.
During later investigations it emerged that many records concerning the program had been destroyed in 1973.
The 1977 Senate record acknowledged that because the program had been highly compartmentalised, documentation was limited and much of what existed had been destroyed. (CIA)
Think about what this means for public trust.
A government secretly conducts research involving behavioural manipulation.
People are exposed to experimentation without adequate consent.
The program remains hidden.
Records are destroyed.
Years later, government investigations confirm that much of it really happened.
This creates extraordinarily fertile ground for conspiracy theories.
Because suddenly the person who says,
“Governments would never secretly experiment on ordinary people”
has a historical problem.
Sometimes governments have.
Donald Ewen Cameron and the Montreal Experiments
The story becomes even more disturbing when psychiatry enters MKUltra directly.
At Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron conducted experiments involving extraordinary attempts to alter psychological functioning.
McGill University’s own archival catalogue records that the experiments took place between 1957 and 1964 and involved methods including:
“psychic driving,” drug-induced sleep, electroconvulsive therapy, sensory deprivation and Thorazine.
McGill also records that this research received CIA funding as part of MKUltra. (Archival Collections)
Cameron believed, in simplified terms, that dysfunctional psychological patterns might first be broken down or “depatterned”, after which new psychological patterns could potentially be established.
Patients were subjected to combinations of interventions that by contemporary ethical standards are deeply disturbing.
The significance of Cameron goes beyond one doctor.
He illustrates precisely the fear that continues to drive parts of the anti-psychiatry movement:
What if the person supposedly treating you is also experimenting with ways of changing who you are?
Again, careful distinctions are necessary.
Cameron’s work does not prove that psychiatry generally existed to perform mind control.
Nor does MKUltra establish that ordinary psychotherapy was secretly developed by intelligence agencies.
But denying the significance of Cameron’s experiments would be equally dishonest.
Psychiatric institutions really were involved in research connected with attempts to understand behavioural manipulation.
That belongs in psychiatry’s history.
The Great Problem Created by MKUltra
MKUltra presents us with an extraordinary problem of reasoning.
Imagine that in the early 1960s someone had said:
“The CIA is secretly financing experiments involving drugs and attempts to manipulate human behaviour.”
It might easily have sounded paranoid.
Decades later, major parts of that allegation were confirmed.
So people naturally learn a lesson:
“Maybe some conspiracy theories are true.”
That lesson is correct.
But another conclusion often follows:
“Therefore whatever appears conspiratorial may also be true.”
That conclusion is not justified.
MKUltra provides evidence for MKUltra.
It does not automatically provide evidence for every claim subsequently connected to it.
For example, the existence of MKUltra does not by itself establish that:
- contemporary psychiatry is a continuation of MKUltra;
- all psychiatric drugs are designed for population control;
- psychotherapy was designed by intelligence agencies;
- psychologists secretly manipulate society on behalf of governments;
- psychiatry created modern political movements;
- psychiatric diagnosis is inherently fraudulent;
- Marxism secretly controls psychology.
Each of those claims would require its own evidence.
This is where healthy scepticism and conspiratorial reasoning begin to separate.
Why the 1960s Produced the Anti-Psychiatry Movement
Against this historical background, psychiatry began experiencing an extraordinary intellectual rebellion.
During the 1960s and 1970s, major thinkers began questioning psychiatric authority.
They included figures such as:
Thomas Szasz. R.D. Laing. Franco Basaglia. Michel Foucault.
They did not represent a single ideology and frequently disagreed profoundly with one another.
Historical scholarship describes anti-psychiatry as emerging partly from wider social movements challenging institutional authority, conventional definitions of normality and the medical profession’s power over individuals. (PubMed)
Thomas Szasz became particularly influential.
He questioned the concept of mental illness itself and warned about what he regarded as the “therapeutic state”—the combination of medical and governmental authority capable of restricting someone’s liberty in the name of treatment.
Modern scholarship still credits Szasz with identifying important questions involving medicalisation, coercion, freedom and psychiatry’s potential role as an institution of social control, even while rejecting many of his broader conclusions. (PubMed)
This is another reason the simple claim that anti-psychiatry equals one political ideology doesn’t work.
Historical research notes that attacks on psychiatry came from different points across the political spectrum. Critics could disagree about capitalism, socialism, religion and almost everything else while sharing concerns about psychiatric power. (PubMed)
Psychiatry’s Treatment of Homosexuality Adds Another Layer
For gay people in particular, distrust of psychiatry has an additional historical basis.
Homosexuality was previously classified within psychiatric diagnostic systems.
Gay men and lesbians could face psychiatric institutionalisation and “treatments” designed around the assumption that their sexuality represented pathology.
Research by psychologist Evelyn Hooker in the 1950s challenged assumptions that homosexual men were intrinsically psychologically disturbed.
The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official diagnostic classification in 1973, and the American Psychological Association subsequently supported that decision. (American Psychological Association)
This history presents another uncomfortable philosophical question.
If an institution once had the authority to classify an aspect of human identity as pathological and subsequently reversed itself, what does that tell us about diagnostic certainty?
One possible conclusion is:
Psychiatry cannot be trusted.
But another is:
Science is capable of recognising its mistakes when evidence, social scrutiny and ethical understanding improve.
I find the second interpretation more persuasive.
But the first becomes much easier to understand once we know the history.
Then Scientology Entered the Battle
Scientology’s opposition to psychiatry developed into one of the most organised anti-psychiatry campaigns in the world.
In 1969, the Church of Scientology and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz established the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, or CCHR.
CCHR describes itself as a psychiatric watchdog and campaigns against practices it regards as abusive, including coercive psychiatric treatment, electroconvulsive therapy and psychiatric medication. (CCHR Australia)
Scientology’s criticism is far more sweeping than mainstream debate within psychiatry.
It presents psychiatry not merely as a profession that has committed abuses, but as an institution fundamentally responsible for considerable human harm.
And this is where an important rhetorical technique appears.
Scientology can point toward genuine events:
Nazi psychiatric atrocities.
Institutional abuse.
Forced treatment.
Psychosurgery.
Controversial uses of ECT.
MKUltra.
Donald Cameron.
Pharmaceutical conflicts of interest.
Those things give the argument historical weight.
But a crucial logical step sometimes follows:
Psychiatry has committed terrible abuses.
becomes:
Therefore psychiatry itself is intrinsically evil.
Those two propositions are not the same.
The first is historically demonstrable.
The second is an ideological conclusion.
So Why Do People Become Anti-Psychiatry?
Having looked at this history, I no longer think the answer is simply ignorance.
Different people arrive there for different reasons.
Some have experienced coercive psychiatric treatment personally.
Some have suffered serious medication side effects.
Some believe their distress was medicalised rather than understood.
Some distrust pharmaceutical companies.
Some object philosophically to involuntary treatment.
Some are influenced by Scientology.
Some encounter MKUltra and conclude that psychiatry has always secretly been about behavioural control.
Some hold political beliefs about government or institutional authority.
Others have watched diagnostic categories change over generations and conclude that psychiatry defines normality according to prevailing social values.
And some become immersed in online conspiracy communities where documented historical abuses gradually merge with claims for which evidence is absent.
Treating all of those people as foolish probably makes the problem worse.
The more useful question is:
Which parts of their distrust are supported by history, and which parts require assumptions the evidence cannot support?
Psychiatry Is Not Its Worst History
There is another side to this story.
Psychiatry and psychology have also transformed millions of lives.
People experiencing severe depression, psychosis, trauma, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and many other forms of suffering have benefited enormously from psychological and psychiatric treatment.
Modern ethical standards around informed consent, research participation and patient autonomy developed partly because medicine and society confronted earlier abuses.
In the United States, legislation enacted in 1974 strengthened protections for people participating in biomedical and behavioural research. (APA Apps)
Diagnostic systems have changed.
Treatments have changed.
Patient rights have changed.
Research methods have changed.
Professional cultures have changed.
None of this means contemporary mental-health systems are beyond criticism.
They shouldn’t be.
Any institution possessing authority over vulnerable human beings should expect scrutiny.
But there is a profound difference between saying:
“Psychiatry has sometimes abused its power.”
and saying:
“The purpose of psychiatry is abuse.”
History supports the first statement.
It does not establish the second.
Perhaps We Have Been Asking the Wrong Question
After looking into this history, I find the question “Is psychiatry good or evil?” increasingly unhelpful.
The deeper issue is power.
Psychological knowledge can help a traumatised person understand what happened to them.
The same understanding of human behaviour might help someone design propaganda.
Psychology can teach us how manipulation works.
It can also teach someone how to manipulate.
Psychiatry can restore someone experiencing profound mental illness to a functioning life.
Psychiatric authority can also become coercive when insufficiently checked.
This suggests that the real ethical question isn’t whether knowledge about human behaviour is inherently good or bad.
It is:
Who is using that knowledge, for what purpose, with whose consent, and with what accountability?
That question connects Nazi psychiatric abuses, the psychological warfare of World War II, Cold War fears of brainwashing, MKUltra, Donald Cameron, anti-psychiatry and even Scientology’s campaign against psychiatry.
It also helps distinguish history from conspiracy.
We should not sanitise what governments, scientists, psychologists or psychiatrists have done simply because the history makes us uncomfortable.
But neither should documented wrongdoing become unlimited proof of things for which no evidence exists.
Perhaps mature scepticism requires us to hold two ideas simultaneously:
Institutions capable of helping people are also capable of harming them.
And:
The fact that an institution has caused harm does not mean that harm was its secret purpose all along.
For someone who studied psychology, that is not necessarily a comfortable conclusion.
But I think it is a more interesting one.
Because the history of psychology and psychiatry isn’t simply a history of healing.
Nor is it simply a history of control.
It is a history of human beings acquiring increasingly sophisticated knowledge about other human beings—and repeatedly being forced to confront the ethical question of what we should be allowed to do with that knowledge.
And that may be the real story behind why so many people remain suspicious of psychiatry today.
Where I Want to Go Next
There is still a major part of this story I haven’t addressed.
Karl Marx did not invent psychology or psychiatry.
But Marxist ideas did later intersect with psychoanalysis, sociology, critical theory and arguments about whether mental illness can partly reflect social conditions rather than biology alone.
That leads to Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School and the modern claim that psychology became a mechanism for changing Western values.
Some of that history is real.
Some of it has been dramatically distorted.
And that distinction deserves an investigation of its own.
Travelling Through Life Without A Road Map 