Published in: Kerstin Kempker / Peter Lehmann (Hg.): Instead of Psychiatry (Berlin: Antipsychiatrieverlag 1993), Pages 405-407

People, who like me have an education in Psychiatry, suffer from a serious illness: We have not witnessed a comparable measure of agony or trauma like our patients after a psychiatric intervention. This really is a big deficit; not to have this experience makes it so much harder to accept people who have had such an experience, to value them without patronizing and to regard them as anything else than “chronic patients”. To not have this experience makes it easier to diagnose, to enforce treatment, to prescribe medication, to reject them, to avoid them and ultimately to forget them. But instead of thinking about how we can change that, we spend most of the time consolidating our position and hiding behind “therapeutical” methods. We try to avoid emotional relations to the affected and develop bureaucratic structures to cement our views and to keep the affected restrained, where patients “belong”.

What would happen if we ask ourselves why we actually take this position? What if we were to take the task of our psychoanalytical forefathers seriously and really analyzed our counterparts? Would we be encapsulated as neurotic offspring of a dwindling middle European Intelligentsia, as Jewish doctors dreading the look of blood, as fearful well-meaners whose self evaluation depends on charitable deeds? Or would we even disappear behind the mirrors we show them, get lost in the whirlpool of our diagnostic confusion and sink into therapeutical nihilism? Or can we even go nuts? Is all this professional fuss, our access to patients, nothing but a defense against the fear of going insane?

My mother does not talk about her experiences during the war. While taking a walk on a Florida beach a while back, my father told me my mother's life story for the first time. At that moment I realized how little I actually know.

What does that have to do with psychiatry, with self-determination, with the experience of insanity? I'm not really sure about that. I can only say with certainty that psychiatrists and other psycho-social professions should never have the last word. The ultimate authority lies in the locations of one's own experiences; it derives from memories, stories and assertions of many millions of people who have made this experience.

I felt free to report about my experience of not having been there. Maybe it helps to turn the mirror against yourself, to get to know the people that sit across you better. In that moment, when we see them as they are, we will be able to think about building relationships with each other. Only then will we be able to work towards a world whose contents will be defined by all people and not only by those who just fulfill their duties. Maybe that way we can cooperate to avoid pain and damage which psychiatry still forces upon thousands who are captured by it in the midst of most difficult events.

About the author:

Born 1952 in Vienna, he finished his medical studies there and has been living in New York City since 1978. He is lecturer at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, and director of a few state-funded research projects in the fields of work security, social help and self-help in cooperation with people who overcame personal crises and psychiatric intervention. Particularly, he worked organizing institutions to avoid psychiatric measures and offer autonomous alternatives. Through this work a close cooperation with the movement of the affected has developed, which merges in common assignments of research, publications, marketing and exemplifying projects. He is currently initializing a documentary and a few scripts about anti-psychiatric and anti-institutional practices (status quo 1993)