Evolutionary fallacies of Nazi psychiatry. Implications for current research

Evolutionary theory has had a major impact on psychiatry since the middle of the 19th century. During the Nazi regime psychiatry supported compulsory sterilization and euthanasia of physically and mentally ill and subsequently the killing of "inferior" races by borrowing scientifically invalid conclusions from evolutionary biology. The present paper deals with some of the flaws and shortcomings of the scientific paradigms of evolutionary theory adopted by psychiatry during the Nazi regime and discusses possible implications for modern research in evolutionary psychology and psychiatry.     

Psychiatry and the law

In Rex vs. Arnold (1724) it was held that to avail himself of the defense of insanity "a man must be totally deprived of his understanding and memory, so as not to know what he is doing, no more than an infant, a brute, or a wild beast." Although there has been some modification of this formula in most jurisdictions, the courts still operate under the McNaghten Rule (1843) which is no more logical and actually is more difficult to apply. That such a situation exists in 1956 is a reflection on the indifference of society-and particularly the courts which it elects-as well as on the failure of modern psychiatry to communicate its viewpoint to society. If we are to correct the sad formulae of the "right and wrong" and "policeman at the elbow" tests, we must have more study and better methods of communication in this area.A similar state of confusion exists in the methods of commitment of mentally ill people to psychiatric hospitals. The methods prescribed by law are archaic and cruel-and again reflect the failure of modern psychiatry to communicate its understanding to the legislatures and courts. There are many other areas of conflict between law (which looks to the past for its insights) and psychiatry (which seeks for its concepts in the current scientific advances).     

The Indian stratification debate: A discursive exposition of problems and issues in the analysis of class,caste and gender

Conclusion In order to analyze the interrelationships between class, caste and gender, it is essential to analyze the relationship between anthropology and political economy. In non-Marxist anthropology, elitism, cultural relativism, and evolutionism are still influential. The tension in Barrington Moore between a materialist and idealist view of the class/caste relationship is finally resolved in favor of idealism. Moore's idealism sharply contrasts with much contemporary work on peasant struggles in India, in which the peasants are no longer denied access to the historical stage. This shift in focus to the oppressed is only partially reflected in the field of gender, caste and class. While some work on gender, caste and class is both evolutionary and elitist in focus, the emphasis is now changing, and giving way to a more critical historical materialist perspective in which the historical subject is not permanently and inexorably relegated to the wings. Kate Currie is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster.

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PSYCHIATRY AND THE LAW

In Rex vs. Arnold (1724) it was held that to avail himself of the defense of insanity “a man must be totally deprived of his understanding and memory, so as not to know what he is doing, no more than an infant, a brute, or a wild beast.” Although there has been some modification of this formula in most jurisdictions, the courts still operate under the McNaghten Rule (1843) which is no more logical and actually is more difficult to apply. That such a situation exists in 1956 is a reflection on the indifference of society—and particularly the courts which it elects—as well as on the failure of modern psychiatry to communicate its viewpoint to society. If we are to correct the sad formulae of the “right and wrong” and “policeman at the elbow” tests, we must have more study and better methods of communication in this area.A similar state of confusion exists in the methods of commitment of mentally ill people to psychiatric hospitals. The methods prescribed by law are archaic and cruel—and again reflect the failure of modern psychiatry to communicate its understanding to the legislatures and courts.There are many other areas of conflict between law (which looks to the past for its insights) and psychiatry (which seeks for its concepts in the current scientific advances).     

De la « théorie sexuelle » à l’anthropopsychiatrie

The creation of scientific psychiatry, which was modelled after the medical classification of diseases, was brought into question by the tenets of Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. We draw on Leopold Szondi’s method of developing an analytically inspired psychiatry in our effort to interpret Freud’s work from an anthropological perspective, removing psychiatry from the naturalistic medical model and giving it a genuinely human bearing. Szondi’s drive system ranges from the analysis of constitution (as in the animal biomedical model) to the analysis of destiny (as in Schicksalsanalyse). Within this system, the human is considered a driven being, existing in a psychological dimension from the outset, outside animal, sexual instincts. This distinction between mankind and animals accounts for the specificities of mental disorders and illnesses and paves the way to a purely anthropological psychiatry we can call cultural psychiatry. In this kind of psychiatry, any pathology is considered inherent in the destiny of a human being, a part of a person’s development. Its analysis, called pathoanalysis, deals with the human suffering at the heart of mankind’s place in the world.     

The Politics of Ecology in South Africa on the Radical Left

The South African ecologist and political activist Edward Roux (1903–1966) used evolutionary biology to argue against racism. During the cold-war, he transformed his communist beliefs into advocacy for scientific rationalism, management, and protection of nature against advancing capitalism. These pleas for saving the environment served as a vehicle for questioning the more risky issue of evolution and racial order in society. The link between ecological and political order had long been an important theme among the country's ecologists and politicians alike. The statesman Jan Christian Smuts' holistic theory of evolution and racial order inspired the nation's ecologists to sanctify an ecologically informed racial policy. This idealist informed methodology stood in direct opposition to the materialist approach to ecology of Roux. These methodological debates reflected differing political support from within the Union Party and people on the radical left, respectively. Ecology was of concern to politicians because understandings of the order of nature had direct implications for the racial order of the South African society. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

现代生物医学研究中医学研究生“大数据”利用能力的培养

科研能力的水平是我国研究生教育质量的重要指标。现代生物医学研究中呈现的"大数据"特点给研究生科研能力培养提出了新的要求。本文在分析"大数据"基本特点和总结医学科研思维模式在"大数据"影响下发生的转变的基础上,对提高医学研究生获取和利用"大数据"信息的能力提出一些具体建议,希望能够推动医学研究生科研能力的培养。     

The revolution in psychiatric diagnosis: problems at the foundations

The third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III; 1974) not only revolutionized psychiatric diagnosis, it transformed and dominated American psychiatry. The nosology of psychiatry had been conceptually confusing, difficult to apply, and bound to widely questioned theories. Psychiatry and clinical psychology had been struggling with their scientific status. DSM attempted to solve psychiatry's problems by making psychiatry more like its authors' perception of general medicine. It tried to avoid theory, especially psychoanalytic theories, by discussing only observable manifestations of disorders. But DSM is actually highly theory-bound. It implicitly and powerfully includes an exclusively "medical" model of psychological disturbance, while excluding other psychiatric ideas. Its authors tried to meet what they saw as "scientific standards." To a surprising extent, DSM reflects its creators' personal distaste for psychoanalysis. The result is that DSM rests on a narrow philosophical perspective. The consequences of its adoption are widespread: it has profoundly affected drug development and other therapeutic studies, psychiatric education, attitudes toward patients, the public perception of psychiatry, and administrative and legal decisions. This article explores how DSM's most problematic features arise from its history in psychiatric controversies of the 1960s and its underlying positivistic philosophy.     

Anthropology and psychiatry

In this paper anthropology and psychiatry are defined as well as their scientific area, their methods and research objectives; the high level of their mutual thematic and methodological complementarity has been emphasized. The sociocultural factors which are inherent in the area of cultural anthropology can affect mental health in a number of ways: by forming a certain personality type that is predisposed for a certain type of disorder, by an education model which increases the frequency of some disorders, by criticism and sanctions of a certain behaviour that is actually desirable from the point of view of mental health preservation, by supporting and rewarding a behaviour model that is harmful for mental health; by its complexity and, in some of the segments, by mutual contradictions they can cause mental disorders; by forming symptoms of mental disorders i.e. by a pathoplastic action through which they become an area of scientific interest of cultural psychiatry. Anthropology directs psychiatry towards creating preventive and therapeutic programs that accept the mutual influence and interconnectedness of socio-cultural conditions and the mental health status.     

A Contribution to the Comparative Epidemiology of Schizophrenia in Urban and Rural Places

In psychiatry, epidemiology rests upon statistical studies of mental illness in the population. Much attention was given to this as early as the work of Esquirol, (1) and I. F. Riul' (2) in our country. Zemstvo psychiatrists contributed much in the field of psychiatric morbidity. (3-8) However, as a result of the lack of outpatient psychoneurological institutions in prerevolutionary Russia, these studies, like the majority of those currently being conducted by psychiatrists abroad, resolved fundamentally to isolated unidimensional selective surveys of particular groups in the population. The existence in the Soviet Union of a broad network of outpatient psychiatric institutions permits Soviet psychiatrists to go beyond single-factor selective surveys, to make a systematic study of mental illness in accordance with the data of current dispensary records, and to provide timely therapeutic and social prophylactic assistance to the ill, i.e., to conduct epidemiological research on a higher level of scientific methodology. A number of such studies has been published. (8-23) Therefore the statement by Lin and Standley, (24) who allege — in a monograph, The Role of Epidemiology in Psychiatry, published by the World Health Organization — the absence of epidemiological psychiatric studies in the Soviet Union, must be rejected as unfounded.     

Caught in the Psychiatric Net: Meanings and Experiences of ADHD,Pediatric Bipolar Disorder and Mental Health Treatment Among a Diverse Group of Families in the United States

Based on a 13-month ethnographic meaning-centered study of the lived experience of behavioral and emotional disorders among children and families living in the United States, this article highlights the range of orientations to mental health problems and treatment among families from diverse backgrounds. Detailed case portraits of three families are presented to illustrate the various meanings that psychiatric diagnoses and mental health treatments take on within families, with medicalized perspectives holding less salience among African-American families relative to Euro-Americans in the study. The diverse orientations to problems among families in the study suggest that, despite the dominance of biochemical and neurological explanations for behavioral and emotional distress in contemporary U.S. culture, and especially U.S. psychiatry, nonpathological interpretations have not been wholly eclipsed by broad trends toward biologization and medicalization. Families’ experiences are positioned to reveal the allure, as well as the limitations, of biopsychiatric approaches to behavioral and emotional problems.

La crise de la psychiatrie contemporaine 1ère Partie: la perte du singulier

Contemporary psychiatry relies on its activity of categorization. It ignores the person’ subjective experience. This vista fits the current specialization of sciences. The authors relate the origins of modern psychiatry to the scientific spirit of the Age of the Enlightment. The activity of abstraction required by science leads to neglect some aspects of reality. This explains the equivocal face of contemporary psychiatry, which lacks a conception of healthy mental life, as well as a conception of pathological life, and moreover theoretical foundations able to guarantee healing perspectives. The main dangers are conformism and normality.     

The rise of counselling and the return of alienism.

Current services for those with mental disorders show two trends. Psychiatric services are becoming concentrated on the care of those with "severe mental illness," largely (but unjustifiably) synonymous with chronic psychosis. The retreat of psychiatry from the care of those with non-psychotic mental disorders has helped the growth of counselling services for these patients. However, there is no evidence that non-directive counselling is effective for such disorders, in contrast to the evidence for the effectiveness of other treatments that are usually delivered by psychologists or community psychiatric nurses. By retreating from the concerns of general practice and general medicine, psychiatry is returning to the days of alienism: in Victorian terms, the care of "the mad." Possible consequences include increasing expectations of psychiatric services that cannot be met, a loss of skills within psychiatry, and increased demoralisation in the mental health services.     

Trends in biological control: public interest,international networking and research direction

We investigated trends in biological control to both capture its evolution and explore future opportunities. We examined recent changes in public interest, international networking and peer-reviewed research. A Google Trends analysis revealed that the popularity of biological control is decreasing in terms of search hits on the internet. This trend is potentially worrying for the biological control community, given that public interest tends to drive political decisions regarding regulatory processes and governmental funding of research. To examine patterns of international collaboration, we established the list of authors who published their work in the three main biological control journals from the early 1990s to 2016. International co-authorship has intensified and the biological control sector is increasingly characterized by multilateral collaboration. We surveyed papers published in BioControl and Biological Control over the last 25 years to identify research trends with respect to target pests, commodities, biological control agents and biological control approaches. Finally, we report that articles on biological control are published in the broad-based scientific journals Science and Nature on a regular basis. This reflects contributions that biological control research makes to scientific discussions in general. Our analyses revealed a thriving scientific discipline with several major research trends in arthropod, plant pathogen and weed biological control.     

Bradley's Benzedrine studies on children with behavioral disorders

In 1937, psychiatrist Charles Bradley administered Benzedrine sulfate, an amphetamine, to "problem" children at the Emma Pendleton Bradley Home in Providence, Rhode Island, in an attempt to alleviate headaches; however, Bradley noticed an unexpected effect upon the behavior of the children: improved school performance, social interactions, and emotional responses. Drawing on Bradley's published articles on his experiments, this paper explores the historical context of his experiments and the effect this background had on the emerging field of child psychiatry. Bradley's studies went largely ignored in the field of child psychiatry for nearly 25 years. However, they proved to be an important precursor to studies of amphetamines like Ritalin and their use in conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Bradley's Benzedrine trials were thus highly influential in shaping modern objective understandings of children with behavior disorders.     

The Problem of Allergy in Psychiatry

In recent years many authors have directed attention to allergic reactivity in mental disease. This problem has been studied with particular depth by O. V. Kerbikov (1) and his associates. (2) Clinical data, as well as, to some degree, laboratory research data demonstrate beyond all question that an allergic component often plays a substantial role in the genesis and shaping of various psychotic conditions. Also providing a basis for study of the problem of allergy in psychiatry are our data of pathophysiological studies in the field of allergy conducted in recent years (3-6), which demonstrate that the major role in the shaping of allergic reactions belongs to the central nervous system and that "nervous tissue may be the object in which the allergic reaction of antigen with antibody occurs" (A. D. Ado). Any pathological process modifies the immunological properties of the organism and causes adaptive defense reactions. Sometimes, under particular conditions, these defensive developments begin to play a pathogenic role. Under the influence of endogenic toxicosis, particularly in schizophrenia, autoantigens may be formed which acquire the nature of auto-or endo-allergens (A. D. Ado), which exercise a very pronounced effect upon the organism, including the central nervous system. In certain circumstances they facilitate the allergic genesis of psychopathological syndromes. The development of antibodies and auto-allergens in mental diseases may also be a consequence of the modification, under the influence of the pathological process and of various drugs, of the "normal flora" relationship characteristic of the given organism, and sometimes the result of this may be auto-infection.     

Toward a cross-species neuroscientific understanding of the affective mind: do animals have emotional feelings?

Do we need to consider mental processes in our analysis of brain functions in other animals? Obviously we do, if such BrainMind functions exist in the animals we wish to understand. If so, how do we proceed, while still retaining materialistic-mechanistic perspectives? This essay outlines the historical forces that led to emotional feelings in animals being marginalized in behavioristic scientific discussions of why animals behave the way they do, and why mental constructs are generally disregarded in modern neuroscientific analyses. The roots of this problem go back to Cartesian dualism and the attempt of 19th century physician-scientists to ground a new type of medical curriculum on a completely materialistic approach to body functions. Thereby all vitalistic principles were discarded from the lexicon of science, and subjective experience in animals was put in that category and discarded as an invalid approach to animal behavior. This led to forms of rigid operationalism during the era of behaviorism and subsequently ruthless reductionism in brain research, leaving little room for mentalistic concepts such as emotional feelings in animal research. However, modern studies of the brain clearly indicate that artificially induced arousals of emotional networks, as with localized electrical and chemical brain stimulation, can serve as "rewards" and "punishments" in various learning tasks. This strongly indicates that animal brains elaborate various experienced states, with those having affective contents being easiest to study rigorously. However, in approaching emotional feelings empirically we must pay special attention to the difficulties and vagaries of human language and evolutionary levels of control in the brain. We need distinct nomenclatures from primary (unconditioned phenomenal experiences) to tertiary (reflective) levels of mind. The scientific pursuit of affective brain processes in other mammals can now reveal general BrainMind principles that also apply to human feelings, as with neurochemical predictions from preclinical animal models to self-reports of corresponding human experiences. In short, brain research has now repeatedly verified the existence of affective experience-various reward and punishment functions-during artificial arousal of emotional networks in our fellow animals. The implications for new conceptual schema for understanding human/primate affective feelings and how such knowledge can impact scientific advances in biological psychiatry are also addressed.     

The geo‐classifications of colonial statelessness: The anthropology of Kastom,land and citizenship in the decolonisation of Vanuatu

Anthropological accounts of Vanuatu's independence have emphasised both the materiality of land alienation and the importance of kastom (custom) as a symbol of cultural practice, political resistance and national unity in accounts of decolonisation and postcolonial nation‐making. For 74 years indigenous ni‐Vanuatu were stateless and lacked all forms of citizenship and nationality in the Anglo‐French Condominium of the New Hebrides (1906–1980). This article situates anthropological accounts of land, kastom and the state in Vanuatu's transition to independence in relation to statelessness, citizenship and hierarchies of ethnographic authenticity within the geo‐classificatory frameworks of colonial rule established by the condominium. The embodiment of citizenship and demands to end the cumulative humiliations of statelessness that ni‐Vanuatu experienced in the condominium illuminate both tensions and continuities in idealist and materialist accounts of Melanesian nationalisms evident in kastom and land as they were mediated by the emancipatory claims and promises of postcolonial citizenship.     

The Effect of Furnishing on Perceived Spatial Dimensions and Spaciousness of Interior Space

Despite the ubiquity of interior space design, there is virtually no scientific research on the influence of furnishing on the perception of interior space. We conducted two experiments in which observers were asked to estimate the spatial dimensions (size of the room dimensions in meters and centimeters) and to judge subjective spaciousness of various rooms. Experiment 1 used true-to-scale model rooms with a square surface area. Furnishing affected both the perceived height and the spaciousness judgments. The furnished room was perceived as higher but less spacious. In Experiment 2, rooms with different square surface areas and constant physical height were presented in virtual reality. Furnishing affected neither the perceived spatial dimensions nor the perceived spaciousness. Possible reasons for this discrepancy, such as the influence of the presentation medium, are discussed. Moreover, our results suggest a compression of perceived height and depth with decreasing surface area of the room.