FROM WIKIPEDIA:
Upon moving to become Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Munich in 1903, Kraepelin increasingly wrote on social policy issues. He was a strong and influential proponent of eugenics and racial hygiene. His publications included a focus on alcoholism, crime, degeneration and hysteria.[12] Kraepelin was convinced that such institutions as the education system and the welfare state, because of their trend to break the processes of natural selection, undermined the Germans’ biological "struggle for survival".[5] He was concerned to preserve and enhance the German people, the Volk, in the sense of nation or race. He appears to have held Lamarckian concepts of evolution, such that cultural deterioration could be inherited. He was a strong ally and promoter of the work of fellow psychiatrist (and pupil and later successor as director of the clinic) Ernst Rudin to clarify the mechanisms of genetic inheritance as to make a so-called "empirical genetic prognosis".[12]
Martin Brune has pointed out that Kraepelin and Rudin also appear to have been ardent advocates of a self-domestication theory, a version of social Darwinism which held that modern culture was not allowing people to be weeded out, resulting in more mental disorder and deterioration of the gene pool. Kraepelin saw a number of "symptoms" of this, such as "weakening of viability and resistance, decreasing fertility, proletarianisation, and moral damage due to "penning up people" [Zusammenpferchung]. He also wrote that "the number of idiots, epileptics, psychopaths, criminals, prostitutes, and tramps who descend from alcoholic and syphilitic parents, and who transfer their inferiority to their offspring, is incalculable". He felt that "the well-known example of the Jews, with their strong disposition towards nervous and mental disorders, teaches us that their extraordinarily advanced domestication may eventually imprint clear marks on the race". Brune states that Kraepelin's nosological system was "to a great deal, built on the degeneration paradigm".[13]
I believe that Kraepelin's view explains in part why therapeutic nihilism regarding serious mental illness and schizophrenia in particular is still, like a religion, a belief that is held onto despite evidence that persons with serious mental illness, including schizophrenia, do recover.
Conference Paper Is recovery attainable in schizophrenia? Definitions and con...
More articles are attached.
I also highly recommend reading Elyn Saks THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD
Article Recovery From Schizophrenia: With Views of Psychiatrists, Ps...
Kraepelin was giving voice to the ideas of the day. I wonder what completely false ideas our generation wholeheartedly believes in today. I wish I were around when they get disproved.
Professor Seeman is of course correct: in the USA, for example,in 1907 forced sterilization on psychiatric patients was performed in first Indiana. It spread to other states but was challenged in Virginia, leading to its being heard by the Supreme Court which based on bad data presented by eugenicists determined that 3 generations of "imbeciles" was enough and justified forced sterilization. BUT OTHERS (eg, Franz Boas, the founding chair of anthropology at Columbia who left Germany) argued against "race" being a valid scientific construct. Jasper's stayed in Germany but had to give up his academic post because his wife was Jewish, and, at potential peril disagreed with eugenics/Kraepelin/Hitler/Rudin.
My real concern is that continued unquestioning belief of Kraepelin's therapeutic nihilism is hurting our patients with serious mental illness today.
Article Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court...
Article Strous R, Opler AA, Opler LA. Reflections on “Emil Kraepelin...
Were those sterilized during that era in the US ever compensated? They were in Canada.
I am unaware of any compensation for forced sterilization in the USA; Canada is often ahead of the USA re: progressive ideas.
Does anyone else know if the thousands of US citizens who were sterilized were ever compensated? (I will read about Buck v Bell, the landmark case in the USA in which Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered the infamous "three generations is enough."
Article Buck v Bell.
Article Buck v. Bell: A Constitutional Tragedy from a Lost World
Article The Evolving Doctrine of Involuntary Sterilization: From Buc...
Article Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court...
The State of Virginia has passed legislation that would offer financial compensation to victims of the state’s eugenic sterilization program, which forcibly sterilized over 8,000 Virginians deemed “unfit” to reproduce from the 1920s through 1970s. Reports indicate that only 11 surviving victims have been identified, and will each receive a $25,000 compensation. This makes Virginia the second state to address the crimes of forced sterilization through compensation. In 2012, North Carolina announced similar plans to compensate surviving victims of forced sterilization. Payments began in 2014, though the process has been riddled with red tape and loopholes that some say are preventing sterilization victims from receiving their proper compensation.
Article Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court...
Professor Mary V Seeman sent me the following, indicating that in West Virginia the forced sterilization law which became the law of the land after Buck v Bell is still in effect:
http://www.wvgazettemail.com/News/201207210064
West Virginia Looking Into Repeal Of Involuntary Sterilization Law.
The AP (7/24) reports, "West Virginia officials are looking into updating or repealing a state law that allows for the involuntary sterilization of 'mentally incompetent' people. West Virginia is the only state that still has such a law on its books." West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources spokeswoman Marsha Dadisman said that "the agency is looking at updating the language in that chapter of the law, according to" an article published July 21 in the Charleston Gazette.
“West Virginia is the only state that still has such a law on its books”
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Kraeplin's views have indeed had implications for the understanding of the human condition, due to his simplistic, as well as narcissistic, emphasis on the role of genetics. More recently, researchers investigating people diagnosed with schizophrenia have emphasized prenatal and early postnatal immune challenges, with many of the plethora of genetic susceptibility genes being expressed in early development and involved in the regulation of immune responses. If anything this would suggest that the study, and better treatment, of such early developmental time periods will decrease numbers of offspring classed as schizophrenic. The search for a key schizophrenia gene has proved fruitless and can be seen as futile work partly driven by the influence of Kraepelin on subsequent nosology.
Thank you very much for your insightful answer! Kraepelin's political agenda, which became even more national chauvinist after the defeat of Germany in WWI, and his belief in rassenhygiene as a way to improve the German Volk, made him and his protégées (e.g. Ernst Rudin) present statistically meaningless data as "proving" their a priori hypotheses. Franz Boas, PhD, (who was not Jewish) pointed out flaws in their research, but he realized he needed to emigrate to the USA as the Nazis became increasingly powerful in the Weimar Republic. Karl Jaspers, MD, (also not Jewish) had to give up his university professorship because his wife was Jewish AND he too pointed out flaws in the pseudoscience rassenhygiene/eugenic; he and his wife remained in Germany and fortunately were not taken to the extermination camps; after WWII he again was professor at (I think) the university of heidelberg
It is Kraepelin's (plagiarizing from you!) simplistic, as well as narcissistic, views that we need to stop worshipping: his hypotheses were flawed and his research was dishonest.
As a sociologist, I find these postings very interesting. In social science, the ideal type (a conceptual caricature) of cultural reproduction is sometimes helpful when looking at enduring forms of human behavior. The issue here is not on an instantaneous event but on a sequence, however short or long that might be. There are some parallels here in the study of "events" in physics.
Oddly enough, I am in Munich as I write, and I very recently visited Dachau, the prototype of future Nazi concentration camps. Looking at the categories used to label different types of prisoner there (e.g. Homosexual; Gypsy; Political Dissident, Jewish etc), it is clear that the SS (who guarded Dachau) jumped around biological and social categories, without always delineating boundaries. My gut-feeling, however, is that the intellectually lazy and unethical assumption that faulty and inferior genetics were seen as the primary mover or First Cause of alleged ethnic hierarchies. Paul
Thank you.
Article Strous R, Opler AA, Opler LA. Reflections on “Emil Kraepelin...
Dear Lewis Alan
Anyone who believes in eugenics should not be trusted to classify medical disorders. Eugenics is one of those nasty ideologies which tosses some, dare I say credible scraps?, into the mix, hoping that its crude ideological underpinnings will be overseen. I would n´t consult a eugenic medical doctor even if I broke my leg. He would probably diagnose mineral deficiency due to my Celtic (Irish, Scottish Welsh) roots! Paul
Back to eugenics during the Weimar Republic continuing into the 3rd Reich: Ernst Rüdin MD was so convinced that schizophrenia was a Mendelian recessive disease that had high rates in Jews and other "undesirables" that he only reported data that supported this hypothesis. He was instrumental in piloting the T4 extermination program in mental hospitals where thousands of people with schizophrenia were murdered. The only reason that program was not completed was that Hitler asked Rüdin to help jump start the use of gas chambers in concentration camps. Rüdin eagerly complied.
Article Psychiatric Genocide: Nazi Attempts to Eradicate Schizophrenia
Eugenics researchers, such as Ernst Rüdin, suppressed data that did not fit their hypotheses.
Article Ernst Rüdin's Unpublished 1922-1925 Study "Inheritance of Ma...
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