Alon Harel:
I have several questions. One has to do with the legal situation. As far as I understood, you need actually to prove the commission of a crime in order to be civilly committed?

Christa Peter (translated from German):
Right, naturally!

A.	H.:
So there is no way by which – like in the U.S. or Israel, for that matter – in which a person could be civilly committed without having committed a crime, am I right?

No, that's not right. That's not the case. There are two paths. There is another way of civilly committing people. There is a preventative civil commitment. If someone, because of their behavior, threatens to become dangerous to themselves or to others, then they can also be civilly committed on the basis of a psychiatric report through the courts. This has nothing to do with criminal law here and my specific area, my specialist area is the way criminals are committed. But there are two options, yes. 

A.	H.:
Another concern I had: I heard you kind of hinting and even suggesting that courts and judges do not operate as monitors on psychiatrists but they in fact go along. And I have several examples that you stated and I want to clarify them. 

One had to do with the second expert opinion. This was raised also by one of the witnesses and it is quite interesting. Am I right to say that there is a reluctance on the part of courts to hear or accept a second expert opinion.

Yes, this is correct. It is the case that the courts orders an expert and they have their own "in-house" experts, as it were. The experts know what the court wants to hear and the court knows what way the wind is blowing in the case of a particular expert and it is very hard to find an alternative expert because they are considered "unsound". Naturally this is all very irrational because, if I am a good expert, a good psychiatrist, then I will come to a correct conclusion, regardless of who commissions my report. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with one another. But de facto, it is the case that you will hardly find anyone who is prepared to write a report commissioned by the defense, for example. This makes it much harder to defend a client, if I don't feel I am in the position to present a report from an expert that I have commissioned. 

I went through the case with Mr. Sabasch, who has been there for 30 years. I commissioned an expert, a professor for forensic psychiatry in Mainz. He was prepared to write a report on Mr. Sabasch and he did so, although the clinic wouldn't give him any documents. He only spoke to Mr. Sabasch for two hours and then afterwards the clinic denounced this and said: "Well, he spent only two hours to go through all of the files AND to talk to Mr. Sabasch" and they just sort of put it down.

But the professor had all of the papers from me, because I had the complete file, the whole history of the case. However, by the clinic sort of "putting down" this report by suggesting that this report was no good anyway; it was all very superficial. It really wasn't taken very seriously although in the higher court that it went to after that, it was taken more seriously. Although we had to have yet another expert. And again this expert was ordered by the court, so this is how the game works. 

A.	H.:
So basically there is no effective way in which you could get a second opinion but through the court itself; the court itself chooses the expert?

Yes, correct. That is the case.

A.	H.:
And you also don't have access to the documents, on the basis of which the psychiatrists made the evidence? The documents are not available to ...

Yes, I do have access to these documents in the case of the report that I criticized earlier on, where they were working with the "HDR20". I did have these documents. I was able to get them from the psychiatrists afterwards and then afterwards I could prove that the psychiatrists did not work in a good way. But the court wasn't interested in that anymore. They only read the results. And if it says the man is dangerous and he is going to be a repeat offender, then the court doesn't care how the psychiatrist reached this conclusion. And that's where the dilemma lies. 

A.	H.:
Would you think that an alternative system, in which the defendant could bring about a second expert opinion as is common in Anglo-American systems, would you think that this would be a much superior system, because the court would have more of ... ? You think so?

Yes, it would definitely be better. Quite clearly, because it is the job of the defense to present evidence to the court, that's really our job and it's made impossible for us here. That's quite right, what you say. 

A.	H.:
Last question, if I may: Are there cases in which – is it common, does it happen that the court rejects the expert opinion invited by the court itself, which says: "We don't think your psychiatrist made the right evaluation." Are there many cases, few, none? 

Apparently, this is the case. The courts do have the right to do this. The court has to look and see whether the basis on which the psychiatric report is made, that these are correct and that they can understand how these conclusions have been arrived at. Though I have to say that in real terms, in this area, I only know Neustadt and the various judiciary around there, the courts there in Luebeck etc. So I can't say what things are like elsewhere in Germany, but I can say that in Luebeck, in the area there, it's absolutely 100% the case that they will only believe the expert reports. 

In Luebeck, I have to actually say, that they only believe the doctors in the clinic because my mandate, whose letter I read here, was ignored, because you will have heard that all of the wonderful reports that they had from the prison were ignored because the doctors in the clinic said he was mad. And I think that this is not only the problem of this clinic, I don't know, maybe it is.

Wolf-Dieter Narr (translated from German):
Naturally many of our questions need to be asked of the court psychiatrists and that's why you're here, because we want to find out a bit more about you. How are these reports made? Is there some kind of criteria, according to which the experts arrive at their conclusions? Do they have to see the people they are writing the reports on? Do they have to see these people? In what conditions do they see these people?

I know a case where a psychiatrist in the early 1980's only met the person that he was writing a report about in the court. I know as a voluntary helper in a prison in Heilbron, someone who was only interviewed when six or seven police officers were with him because his aggression was apparently so strong. So he was never actually interviewed on his own without witnesses, so I'd like to know what academic evidence do these experts have to have? 

I don't think an attorney can answer this. In fact, I don't think anyone can answer this at all. I only know what I have  found out, that Mr. Sabasch who has been there for 30 years, has said to me that in 1971 he only spent 2 minutes talking to the expert who wrote a report on him so that he didn't do any intelligence tests whatsoever or anything else of the kind but that he just looked over some of the old papers and wrote his report on that basis. So naturally it's the case that the expert has to meet the patient and speak to the patient that he is to do a report on, that he has to conduct certain tests on him, for example. I know that one of the experts that one of my mandates that spoke to you directly, that he had my mandate in his clinic for 6 weeks and worked with him closely for quite a long time but its just absolutely arbitrary and up to the person writing the report themselves. 

Perhaps I could just say one other thing as well – I don't wish to do anyone any harm – I've read reports in other cases as well and there are experts who really deal much more thoroughly with the issue and can come to terms with what is going on; have real empathy and come to a much better conclusion. I have read reports which show this quite clearly but to return to Dr. Purzelmeister for example, in October I wrang him and asked to have the files that were used to write his report and he said: "Mr. Burda, who is that?" or when I spoke to another expert, who I thought had real empathy for his mandates, his first patients, he remembered years later who I was talking about. So it is a matter of the maturity and empathy.

What role would you say, according to your experience, do these prognoses that we've heard about, these predictions play that psychiatrists make?

I mean it's quite clear that psychiatrists shouldn't be able to write these predictions; they shouldn't be able to predict how I'm going to respond in another situation, that's clear. So I think these predictions from the very beginning are a mistake. However. But these predictions play a role in a number of places in courts. Firstly in the accusation then in the trial itself, then in the actual sentence and then in psychiatry or in the prison as well. So there are four areas in which they play a very big role and fifthly perhaps the question is whether or not release is considered. 

What role do you think psychiatric predictions play, on average?

A key role, particularly in this assessment of whether someone should be in prison or hospital. We have a very unfortunate formulation in our code of laws, that an expert has to decide on whether or not it can be expected that the person affected in the future will not be a repeat offender, will not commit any other offences and this is an impossible question. But naturally, since no-one wants to say that they can't meet the grade here, uncritical psychiatrists simply hide behind a prediction scheme, do the points, then draw a line and count them all up and then say, alright, this way or that way.

I would like to take a football metaphor here. There's a bad sort of dribble passing between the judiciary and the psychiatric hospitals. Judiciary somehow becomes sort of arbitrary through psychiatry. They can take it or leave it. The judges don't have to take these reports; they can ignore them or they can use them in order to make their sentence completely arbitrary and on the other hand, psychiatry, in the way that it is linked to the judiciary, can go quite beyond things that might be purely academic.

I don't know if you know the case "Sturmer" in 1904, where the Leipzig court, a certain "Schreiber", a son of an impossible father, who himself worked in the courts, had his own family placed under guardianship. He said: "Everything they say is uninteresting for us. This man wouldn't hurt a fly; maybe he thinks he is Napoleon, or whatever. Whatever he does, whether he is singing or whistling, but he can do whatever he likes. As a court we only have to decide whether he is dangerous or not. This is the famous Schreiber verdict from 1904 and it has some classic constitutional state aspects in it. So this isn't progress but regression.

But my question in this case, in this sort of one, two path. I heard from a judge in the corridors that the verdicts are increasingly being influenced by the psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are passing the verdicts, as it were, because the material in its very nature, is difficult to understand and psychiatry suggests that it can look into the inside of human beings' minds, which the judiciary cannot do and so the judiciary simply hides behind this and so it is very easy to say: "Well, I am not a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist said..." etc. etc. and so that's how I come to my conclusion.

So we regularly hear the formulation in these sentences that we agree with the penal execution chamber's statement. So whether it's a borderline case of something or other with some kind of narcissm and anti-social behaviour or whatever, all these little things that are mentioned and as a result of this the report suggests to the court that the court will have to go along with this etc.

I would just like to put one further question. Whatever you say, I'm going to put my first question anyway. I'm very sorry, I'm going to have to put this question. I'm not expecting an answer from you, but I'd like to put the question to you nevertheless. It breaks down to three parts: how many psychiatrists from the Nazi era have been condemned, how many pupils of these psychiatrists are still practicing and what about the mythology of psychiatry from the National Socialist period. I'd like to put these three questions; I don't expect you to provide an answer. That was the fourth question but I'd like an answer to the 5th and final question as we cast the connection between psychiatry and the legal system – that's what we're dealing with. Also, psychiatrization of penal laws and in Germany – I'm not identifying with the Federal Republic of Germany – but to put it this way, in Germany we have a penal code which has a murder clause drawn up at the time of Adolf Hitler and has been incorporated in the penal code; that's § 211. We're not more murderous with that, but the murderer...

So, my question is: to what extent can you talk about the psychiatrization of the penal system in the Federal Republic of Germany. So we have § 211, § 240, which deals with other crime. So, ho would you respond to that? 

Well, I'm afraid I can't really give you an answer. I can't answer that question, I'm very sorry – I don't have the requisite knowledge, but if we're talking about reports and so on, let me just add something I forgot earlier on about this HCR20, which I pointed out comes from Canada:
Just imagine the following: all the expert reports or academic reports drawn up are based on experience. If we assess people and the situation is subsequently... that is then correct. But what is theorized here, is that people have a certain number of points means that in future they will commit acts of violence. However, as a result of this test result, it actually is the case that the person concerned will engage in violent acts. Possibly then they will not release him, so therefore they never realize whether their initial hypothesis i.e. that somebody who has been given a certain number of points will actually engage in further acts of violence, cannot be carried out and verified. So therefore, bearing in mind the constitutional situation, it's out of the question that such a method should be applied at all. Apart from the fact that people become a matter for statistics and nothing else – they're just degraded in that respect. 

Thomas Szasz:
I want to thank Mrs. Peters for an excellent presentation. But, not in response necessarily to your comments, I would like to make some observations which I have gathered while you were presenting and ...[inaudible]. I think we have gone – as I see it, and I'm speaking from my own personal view – as I see it, we have gone off the deep end. That means you are completely off on the wrong footing now. Because we are talking the language of the enemy now. We keep talking about illness, diagnosis, borderline personalities, schizophrenia and so on, hospitals, doctors and so on. I think the word "expert" was probably used 200 times in the past half-hour. There are no experts here! We have a conflict between the individual and the state. The psychiatrists are no more experts than the lawyers. The lawyers are not experts on the law, they are prosecutors and defense lawyers. 

I have written about this 3 books, almost 50 years ago.  This has nothing to do with the Nazis – any of this - first of all. The Nazis are very, very bad. We don't have to discuss this anymore. This has to do with psychiatric Nazis! They are right here! In Syracuse, in New York, in Berlin.

So to use the word "expert" is like [inaudible] a theological criminal is giving expert testimony about witchcraft. You cannot give expert testimony about witchcraft. You either try to convict the woman or acquit the woman. So the psychiatrists who get involved in this are either trying to kill the patient or save the patient. By "kill" I mean lock him up and destroy him. They are not experts! As long as we talk this language, we are finished. 

Christa Peters:
Can I just respond to that? Of course you're quite correct, the word itself is incorrect, because if I'm talking about somebody, I'm not an expert because I'm talking about a thing itself but that's what we did. 

T. S.:
... 45 years ago and I told the judge: "Your honor, the doctor in the hospital is not a doctor, he is the enemy of your patient. I am his doctor, I am the one he asked to examine him. I am not an expert either, I am trying to get him out. Of course I was not successful. But I think I was more successful in exposing that this is a charade. It is a charade to take this seriously! ... We cannot be respectful towards a disrespectful occupation! We cannot show so much respect for these psychiatrists, also the media that caters to them!
[Applause]
Thank you. Just one or two more points I want to make briefly. I am saying this "tongue in cheek" (I hope you can translate this accurately), I don't mean this, I need to exagerate. But in some ways one could say that the Nazi concentration camps are less bad than their hospitals. I'll tell you why. These are not my views, it is an old english/american idea. It is much easier to be confronted by another man who says: "I am your enemy, I am out to destroy you!" It is much harder to confront a man who says: "I am really your friend, I am trying to help you! And I am convincing everyone else that he is trying to help you." So if you refuse help, that means you are some kind of a [inaudible]. Obviously, how can anybody refuse help. So this has to be undermined. These are not helpers – these are criminals! But they may be very decent people.

That’s exactly what my patients say time and time and time again! 

It is not correct for a lawyer in this situation – after all one of these cases you mentioned was called to my own attention to my brother. He reads the german literature. 

Also, it is hopeless – it might be more effective for you and a couple of other lawyers to give an interview to the press and explain why you will not go into this courtroom. Because you are not going into a courtroom, you are going into what is called in America a “kangaroo court”. A “kangaroo court” is one where the verdict has already been reached, like “Alice in Wonderland”: now we find out what should be the basis for the conviction. And when I hear even members of the jury speaking of “experts”, “experts” and “maybe even get another psychiatrist in”, I am dismayed. I am absolutely dismayed! I mean, whose side are we on? We can’t be entirely impartial and there is such a conflict, we have to have some kind of sense of where we stand. 

In “Dantes Inferno” there is a special place for those who, when the good angels and the bad angels fought, declared themselves to be neutral. You cannot be neutral in [such] situations!

Yes, that is quite correct and one of my colleagues said to me, when it comes to these procedures in particular, when a commitment to psychiatric clinics takes place and there is a “routing hering” every other year just to adhere to the formalities, then this is a constitutional figleaf. But if I have a client, I don’t have the possibility of saying. “I think this is disgusting, I’m not going to go along with you”.  Of course I can’t leave my client alone. He needs me at his side as somebody because things proceed nevertheless. We cannot undermine a system simply by not turning up. The system is going to continue to function and this guy is sitting alone in front of the doctor and the judge. 

That is debatable. We are talking about a tactic now. I would argue that you are validating a system and perpetuating it. I think there would be alternatives and perhaps others on the panel who might know, might want to add to this. I have said enough but I am not so sure, that you are not doing more harm than good by showing up. Now I am not saying this personally. Obviously I respect your attempt to help in these situations and I have been in similar situations. But I think that at some point “participation” becomes “validation”.  Rather than going on a strike against a system and making a protest somewhere outside the system, assuming that there is some place some visibility outside. 

Kate Millett:
It goes back to what we were saying with the last witness. It seems to me that law has been absolutely corrupted now by psychiatry and it was never perfect to start with. It’s only gotten worse, muddier, more unjust, stupid… And also, it’s not jangling with magic. One thing about laws – you know, “the corpus” – he is dead or alive, he is in court or he isn’t. You have real evidence: someone is dead, someone got caught with a dollar bill in their hand and so forth. The superior 
character of law as compared with psychiatry is that it does deal to some extent with real evidence and real acts. 

What happened and how did we get here? How did we get here so that you just don’t serve your time? You break the law, you accept your punishment and whether you do or not, you are going to get it. You do your time and then you’re finished. Now, you do your time again and probably forever. This is crazy, when did this come in? How much has psychiatry to do with this? This is a never-ending sentence like the gulag. In Russia you get exiled for another 20 years and so forth. So we have permitted the whole business of paying your debt to society to completely degenerate now into paying an eternal debt to some absurd mystery about whether some shrink thinks you might do this again. How in the world would he ever know and if he did know and you continue to be imprisoned, it’s preventative detention, which [is] against every single human rights statute and most constitutional law. So, now we have “experts”. I mean, it gets more and more like magic or,  as Dr. Szasz often says, its like the inquisition. I think it becomes really a lot like the inquisition now that psychiatry perpetuates. What the inquisition does and what the mysteries of religion and, you know, the state of the soul. It’s so silly, but human lives are at stake and it seems to me too that in as much as lawyers now go along with this jargon, you really are betraying justice, equity and all good things. 

It seems to me the only thing that we can ever hope for, is for law to refuse medicine or psychiatry to further oppress. That is that we need legal defences against psychiatry. An we need them very badly. We need living wills, for example, so that we can’t be busted because we have a record or 
something. We also need our civil rights. We need real defence at commitment hearings rather than somebody stupid with drugs introduced to a stranger who sells them in three minutes to a judge who is already convinced they’re crazy because the doctor said so. 

There is a group in Ohio who did very good work, a group of lawyer/advocates. And what they did is they took the actual transcript of commitment hearings and then acted them out as skits. They are hilariously funny. They are real short. You can have your life bargained away in three to five seconds – fifteen is a real long one. And what they did is they played different parts each time: one lawyer will be the judge in one skit, the crazy person in the next skit, the doctor in the next skit and so forth. And so you begin to understand how utterly arbitrary this is, how perfectly silly, how it is an insult toe the idea of trial or search for justice and I think that is what we have to begin to do. You really have to attack the way that law has connived now with psychiatry. And in fact permitted itself to be overwhelmed by psychiatry. 

The courts, the courts!

Yeah, it’s conquered law. So somehow you have to get it back, because the idea of justice is just too important to us. 

Although that of course is also an appeal to politicians, to the lawyers. 

Esther Hertzog:
Well I would like to try to comment on Szasz’ comments. I wonder if it is helpful enough if we just separate psychiatry from the whole political and power systems. Because I mean I am thinking about social workers and social workers who I have witnessed have such an enormous power to do things that are just equal to what psychiatrists can do or sometimes even worse. And I can’t look at the social workers detached or apart from the whole political system. So what I need to see is what is behind these kinds of powers. What is playing, what is motivating, what gives them such an enormous power? So I think that psychiatry – I think that you brought an example and I think that I heard you saying - that in one case they said that they accepted the evaluations of the psychiatrist but in another case they just dismissed them, right? So I mean judges can do opposite things and contradicting things. 

So what we have to know and find out is what are the power elements that are behind psychiatry. Psychiatry I think doesn’t stand just by itself, that we can treat it or try to dissolve it or to get rid of it. 
Because I mean, we get rid of psychiatry and then very soon we find some other kind of element that is just as bad or just as harmful as psychiatry and we know that we have other elements. So I think that the whole situation is much more complicated and we are actually fighting against the political structure, the power structures in society. 

Thomas Szasz:
Well, there isn’t time to discuss all this but I thank you for your question and forgive me if I refer you to my books written 40 and 50 years ago. What we have – in a nutshell – I have suggested that in the 20th century what we had two totalitarian systems: international socialism, called communism and national socialism, called Nazism and we have replaced them with what I call “the totalitarian state” ….. Society does want to control people, undesirable people. Previously it was people who were farmers in Russia or Jews. Here it was Jews and Gypsies and you know all that. Now in the western democracies, it’s the kind of people we have heard of and we all know about: mainly poor people. Poor people are always the victims [of laws]. And let me add that when I use the word “psychiatry”, I am including – and you will see in America … knows this – the word “psychiatry” covers, in our vocabulary, clinical psychology, social work and any other profession and some aspects of the law that use this terminology to manipulate and dispose of unwanted human being. That is the term. That book is translated into German, that is the book “Cruel compassion” (“Grausames Mitleid”). I’ve been writing about this for literally 50 years. 

I am a great believer in the great Anglo-Saxon principle that life is not a disease – we can just get rid of one bad thing at a time. We have got an obviously bad thing – what to me is an obviously bad thing – and that is a psychiatric control of human beings. Whether something worse will replace it, I don’t know. I hope that something worse will not replace it, because modern society does depend on legitimizing this kind of mistreatment and it really does not have anything else to fall back on – it cannot fall back on race, on gender and religion. It can fall back on medicine, health. Or in some ways public health is becoming psychiatrized. There is a great movement, as you know, smoking in America is practically like being jewish in Germany. Not quite but it is coming there. And getting fat is going to be the next thing. And in some ways all of this is supported by the social sciences who get money from the government. The corruption is in two directions, which has not been exposed. Half the money comes from the state, the other half of the money comes from pharmaceutical companies. The people who oppose this have got no money. Sure, we have got a problem but we have got good ideas – we have the truth on our side. Unfortunately we haven’t got the press on our side – they hardly ever come, or cover us. But that is my answer.