George Alexander:
There is a question from the audience. Please…

My name is Joachim W. I am a survivor of psychiatry. I’m a student of law. I’ve got a legal question to the witness as long as he is in the dock. It seemed to be the case that this penal execution chamber in Luebeck which is responsible for this forensic department in Schleswig-Holstein regularly called upon outside experts or has to use their services and then makes use of the hospital doctors or whatever. So normally the senior physician at the department?… the therapeutic responsibility for the patients are turned into the forensic experts for the patients concerned. No, that is not the case, the penal execution chamber is called upon but there is no time frame involved here. Every few years or whatever to call upon the services of an external psychiatric expert who can then attempt to make a prediction about the future behaviour of the person concerned. 

Now in contrast to this, every year we have these reviews and hearings. The hospital doctor or the head of the department is called upon to produce a statement and normally this is the person who is called upon to do so and then the court goes along with the statement for the most part without posing any questions. For instance, in the case of Mr. Sabasch, … referred to, who has been in the institution for the past 30 years, year by year since 1986 onwards roughly he has been accused of being incapable of following things and it is not a question of people asking why a person who can express himself perfectly clearly, why he should be mentally deficient in any way and it is not surprising of course that if you’ve been in an institution of this kind for almost 30 years that you may have problems of a certain kind. 

So this statement given by the treating doctor involves less efforts than the external experts because basically he just addresses you?…? sentences for the court which confirmed what was said in the past ?………? and the court doesn’t need an external full-blown report and so on – the situation is as it was in the past and that’s it. Thank you very much. 

???:
Can we agree, I’m not talking about “clinic” but talk about “institution”, but that we should not talk about “doctor” but the “treater”, because treatment has to do with the use of insecticide, pesticides and so forth…

George Alexander:
Would you like to let us know who you are?

My name is Sabrina S.

Yes, sir…

[Direct transcription of the spoken English – not a translation]:
My name is Klaus. ?…….? I think what we missed in the last 20, 30 years is a more centered interest of the personal wishes of the people who call themselves psychiatrists. I think it is too short to argue: “These people have economic organizations and trusts and mafiosi structures to make a profit. That is true but what is the reason why people make profits? They make profits to have a certain kind of satisfaction in their private sphere, in their private wishes, in their private urges and this discussion is tabooed since the Third Reich. There are some attempts from Thiloweit to discuss the viciousness and urgence of this sadist KZ [concentration camp] custodies, who have really sadist motivation to make such pain on the people. They have sadist wishes and this sadism is not discussed. I don’t know why. I don’t know why any of us is wanting to support these organizations, to work in these organizations, to support these sadist systems by daily work in professions. Why is it not possible? Since 30 years we had the chance to go out of the structures, to make own structures, to make structures self-determined, to bring a big discussion and a big movement in the publicity. To publicize the backgrounds of the activities of the pedagogues, the social workers and the psychiatrists and that is never done and I think here we come to a big taboo and this taboo must come on the table and then we know: why do the people catch kids, put them away, abduct them. Why do they catch people, why do they want to have the near of patients? They want to have a kind of emotional satisfaction and this must come on the table. It is time!

George Alexander:
Thank you very much for your statement. Anyone want to comment on that?

Alon Harel:
Yes, I want to make some short points:
First just to express some disagreement with the constant comparison with the Nazis, which for a Jew like myself, who most of his family was exterminated in the Holocaust, is – I think – inappropriate in this context and I think possibly for other people in the audience. 
Secondly, I obviously have great respect for Prof. Szasz but the issue of expertise is obviously controversial and is one of the things that the jury has to discuss. I would very much, when I come back to Israel, the first thing I am going to do is to read your books but I’m not familiar with them and I am looking forward to reading them but still the issue is obviously controversial. Thank you very much.

G. A.:
Did you have a comment you wanted to make?

Lawyer Christa Peters:
I just wanted to ask whether we could perhaps continue this point:

G. A.:
I thought you were responding to one of the comments. We [will] come back…

Ron Leifer:
Dr. Szasz and I think very much alike. I just want to add a few observations to his comments:
Being mindful of the prosecution’s charge, and being mindful of the fact that these proceedings are being observed by the United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights and being mindful of the fact that local psychiatrists from the Free University have made an attempt to silence us and given the kind of testimony that we have heard about psychiatry, it seems to me that we are in a crisis of civilization, that what we are talking about is a breakdown of the rule of law and it being replaced by the rule of psychiatrists and it’s a very complicated problem. The law itself has defaulted on its responsibility to make judgements about people’s actions on the basis of the rule of law. 

Psychiatrists have taken over because there is the opportunity for them. They serve that function now of social control. What I would like to see come out of this meeting is the understanding that psychiatry – that is, involuntary psychiatry – is not a medical discipline, it is a covert form of social control and the reason that it functions is because quite frankly we can’t stand the rule of law, we can’t stand freedom. That’s the reason why we have in this century witnessed international socialism, National Socialism and we can’t stand freedom in the West where we pretend to be free and so we require – and when I say “we”, I mean the people out on the streets. It’s family member who commits family member, it’s neighbor who calls the police on neighbor, it’s schools who call the police and  ?…? their children. We cannot stand ourselves and we appeal to psychiatry to control us because rule of law is too limited. Rule of law is a limitation on the power of the state and when the power of the state is limited, what we have is human behavior in community and family have broken down and the individual has no lost guidelines for moral actions in the world and for meaning in the world. In the United States we are dealing with children killing children, mothers killing children, children killing their parents. These are canaries in the gold mine. We are dealing with the breakdown of civilization. We can’t solve that entire problem but if at least we can recognize that psychiatry functions not as a medical discipline but as a covert means of social control to supplement what rule of law and what government cannot provide for us, because we ourselves cannot stand freedom, I think we will have accomplished something today. 

 Kate Millett:
The young man who spoke about the private satisfactions of sadism for psychiatry seems at first – at least to me, I am about to express an extreme point of view or even one that’s, you know, a temptation – but it does also seem to lead to a possible kind of breakthrough in this thought and that is: we have this system because we let it take place. We have it not because psychiatrists have so much fun and private sadism – although I guess they might – but we have it because government wants it. We have it because people want to commit their relatives and because if the state will police the family and the friends and the neighborhood and so forth without your having to commit a crime, you can still lose your freedom, maybe forever and be stigmatised and so forth.

 So this form of social control has an enormous usefulness and government has taken it over step by step by step every year, every decade… National Socialism, I don’t think has a patch on it. I think psychiatry as a form of social control is probably the most perfect that was ever developed. It makes the Catholic Church even at the time of the inquisition look like a small-time outfit and we have not only paid for this with government. 

In my little town where my farm is in, Poughkeepsie in New York, there are 8 pages of social services for if you want to lock somebody up. We once tried to prevent someone from being locked up and we called all 8 pages and none of them would promise. And they are all charitable. They are supported by churches, the ?…….?, the Lions, all kinds of businessmen’s associations. Their good works, so that we have completely psychiatrized society now, both through the government, through the social worker system, from all the money of the pharmaceuticals, which only exceed armaments in their profitability or perhaps prisons now. 

In my country we have 2 million prisoners now. We have more prisoners than any place in the world. And it’s a terrible future that this seems to indicate.