My name is George Alexander. I also want to thank the Russell Foundation for its generous support and thank the people who's hard work put the conference together against all to fthe odds that it has had to face, the people who have put their time to serving on the jury and all of you who have decided to spend what is a lovely Berlin day in this hall talking about this trial.

This being a trial, you might want to know: Where is the defendant? Yes, that is a good question. Where is the defendant!? Well not anywhere that I can lay my hands on. Is that because we did not let the psychiatric community know that there was a trial? No. They were given adequete notice and ample time and requested to show up but their response was different. They ignored the invitation directly and honored it in several ways, which I won't elaborate, Prof. Narr has already told you about. Maybe rapid in showing up, we should shut the trial down. They have not been entirely successful in that. Indeed they have moved us to a more comfortable hall than we would have been in at the Free University of Berlin and so perhaps ironically we owe them a debt of gratitude. 

But it does show how the profession in power considers its responsiblity to the world: it has none! It has nothing to answer for and doesn't bother to come by and provide an answer. It isn't indifferent to the tribunal. In addition to pointedly not showing up, presumably having something to do with getting us kicked out of the university, they have also prevented a large number of people from being here. One of the witnesses from whom you will hear was going to come with 5 clients, whom she has -  she is an attorney. And each one of them is not here. Why are they not here? Because it would be "anti-therapeutic". To remove them from the wonders of the institution they are in and put them in a place as dangerous as this. 

Well, you can understand, that's part of the response too. And our response is: we will go ahead, we will be as fair as we can be. We will get the issues on the table and we will overlook the fact that the psychiatric profession would just as soon pretend that they were universally loved and that their misdeeds were not noticed by anyone outside of their ranks. 

The way in which we are going to proceed is largely this: we will call witnesses, who have direct testimony concerning psychiatric abuse. They will make a statement. At the end of that time, they will answer questions, should there be questions about their testimony or about matters related to the testimony. Dr. Szasz and I will participate and you are invited to paricipate as well. 

During the time that they are making their statements, we would prefer, if it is acceptable, that questions be limited to questions such as: "What did you say?" rather than "What did you mean and how can you reconcile that with my perspective about things?". Those are the sorts of issues that we hope can be reserved to the question and answer period, in which we expect the jury and you to be as active as we in elaborating the statements that can be made. 

I should make on other point before I join Prof. Szasz in very limited statment of what I think the accusation will demonstrate. The way in which we are going to introduce witnesses is going to be perhaps a bit troubling, because are going to start with the most outrageous cases. Not to suggest that there is any good way to calibrate outrage. But cases, in which the state is so deeply and malevalently involved, that nobody, even in the state, would seek to justify that kind of intervention. Don't misunderstand our starting with that. The point is not that that's all that's wrong with psychiatry. The point is simply to remind you of the central role of psychiatry, when it comes to a despotic government attempting to control its people and that's, I think, our way of introducing that issue. But we will bring witnesses later, who will be the day to day victims of a profession that creates enormous numbers of victims and don't take the order as our suggesting anything different. 

Now let me just make a couple of points about what I think we will demonstrate about psychiatry with this testimony and then we'll get on with the testimony. I think one of the things it is very important to note, is – as we say in the accusation – that psychiatry has made itself the arbitrar of normalcy. So you are not normal when the psychiatrist decides you are not normal. Unlike other medical conditions, for which there is some standard out there, some objective marker, the marker for mental illness is behavior. And the designation of "proper behavior" is medicalized by the psychiatrists but no less arbitrary for the medical label than if they simply set it outright. 

Homosexuality was a mental disease. Oh, don't worry, it isn't a medical disease any more, because the arbitrers of normalcy have decided by vote to include that – at  least some of that – within the ...... (ambit?) of normal behavior. So it stopped being a disease. Now, I must say, I envy – as a non-physician – this group of people for their ability by a simple vote, to eradicate what they think is an illness and wish they would pass on that miraculous trait to other physicians, so we could vote out cancer and tuberculosis and other things. But they can do that and they did it with, as I said, homosexuality. They are now doing it with shyness. Apparently your lack of gregariousness is – we all thought – as apect of your personality. No, no! It is an aspect of your wellness and if you are shy enough, you are really sick and should, at an early opportunity – if you listen to the psychiatrist pressing this point of view – go to them so they can cure you or at least so they can treat you. 

Well, you get the point that I am making and I don't want to elaborate it too extensively, except to say that it has really victimized a number of very vulnerable groups. Women were a wonderful target for having their behavior declared abnormal and therefore sick and therefore treatable. And both Dr. Szasz and I have written a good deal about this – I don't want to press the point but the women's movement in part had to struggle against the fact that psychiatrists were saying that a lot of things, that women now take for granted, were really aspects of the illness of a few women at an earlier time. 

Now I just want to make only one other point, that the psychiatrists have actually given some thought to this. Every once in a while they decide that they have identified something as an illness, that they really don't want to deal with because it gets them into too much trouble. And so some time ago they decided that anti-social personality was a mental disorder but have joined the courts in arguing that it's not a mental disorder worthy of consideration. Why? Because every criminal has that problem and for them to try and take the entire criminal population under their wing, is more than they can manage with their resources. So, though it's an illness, it's not an illness that will be admitted as an illness. So the fact that you are criminal – unless there is another aspect of your behavior – does not qualify you for the large range of things we do to mental patients in the law. 
It is that control of normal behavior that I think lies behind a large part of psychiatric power and we will talk more about it through the witnesses. 

Psychiatrists have managed to interfere not only with life and liberty but with a large number of legal relationships that people have with each other. If you are not competent – which means you don't behave normally – with respect to contracts, chances are a) that nobody will make a contract with you anyway, once they find out and b) that, should they, you may have some redress, because you could bring a psychiatrist with you to say that you weren't normal and therefore shouldn't be held, shouldn't be responsible for the contracts you make. In the United States, at least, the same is not true of your wrongs, which we call "torts". And you're held responsible for those. There is an expression, which may not be German, which says: "Unnecessary consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", meaning that you don't have to make all things consistent. So you can commit all kinds of harms. If you hit someone with a car, the fact that you are otherwise not competent, will not get you off. If you make a contract, it will. Again: : " Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds".

The worst part about psychiatry with respect to people who are criminals, is not that they won't be recognized for their behavior as necessarily universally being illness. But then when it is declared to be an illness and people are excused because of the illness, they are then acquitted of the crime and subjected to far greater punishment than had they been tried as criminals in the first place. For example, a criminal has the right to due process, both in the United States and certainly in Germany and in most civilized countries in some respect or other. And that's because the state is seen as intervening in that person's life in a harmful way. A person said to be a mental patient is not entitled to due process, because after all, the state is benefitting that person by putting them in an institution and "treating them". We will hear about some such treatment.

So, in the criminal process, not only has the profession sloughed off a number of people, but the people that it has considered within it's ambit (?) have found their way to more difficult treatment. The United States supreme court just this year, had a chance to review that question with respect to someone serving a post-sentence confinement. We have for some years now allowed the state to prosecute sexual predators - which I think is the right thing to do - to put them in jail for the crimes they committed – which I think is the right thing to do – and then, after they have served their sentence, to hold a medical hearing to see whether they are still dangerous. And guess what? They are found pretty often to be dangerous. "But", said the first defendant just a few years back in the supreme court, "that's double jearpordy! Our consitution forbids people for being tried twice for the same offence":  "And", the defendant said, "that's 'ex po facto'" – a provision you also have. "Which means that's a punishment you made up after the offence was committed. You can't do that, constitutionally – people have a right to be warned in advance of their conduct, what their punishment will be." And the supreme court said: "That's absolutely right". If this were a criminal case, your second sentence, your "post sentence sentence" to a mental institution would be in fact both double jeapordy and "ex po facto". 

Unfortunately for you, that's not what is happening. The second proceeding is not a criminal proceeding at all, it is a civil proceeding on the question of your dangerousness and when you now get put away in an institution, it doesn't even pretend to have a treatment for you. Being locked up that time, is medical. Well, "How do you know?", the supreme court was asked in a case that came down this year, "How can you distinguish between a prosecution and a medical hearing?". "Oh!", said the supreme court, "it's a matter of what the constitution intended. If they intended to punish, then it's a criminal proceeding, if they intended to treat, then it's civil". So first you look to see what the legislature said. What is the legislature likely to say? I suppose I needn't give you the answer to that but beyond that, the supreme court, which has learned to be a bit suspicious, said: "We also have a test". And that test is – to summarize it a bit cavalierly -  whether you are given any rights by the legislature, because they know they have to give you rights if you are a criminal defendant and so if they have put together a procedure that doesn't give those to you, that demonstrates that they were thinking of this as a civil procedure and that they were not trying to punish you, but to help you. It is against that kind of help that the accusation levels its case. 

There is, I guess, only one other aspect of the accusation that you have read, or will read – it is in your material – and that is that a lot of this helpful, non-due process commitment is done in the interest of preventing harm to society or to the people that are incarcerated. People are incarcerated generally as being dangerous to self or dangerous to others. Again this lies against a long jurisprudencial history of not having what is known as "preventive detention". It is not that future harm is unpredictable – I would be the last to claim that. If you beleived in preventive detention, then a good way to begin is never to let out people who have been convicted of significant crimes, because the most predictably criminal population in the future will be made up of people who have been convicted of crimes in the past. And yet for due process reasons, we wouldn't dream of doing that. So we drop down the scale to people who are less predictably likely to be involved and we get to the point where sometimes we can even be good enough to say, "In this group of four, six or eight people, somebody is likely to be dangerous to others". That's easy: lock them all up! And that essentially is the recipe that we use in danger to others: people are predictably dangerous because they are in a group. They might as a group actually be dangerous – that I would be willing to admit – someone in that group probably is more than normally likely to commit an offence. But the notion of that kind of intervention in human rights is – I think – horrible and should be, but isn't, unthinkable. 

Well, these are the sorts of issues and there are more and we have elaborated them in the accusation that we hope to present through the witnesses that we have ready to testify and I shall begin. I would like now to call Elvira Manthey to make a statement.