[CTRL] A Short History of Psychosurgical "Violence Initiatives"

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From: "Alex Constantine" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Lloyd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: A Short History of Psychosurgical "Violence Initiatives"
Date: Saturday, October 21, 2000 9:38 PM

A Short History of Psychosurgical "Violence Initiatives"
‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹
The following report was originally published in:
Journal of African American Men 1:No. 3, 3-22. Winter 1995/96
Campaigns Against Racist Federal Programs by the Center for
the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology

by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.

The Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology was founded in the
early 1970s to organize my international campaign to stop the resurgence of
lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery or psychiatric brain surgery.
Initially, I had no idea that my campaign would end up focusing on the
racist intentions of federally funded biological psychiatrists and
neurosurgeons. I certainly could not have anticipated that twenty years
later, the Center would once again be fighting a government-sponsored racist
psychiatric program. This report tells the story of the first and second
violence initiatives and the Center's efforts to counter them.

THE FIRST VIOLENCE INITIATIVE
In 1971 I discovered that psychiatrists and neurosurgeons were planning and
implementing a worldwide revival of psychosurgery. At the time I was not an
activist, but I was aware that no one had publicly opposed the first round
of lobotomies in the 1940s and 1950s. I decided to take a stand.
My medical training convinced me that improving the techniques of
psychiatric surgery-for example, by replacing the scalpel with hot
electrodes--would not make the interventions any less damaging. Without
harming the brain, there could be no "therapeutic" effect. The surgery must
destroy enough function to flatten the patient's emotions. There is no way
to accomplish that without creating more widespread mental devastation,
including the relative loss of essential human qualities such as creativity,
spontaneity, personal responsibility, self-insight, social sensitivity and
awareness, and judgment. Research and my personal experiences would confirm
this initial impression.2
Psychosurgery, Individual Vulnerability, and Public Health
Shortly after beginning my opposition to psychosurgery, I came under attack
in the national media from an unexpected source, three Harvard
professors-psychiatrist Frank Ervin and neurosurgeons Vernon Mark and
William Sweet. Sweet was director of neurosurgery at perhaps the most
respected hospital in the world, the Massachusetts General. Mark was head of
the department of neurosurgery at Boston City Hospital.
As the controversy heated up, a physician who asked for anonymity directed
me to published remarks made by the three doctors concerning the use of
brain surgery to suppress black urban rioters. Soon after, in 1973, I
received a brown envelope from an unidentified source in the Department of
Justice (DOJ). It contained an in-house memo documenting that Mark and Ervin
were receiving funds from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for
experiments in psychosurgery for violence control. Meanwhile, Ervin was also
receiving money from the Department of Justice for research on genetic
factors in violent crime. Sweet was involved as a supporter, co-author, and
a member of the private foundation that funneled the government funds to
Mark and Ervin.
In a 1967 letter entitled "Role of Brain Disease in Riots and Urban
Violence" in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Mark,
Sweet and Ervin, much like current violence-initiative advocates, focused on
individual vulnerability rather than upon larger social, economic or
political factors. They asked, "if slum conditions alone determined and
initiated riots, why are the vast majority of slum dwellers able to resist
the temptations of unrestrained violence? Is there something peculiar about
the violent slum dweller that differentiates him from his peaceful
neighbor?"
Mark, Sweet and Ervin went on to suggest that this "peculiarity" was "brain
dysfunction." They called for large-scale studies of the inner city to
"pinpoint, diagnose, and treat those people with low violence thresholds
before they contribute to further tragedies." In a supportive "Medical News"
report a few weeks later, JAMA lauded Mark and Ervin's psychosurgery as a
"public health" measure.
Mark and Ervin must have felt they were on a heroic, Nobel Prize-winning
endeavor-providing a solution to worldwide mayhem, and especially to
America's urban uprisings. In 1968, a year in which they were aggressively
experimenting on patients, they wrote in Psychiatric Opinion that "brain
dysfunction" was "equally important" to "poverty, unemployment and
substandard housing" as a cause of urban violence. They estimated that tens
of millions of Americans might be violence prone as a result of brain
damage.
In testimony on civil disorders before a New York State legislative
committee in 1968 (Bird, 1968), William Sweet "said mass violence might be
touched off by leaders suffering from temporal seizures of the brain." Sweet
made a pitch for the electrical stimulation of surgically implanted
electrodes as a method of calming violent people.
Mark, Ervin and Sweet had their greatest PR coup when their work made the
cover of Life on June 21, 1968 (Rosenfeld, 1968). Life observed, "The
psychobiology approach, new as it is, is gaining adherents so fast that it
might almost be called a movement." Life seemed to endorse their efforts
toward biomedical social control:
In a slum neighborhood, everyone may live under the same frustrating set of
pressures and tensions, but only a small minority will engage in rioting,
and even among the rioters only a handful will actually burn down a building
or assault another person. Thus psychobiology proceeds on the premise that
violent acts are carried out by violent individuals, even if the individuals
are part of a mob.
The article gave a big spread to Mark and Ervin's psychosurgery for
violence.

The fate of Thomas R
In their book, Violence and the Brain (1970), and elsewhere, Mark and Ervin
described Thomas R (sometimes called Leonard K) as a young white man largely
saved from epilepsy and completely saved from violence by psychosurgery.
When describing his outcome, they mention no serious side effects. He was
their star patient.
The patient's mother, Mrs. G., read my criticism of Mark and Ervin in the
Boston Globe and realized for the first time what had been done to her son.
She wrote to me that in reality he had been reduced almost to a "vegetable."
Thomas's tragic story is retold in detail in Breggin and Breggin, The War
Against Children.
Mark and Ervin Lose Their Funding
As a result of the antipsychosurgery campaign, all of Mark, Ervin and
Sweet's federal funding for genetic and psychosurgical experimentation was
cut off. As a long-delayed satisfaction to us, we learned this year that the
Center's campaign against the DOJ's Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration (LEAA) funding for Ervin had brought about a dramatic
reversal in official government policy. A guideline entitled "Use of LEAA
funds for Psychosurgery and Medical Research" was signed by the LEAA
administrator, Donald E. Santarelli, on June 19, 1974. The guideline
declared that any future grant applications for psychosurgery would be
denied. It further stipulated that all "medical research," unless risk-free,
would be denied and referred instead to the Department of Health, Education
and Welfare (DHEW, now DHHS). It forbid states to use LEAA block grants to
do psychosurgery or medical experimentation.
OPERATING ON LITTLE BLACK CHILDREN
As far as we know, Mark and Ervin did not perform their psychosurgery
experiments on any African Americans. With more limited political aims,
perhaps, another surgeon was operating on numerous black children. When I
began researching the return of psychosurgery in the early 1970s, I quickly
came upon the work of O.J. Andy, director of neurosurgery at the University
of Mississippi-Ole Miss-in Jackson. He was publishing reports on multiple
surgical interventions into the brains of small children, ages five to
twelve, who were diagnosed as aggressive and hyperactive. Of his 30-40
patients, he wrote me in 1971, most were children.
Before the controversy hit the press, l phoned Andy, who told me he could
not recall the race of any of the children. Later I contacted a civil rights
attorney in Mississippi who was able to determine that most of them were
housed in a segregated black institution for the developmentally disabled.
The attorney got onto the wards, where the nurses told him with frustration
that Andy had a completely free hand in picking children for psychosurgery.
In 1966 Andy described J. M., age nine, who was "hyperactive, aggressive,
combative, explosive, destructive, sadistic." Over a three-year period Andy
performed four separate mutilating operations involving at least six lesions
with implanted electrodes. The youngster was at first said to be doing well.
In a subsequent 1970 article, Andy again claimed that J. M. is no longer so
combative and negative. Then he added, "lntellectually, however, the patient
is deteriorating."
While Andy did not take an activist political position like Mark, Ervin and
Sweet-he did tell B. J. Mason, a reporter for Ebony, that black urban
rioters "could have abnormal pathologic brains" and "should undergo tests
with whatever capacity we have now." Following world-wide publicity about
his operations during the antipsychosurgery campaign, in 1973 a committee of
his peers at the university declared his research experimental. When Andy
did not establish appropriate experimental protocols, he was prohibited from
operating. Andy himself declared in 1980 that he had been forced to stop
operating due to "sociological pressures" in his home community.

VIOLENCE CENTERS THROUGHOUT URBAN AMERICA
In his 1973 State of the State message, California governor Ronald Reagan
announced plans for the establishment of a biomedical facility, the Center
for the Study of the Reduction of Violence. Supported by state and federal
funds, the first center was planned for the psychiatry department at UCLA,
headed by Louis Jolyn "Jolly" West, a flamboyant psychiatrist known for his
ability to hitch himself to hot topics. An early draft of West's proposed
UCLA center described using schools in Chicano and African American
neighborhoods to screen for possible genetic defects. It also mentioned the
possibility of psychosurgery. The suggestion of psychosurgery for control of
violence was especially menacing in California because Santa Monica
neurosurgeon M. H. Brown was strongly advocating it. In a January 22, 1972
letter to the Los Angeles Times, he wrote "It is either this [psychosurgery]
or a further escalation of violence and chaos in society that does not serve
the best interests of the United States."
Meanwhile, Frank Ervin left the collapsing Boston project and came to join
West at UCLA. Ervin's arrival at this critical juncture alerted people to
the center's potential dangers. Despite denials from psychiatrists West and
Ervin, the discovery of references to genetics and psychosurgery in the
original proposal proved politically fatal. Opposed by the Center and a
coalition of west coast reformers,3 the planned string of federal violence
centers never got off the ground.
The Kaimowitz Trial
In 1972 the State of Michigan and the Lafayette Clinic of Wayne State
University began planning an experimental psychosurgery program for the
control of violence, using "voluntary" inmates of the state hospital system.
Gabe Kaimowitz, at the time a Michigan Legal Services lawyer, heard about
the upcoming medical event, and intervened in the court on behalf of "John
Doe" and two dozen other state psychiatric inmates scheduled for eventual
enrollment in the experimental program.
Comparing Blacks to Bulls
Ernst Rodin was the chief neurologist and the moving force behind the
Lafayette Clinic's psychosurgery project. In 1972, Rodin wrote a lengthy
speech describing psychosurgery and castration as fitting treatment for some
of the violent behavior displayed in the riots that had raged in his city of
Detroit. Rodin voiced doubts about doing psychosurgery without
sterilization, because with psychosurgery alone "the now hopefully more
placid dullard can inseminate other equally dull young females to produce
further dull and aggressive offspring."
Rodin argued that children of limited intelligence tend to become violent
when they are treated as equals. He wanted them brought up in an
"authoritarian life style," and declared that many of them, like aggressive
bulls, should be turned into docile oxen by means of castration. In the
neurologist's own words, it was time to "get down to cold-blooded medical
research dealing with individuals rather than masses."
The Verdict
Kaimowitz invited me to testify as his medical expert and during two days on
the stand, I gave a history of state mental hospitals and psychosurgery. I
wanted the three judges to understand that state mental hospitals are
similar to Nazi concentration camps in how they suppress and humiliate their
involuntary inmates; and I wanted to suggest the applicability of the
Nuremberg Code.
The Nuremberg Code was originally written into the final opinion of the
judges at the first War Crimes Tribunals in postwar Germany. It consists of
ten principles for "permissible medical experiments." The first principle
states in part that the human subject "should be so situated as to be able
to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of
force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of
constraint or coercion" (Trials of War Criminals, 1946-1949, pp. 181-182).
The Nuremberg Code meant that Jewish inmates of concentration camps were not
actually volunteers when they seemingly agreed to participate in medical
experiments, such as being frozen in ice water. If they did acquiesce to
these experiments, their consent was coerced by fear of other worse
alternatives, such as torture or death in the gas chambers.
After hearing a spectrum of witnesses, the three judges agreed with the
substance of my testimony, including the devastating effects of the most
modern psychosurgery.4 Their official opinion cited the Nuremberg Code and
used it as one reason for prohibiting consent to psychosurgery in the state
mental hospitals of Michigan. The judges found that "involuntarily confined
patients cannot reason as equals with doctors and administrators over
whether they should undergo psychosurgery." They declared that under First
Amendment freedoms the "government has no power or right to control men's
minds, thoughts, and expressions. If the First Amendment protects the
freedom to express ideas, it necessarily follows that it must protect the
freedom to generate ideas."
The opinion was never appealed and stands to this day. It continues to
inhibit the performance of psychosurgery throughout the country, especially
in state mental hospitals and prisons.
As described in The War Against Children, there are contemporary attempts to
revive lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery, although none of the
advocates now dare tie their work to political aims. What keeps advocates of
psychosurgery from proceeding ahead full-throttle? Is it their own
scientific caution or ethical concerns? In Psychosurgery, (1992), Rodgers
quotes Donlin Long, the Johns Hopkins director of neurosurgery:
``You'd also need an institutional commitment to absolutely pristine science
and the guts to tell the Peter Breggins of the world to stuff it,' he [Long]
added, referring to psychiatrist Peter Breggin's lifelong battle to ban
psychiatric surgery.
RESULTS FOR THE FIRST VIOLENCE INITIATIVE
Overall, the Center's activities-supported by other activists and
organizations around the country-resulted in victory over the first violence
initiative. The most effective activists were found in the black community,
especially the Black Congressional Caucus. Louis Stokes (D-OH) and Ronald V.
Dellums (D-CA) became founding members of the Center's board of directors,
and have remained with the Center for the past twenty years. The single most
important media event was probably an article in Ebony written by B. J.
Mason (1973) in which he exposed the whole racist agenda.
In a surprising coalition, white conservatives in the U.S. Senate were also
instrumental in opposing some aspects of the first violence initiative,
especially the resurgence of psychiatric brain surgery. Their chief concern
was not racial justice but morality. To many of them, tampering with the
brain for emotional or behavioral control robbed individuals of personal
responsibility and was therefore unethical.
After the debacle of the late 1970s, leaders of biological psychiatry
avoided linking their efforts to anything that might be construed as a
racist political agenda. Unhappily, they could not be silenced or held in
check indefinitely. The rise of violent crime, renewed racism, and economic
stresses in the early 1990s provided them fertile ground. The polarization
in the country was symbolized, this second time around, by a tragic
political reality: Unlike their position in the first round, conservatives
would support the new biological racism.
THE SECOND VIOLENCE INITIATIVE
Rhesus Monkeys and Inner-City Youth
At the head of now disbanded Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health
Administration (ADAMHA), psychiatrist Frederick Goodwin was the federal
government's highest ranking psychiatrist and one of the world's leading
biological psychiatrists. He was thrust into the hot lights of national
media attention in early 1992 after he allegedly made remarks that compared
inner city youth to monkeys who live in a jungle, and who just want to kill
each other, have sex and reproduce. The statements in question were made at
a February 11 meeting of the prestigious National Advisory Mental Health
Council. One person in attendance, an African American government employee,
was offended enough to phone the Washington Post.5
Ten days of escalating media debate and criticism ensued, at the end of
which Goodwin issued an apology. On February 21, 1992 he said he had
"learned all too painfully that the absence of malice or bad intentions does
not excuse the insensitivity" of his comments, adding, "In an effort to shed
light on the violence problem, I juxtaposed primate research to the problems
in our cities in a careless way. I regret this insensitivity."
Media controversy continued, but as yet no one had seen the actual
transcript of Goodwin's speech to the National Advisory Mental Health
Council. Meanwhile, Goodwin resigned as head of ADAMHA; but Louis Sullivan
immediately appointed him to a post he was already scheduled to assume,
director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Goodwin remained
well-placed to lead the violence initiative.
Defending Goodwin
The media coverage of Goodwin's apparently racist remarks was considerable,
and Congressman John Conyers, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus,
demanded Goodwin's resignation. But then Conyers came under fire from the
Wall Street Journal in a March 9 editorial titled "The Speech Police." The
Washington Post followed with an editorial on March 21, "The Fred Goodwin
Case," stating that an otherwise great scientist and psychiatrist had made
an unfortunate slip. The newspaper commented, "this is the political high
season. When the going got tough, Dr. Fred Goodwin was out."

DISCOVERING THE SECOND VIOLENCE INITIATIVE
In an effort to lend support to Congressman John Conyers, Ginger Ross
Breggin and I visited his office on March 17, 1992. There we read the newly
arrived verbatim transcript of Goodwin's remarks to the National Advisory
Mental Health Council. The transcript not only confirmed Goodwin's
comparison between monkeys and inner-city youth, it contained something far
more threatening. The government was indeed planning a program of urban
biomedical social control aimed at identifying and treating children with
presumed genetic and biological "vulnerabilities" that might make them prone
to violence in later years.
Goodwin described this inner city psychiatric intervention as "one of the
planning initiatives that is the top priority of the agency now for its
planning for the future-and what we mean here is the 1994 budget."
Goodwin emphasized NlMH's unique expertise and role in identifying the
vulnerable individual-the youngster who might grow up to be violent. He
spoke of "early detection" and "preventive interventions." While he
acknowledged that "psychosocial variables" do contribute to crime, he
focused on psychiatric concepts of "impulsivity," "biological correlates"
and "genetic factors." He said that genetic factors in violence and crime
"are very strong."
He discussed the need to identify specific populations for "extensive and
expensive productive interventions." Because the interventions would be
costly, it would be necessary to "narrow your focus on your population that
you are going to intervene in" to "hone down to something under 100,000."
Goodwin noted the public's concern over violent crime, and suggested that
there would be more political support or "leverage" for focusing on
individuals rather than on social reform or "large social engineering of
society." He cited gun control as an example of social engineering that
would draw less support than focusing on individual criminals. It was in
this overall context that Goodwin had made his comparison between inner-city
youth and monkeys in a jungle:
If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly
half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is
the natural way of it for males, to knock each other off and, in fact, there
are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the same
hyperaggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual, so they
copulate more and therefore they reproduce more to offset the fact that half
of them are dying. Now, one could say that if some of the loss of structure
in this society, and particularly in the high impact inner city areas, has
removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and
that maybe it isn't t just careless use of the word when people call certain
areas of certain cities jungles, that we may have gone back to what might be
more natural, without all of the social controls that we have imposed upon
ourselves as a civilization over thousands of years in our own evolution.
In March 1992, immediately after we obtained the transcript of Goodwin's
remarks to the National Advisory Mental Health Council, we began to organize
a national campaign against the government's plans. We started by sending
out hundreds and eventually thousands of reports from the Center for the
Study of Psychiatry and Psychology and by attempting to arouse media
interest.
Goodwin at the American Psychiatric Association
By the spring of 1992, the government was trying to evade the flak that
Goodwin had drawn over his comparison between monkeys and urban youth living
in a jungle. Our efforts to interest the media and the nation in the even
more ominous concrete plans for the violence initiative met with little
initial success. Then on May 5 Goodwin spoke to the annual convention of the
American Psychiatric Association on the subject of "Conduct Disorder as a
Precursor to Adult Violence and Substance Abuse." It would be the last time
he elaborated in a public forum on his views about violence prevention.
After carefully couching his remarks, Goodwin reached his main interest,
"focus on the violent-prone individual." He brought up the genetic question
and stated, as if it were a proven fact, "There is a genetic contribution to
antisocial personality disorder." According to Goodwin, while the genetic
factor in crime and violence is not "overwhelming," it is a prerequisite.6
Without directly saying so, he was making clear that violent inner city men
have a predisposing genetic makeup.
Finding the Preliminary Plan
Under the Freedom of Information Act, we submitted requests to the
government for all documents pertaining to biological and medical research
into violence and Goodwin's proposed inner-city interventions. Stuffed
within one large batch of papers was an unsigned, three-page document dated
March 9, 1992 that bears a striking resemblance to Goodwin's May 1992 speech
at APA. It may have been a draft that was prepared prior to the outbreak of
the controversy. This document indicates that as of March 1992 someone at
NIMH-very possibly Goodwin himself-was relating the violence initiative to
pharmacological interventions, specifically including Prozac.
Was There a Written Plan ?
We always suspected that Goodwin's speeches-with their emphasis on
individual vulnerability, biology and genetics-reflected a formal written
plan for the 1994 budget. It was not until later in our campaign that a
source who wishes to remain anonymous provided us with a nine-page
single-spaced typewritten manuscript entitled "Violent Behavior: Etiology
and Early Intervention." The heading identifies it as a section from "ADAMHA
1994 Planning Documents" and Secretary of DHHS Louis Sullivan confirmed its
authenticity as ADAMHA's proposed violence initiative for the 1994 budget.
It probably dates from the first months of 1992 or earlier.
The plan's one-paragraph abstract summarizes that "minority populations are
disproportionately affected" and then points to "An emerging scientific
capacity to identify the individual determinants of behavior-at the
biochemical, psychological, and social/environmental levels." The proposal
further states, "Although the problem is societal in scope, our solutions
must reflect increasing scientific and clinical capacities to isolate and
target the individual determinants of violence." It emphasizes, "ADAMHA will
focus on individual vulnerability factors."
The 1994 budget planning document maintains that "the precursors of violent
behavior are evident at an early age." As the "precursors of future violent
behavior," it lists a broad spectrum of childhood behaviors: "physical
aggression, deviant behavior, attention deficits and hyperactivity-manifest
early on."
The goal is to develop new treatment approaches for the targeted
children-"to tailor clinical as well as population-based interventions to
[these] behavioral risk factors." ADAMHA will stress "the importance of
individual risk factors... in identifying and treating those who are likely
to engage in violent behavior." These treatments are linked to genetic
abnormalities in brain chemistry.7 Perhaps most potentially menacing, the
plan proposes research centers for "the testing of a variety of
interventions aimed at the individual, family and community."
THE CONTROVERSY HEIGHTENS
In the spring of 1992, talk radio and TV shows with large African American
audiences began responding to our educational campaign, beginning with WPFW
(Radio Pacifica Network) in Washington, DC and culminating in the summer
with news stories and two interview shows on Black Entertainment Television
(BET). The government seemed most affected by the response to two talk
shows, "Lead Story" and "Our Voices." Extensive mainstream media coverage
would follow; but African American show hosts began the process.
Beyond our personal network of friends and colleagues associated with the
Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, most of our initial
support again came from African American activists, starting in Washington,
D.C. and then Harlem, Chicago, and Watts. Eventually, public support, like
the media interest, broadened to include many individuals, organizations,
and cities. The 26 members of the Congressional Black Caucus sought
Goodwin's ouster from ADAMHA and they also protested his appointment as NIMH
Director. The Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi), Blacks in
Government (BIG), the Black Business Alliance, the American Counseling
Association (the largest in the world), and the National Association for
Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA) also took strong stands against
Goodwin and the proposals for biopsychiatric interventions into the inner
city.
The "Crime Gene" Conference
After we had begun our initial efforts to publicize the violence initiative,
Ginger Ross Breggin and I received information that the University of
Maryland had received funds from the Human Genome Project to hold a
conference on "Genetic Factors in Crime." Developed by University of
Maryland professor David Wasserman, the conference was scheduled for October
9, 1992 at the university. After we obtained the conference brochure, we met
with three African Americans: Ron Walters, Director of the Department of
Political Science at Howard University; Lorne Cress-Love, a WPFW radio
columnist; and Sam Yette, former professor of journalism at Howard and
author of The Choice. We decided together to call for a halt to the
conference.
We based our initial opposition to the conference on its brochure, which
promoted research on the "genetic regulation of violent and impulsive
behavior." The supposed discovery of genetic factors in psychiatric
conditions was put forth as an encouraging precedent. The alleged failure of
psychosocial approaches was also cited:
But genetic research also gains impetus from the apparent failure of
environmental approaches to crime deterrence, diversion, and
rehabilitation-to affect the dramatic increases in crime, especially violent
crime, that this country has experienced in the past 30 years.
The conference brochure anticipated the possibility of treating genetically
"predisposed" individuals by means of "drugs," as well as unnamed less
intrusive therapies. To obtain federal funding for his proposed conference,
Wasserman had applied to NIH and the lengthy application read like an
elaboration of Goodwin's plans:
Genetic and neurobiological research holds out the prospect of identifying
individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct. ..
and of treating some predispositions with drugs and unintrusive
therapies.... Such research will enhance our ability to treat genetic
predispositions pharmacologically....
The Human Genome Project
The "Genetic Factors in Crime" conference was funded by NlH's controversial,
highly publicized Human Genome Project.8 The Human Genome Project is a large
federal program aimed at mobilizing international science to map the
complete set of human hereditary factors. Supporters of the Human Genome
Project had gone as far as to suggest that homelessness and crime might be
solved as a result of its discoveries.
The idea of a conference linking crime and genetics caught the attention of
the media and the public. That critics were trying to stop the conference
from taking place heightened the drama. Concern spread to England and
Germany, countries in which the eugenics8 movement had thrived prior to
Hitler taking power. Comparisons were made between the theme of the
conference and similar discussions in Nazi Germany. Heated debate was
generated in major newspapers and magazines, and in scientific and academic
journals. It resulted in panels at political and scientific meetings, as
well as dozens of radio interviews and TV coverage.
The Cowering Inferno
A month before the conference, NIH withdrew its grant and the University of
Maryland cancelled the conference for lack of funds. But the university did
not reject or abandon the idea, continued to seek funding, and set in motion
a formal protest over NlH's withdrawal of support. Some defenders of
biomedical research into violence accused NIH of backing down out of
cowardice. In November 1992, The Journal of NIH Research called NIH the
"cowering inferno":
Curiously, however, NIH, NIMH, and HHS cowered from Breggin's criticism and
only recently have begun to respond to his accusations.'° In addition to
NlH's halting the genetics and crime meeting, NIMH in early September
abruptly canceled a workshop on "Clinical Factors in Aggression slated for
Sept. 21-22. Goodwin . . was ordered by HHS officials to cancel [media]
interviews.
Academic freedom or Political Irresponsibility?
The Human Genome Project has enormous prestige. We feared that its support
for the genetics conference legitimized a debate with no substance, making
it appear as if there must be something worth discussing. After all, why
would the Human Genome Project hold a conference with no scientific merit?
Why would it hold a conference that moved America one step closer to
biomedical social control?
Experience convinced us that whatever might actually be debated at the
conference, the press would play up the biological and genetic arguments.
Biopsychiatric claims regularly make newspaper headlines, while psychosocial
ones almost never do. While conference advocates claimed it would stir up
"healthy public controversy," we felt it would encourage the false
conclusion that violent criminals are genetically flawed. Opposition to the
conference, as it turned out, created a much larger and more searching
public discussion than the unopposed conference possibly could have done.
The Justice Department's Version of the Violence Initiative
While our initial focus was on the health agencies, we gradually put
together information showing that another part of the government was already
sponsoring a large-scale version of Goodwin's plans. Entitled the "Program
on Human Development and Criminal Behavior," it is funded by the Department
of Justice (DOJ) and the MacArthur Foundation, probably with money from NIH
as well. In the words of a 1992 brochure from the DOJ, "It represents an
unprecedented partnership between federal government and a private
foundation."
The director of the project, Felton Earls, as well as codirector Albert J.
Reiss, Jr., were key figures in developing the NRC's blueprint for the
violence initiative. Earls-himself an African American-is professor of child
psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and professor of human behavior and
development at the Harvard School of Public Health. Reiss is a professor of
sociology at Yale's Institute for Social and Police Studies, and lectures at
the law school.
Earl's vision, like Goodwin's, is based on "disease prevention" (Earls,
1991) and aims at screening and identifying individual children as potential
offenders in need of preventive treatment or control. According to the DOJ,
nine groups of subjects, "starting prenatally and at ages 3, 6, 9, 12, 15,
18, 21, and 24, will be followed for 8 years." A total of 11,000 people will
be studied. The project will "link key biological, psychological, and social
factors that may play a role in the development of criminal behavior" and
search for "biological" and "biomedical" markers for predicting criminality.
Again according to the DOJ, the first of the project's "Questions to be
answered" is:
Individual differences. What biological, biomedical, and psychological
characteristics, some of them present from the beginning of life, put
children at risk for delinquency and criminal behavior?
This is entirely consistent with Goodwin's plan.
While Earls also believes in the importance of the environment, he focuses
his project on the role of biological and genetic factors in predisposing
the individual and perhaps in driving him toward violence and crime. In a
1991 publication, "A Developmental Approach to Understanding and Controlling
Violence," he writes that "advances in the fields of behavior genetics,
neurobiology, and molecular biology are renewing the hope that the
biological determinants of delinquent and criminal behavior may yet be
discovered." In discussing "key developmental questions" that he wishes to
answer, Earls emphasizes genetic and biological factors.
Earls declares there is evidence for a genetic factor "in violent behavior
among individuals." But the Mednick, Brenna and Kandel (1988) study that he
cites as evidence comes to the opposite conclusion, stating definitively
that it could "find no evidence of hereditary transmission of violent
criminal behavior" and that "a genetic predisposition to violence was not
supported by this review of our data." (Interestingly, Frederick Goodwin had
also incorrectly cited Mednick studies). Earls believes that spinal taps are
intrusive and unwarranted by our current state of knowledge, but wants to
measure the brain's chemical activity through blood samples, and
testosterone levels through saliva.11
The project is receiving an estimated $12 million per year for the eight
years from all sources, including some previously unidentified money from
NIH. The combining of Harvard and Yale, the Department of Justice, NIH, and
a prestigious private foundation raises the political specter of psychiatric
social control. It is truly Big Brother in scope.
We originally heard a rumor that the violence initiative controversy was
making it difficult for Earls to get communities to accept his project.
Eventually Earls himself declared that due to our campaign against his
project, he was forced to drop biologically intrusive elements, such as
spinal taps.

THE CURRENT STATUS OF THE SECOND VIOLENCE INITIATIVE
The federal umbrella program called the violence initiative was withdrawn as
a result of the controversy initiated by the Center for the Study of
Psychiatry and Psychology. While individual programs continued to be
sponsored by the federal government, there would be no overall coordinated
policy. Frederick Goodwin, meanwhile, resigned from the federal government
to become a professor at George Washington University.
The overall result, however, is not nearly so positive. As documented in The
War Against Children, many biopsychiatric leaders in the federal government
continue to view violence as genetic and biological in origin, and many
federally funded projects investigating such views continued unabated. A
multimillion dollar program, for example, is promoting the use of Ritalin
for the control of disruptive behavior. Other projects continue to seek
genetic and biological causes for violence.
Earls's violence initiative project has finally located a welcoming
city-Chicago. At this moment, it has already begun implementation, although
leaders in that city are organizing to counter it. While it seemingly has
given up its original biological research aims, Earls's program remains
focused on the individual and the family, instead of on racist national
policies that create the problems in the inner city.
Finally, the "Genetic Factors in Crime" conference was held in 1995 by the
University of Maryland, although with a more balanced format. NIH decided
that the funds had been taken away improperly.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
As the controversy over the violence initiative simmered down, another
scientific assault was mounted on the African American community. This new
racist manifestation grows from the same political and social roots as the
violence initiative. It is spearheaded by the best-selling 1994 book, The
Bell Curve, authored by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The book
purports to prove that Africans, including black Americans, are genetically
deficient in intelligence. It promotes programs that would ultimately cut
off aid to most black mothers and their children. The concept that African
American youth are both genetically violent and genetically stupid
resurrects the discredited King Kong image of black American males.

VIOLENCE AS A PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE
A public health approach to crime prevention sounds scientific and humane.
It gains authority from a respected tradition of life-saving interventions.
But is the violence initiative really in the tradition of public health?
In reality, public health moves beyond medicine's typical emphasis on
individual vulnerability. It focuses on the broader environmental and social
factors that affect human well-being and disease.
When public health officials realized that foul water can spread disease,
individuals were no longer blamed for getting physically ill. It wasn't the
"bad habits" or "weak heredity" of the poor, but deadly micro-organisms in
the city water. Instead of spinning wheels over why some people got sicker
than others, water quality and sanitation were improved, with dramatic
results.
Smog remains a serious public health threat. While there is considerable
individual variability in reaction to air pollution- some people hardly
notice it and others die from it-the public health strategy attacks the
source of the problem. When air quality improves, all individuals benefit
and severe reactions are minimized.
Recently there have been incidents of food poisoning at fast food
restaurants. Some people got sicker than others, and some may not have
gotten sick at all; but instead of focusing on these individual differences,
the public health approach led to tighter regulation of the safety of meat.
The government focus on vulnerable individuals actually abandons public
health in favor of traditional medicine. It obscures the reality that the
high rates of physical aggression cannot be understood outside the larger
environmental context. While it is important to hold individuals morally
responsible for their conduct, when the rate of crime seems to abruptly
escalate within an oppressed minority, it becomes critical to look for
causes beyond the individual and ultimately beyond the local community.
Why would the government pervert the concept of public health? The violence
initiative was timed with the election year to distract voters from larger
political factors impinging on the inner city, such as poverty,
unemployment, inadequate or absent health care, the unavailability of
housing, the decay of the schools, and racism. It supported the growing
political tendency to blame poverty, crime and other social phenomena on
individuals and their families rather than on public policy, economics, and
broader social issues, such as racism. It is time to unambiguously condemn
all pseudo-scientific research that distracts America from its fundamental
social and economic problems, including racism.
A PERSONAL CONCLUSION
Iam white and Jewish. It feels like a special honor to work in close
association with African Americans on behalf of human liberty and mutual
respect. As I look back on the fight against the first and second violence
initiatives, it strikes me that the victories would not have been won
without the vigorous participation of African Americans. Often the dominant
white society seems indifferent to the various psychiatric abuses, whether
they affected blacks or the entire society. For example, I had little
success in opposing the return of lobotomy until its effects on the blacks
aroused their concerns. Right now the drugging of children in general
escalates in America, with millions of school-boys and girls on Ritalin and
other psychiatric medications. Yet it is only among blacks that I have found
any concerted ethical or spiritual outrage over the medical diagnosing and
drugging of America's children. It is ironic indeed that the black community
remains a bulwark of ethics, social conscience, and empathy for children
within the very society that so oppresses it.
NOTES
Much of this article is adapted from The War Against Children (1994) by
Peter R. Breggin, M.D. and Ginger Ross Breggin by permission of St. Martin's
Press. The book contains additional details and citations. The author's
critique of biological psychiatry is further elaborated in Toxic Psychiatry
(1991 ) and Talking Back to Prozac (1994) (with Ginger Ross Breggin).
1. The Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology is a nonprofit
research and educational network founded in the early 1970s by Peter Breggin
and twenty other individuals, including reform minded mental health
professionals and members of the U.S. Congress and Senate. Its board of
directors and advisory council now have more than a hundred members.
2. For citations concerning psychosurgery, see Breggin and Breggin, The War
Against Children.
3. Opposition to the violence centers was broadbased: psychologist and
attorney Edward M. Opton, Jr., psychiatrists Lee Coleman and Phil Shapiro,
civil rights and women's groups, African American activists, and many
psychiatric survivors, including Leonard Frank and Wade Hudson.
4. The technique of psychosurgery has not changed since the Kaimowitz case.
5. None of the leading mental health professionals in attendance at the
meeting made any complaints about Goodwin's remarks.
6. The lack of evidence for these assertions is discussed in Breggin and
Breggin, The War Against Children.
7. As Elliot Currie commented on the ADAMHA document in the Journal of NIH
Research, "Most strikingly, it repeatedly affirms-without supporting
evidence-the importance of genetic predispositions in explaining inner-city
violence, as if the assertion of those connections were not controversial."
In the March 1993 issue, Sullivan rebutted Currie and Currie answered his
criticism.
8. NlH's National Center for Human Genome Research (the Human Genome
Project) funded the project through its Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues
Program (ELSI).
9. Eugenics, the use of coercive government policies to improve the genetic
stock of a society, is discussed further in Breggin and Breggin, The War
Against Children.
10. Did NIH and its giant parent agency, the Department of Health and Human
Services (DHHS), cave in before one person's-really one couple's-criticism?
While we started the ball roiling and worked hard to educate the public and
the professions, many organizations and individuals-especially from the
African-American community-joined the avalanche of criticism against both
the violence initiative and the conference. That opposition remains active
today.
11. Testosterone level differences among individual men are not correlated
with violence. The Earls study did carry out testosterone studies, but then
declared it was giving up all biologically intrusive interventions in
response to our campaign against them.
REFERENCES
Andy, O. J. (1966). Neurosurgical treatment of abnormal behavior. American
Journal of Medical Sciences 252:232-238.
Andy, O. J. (1970) Thalamotomy in hyperactive and aggressive behavior.
Confinia Neurologica 32, 322- 325.
Bird, D. (1968, August 4). More stress urged on causes of civil disorders.
New York Times, p. 19.
Breggin, P. (1991). Toxic psychiatry. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Breggin, P. and Breggin G. (1994). The War Against Children: How the drugs,
programs, and theories of the psychiatric establishment are threatening
America's children with a medical 'cure' for violence. New York: St.
Martin's Press.
Breggin, P. and Breggin G. (1994). Talking back to Prozac. New York: St.
Martin's Press.
Earls, E (1991). A developmental approach to understanding and controlling
pediatrics 5,61-88. New York: Plenum Press.
Kaimowitz v. Department of Mental Health. (1973, July 10). Civil Action No.
73-19434-AW (Wayne County, Michigan, Circuit Court).
Mark, V. and Ervin, F. (1970). Violence and the brain. New York: Harper &
Row.
Mason, B. J. (1973, February). Brain surgery to control behavior:
Controversial operations are coming back as violence curbs. Ebony, Vol.
XXVII, No. 4, p. 63.
Mednick, S. A., Brenna, P. and Kandel, E. (1988). Predisposition to
violence. Aggressive Behavior 14, 25- 33.
Rodgers, J. E. (1992). Psychosurgery: Damaging the brain to save the mind.
New York: HarperCollins.
Rodin, E. (1972, March 27). A neurological appraisal of some episodic
behavior disturbances with special emphasis on aggressive outbursts. Exhibit
AC-3 in Kaimowitz. Date is from the exhibit stamp. The document is undated.
Rosenfeld, A. (1968, June 21). The psychobiology of violence. Life, pp.
67-71.
Trials of war criminals before the Nuernberg military tnbunal, volumes / and
11 (October 1946-April 1949). Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing
Office.
Return to CSPP Index
For more information about The War Against Children by the Breggins, click
here
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