Psychiatry’s Destructive Experiments in the U.S.

Psychiatric “treatment” of minorities has also included some of the most barbaric experiments ever carried out in the name of “scientific” research.

In the 1950s in New Orleans, black prisoners had experimental electrodes implanted into their brains by psychiatrists Robert Heath from Tulane University and Harry Bailey from Australia. Bailey later boasted in a lecture to nurses that they had chosen the test subjects on the basis that it was “cheaper to use Niggers than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals.”

Heath also conducted secret tests funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), using LSD and a drug called bulbocapnine, which in certain doses produces severe stupor. He experimented on prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary to see if the drug would cause “loss of speech, loss of sensitivity to pain, loss of memory, [and] loss of will power…”

At the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Addiction Research Center in Kentucky in the mid-1950s, drug-addicted African-Americans were given LSD, which kept many hallucinating for 77 consecutive days. At this same center in the 1960s, healthy African-American men were used as test subjects for the experimental chemical warfare drug, BZ, which was 100 times more powerful than LSD.

In the 1970s, the NIMH supported one of the most covert and evil experiments ever aimed at Blacks and Hispanics. Following the 1960s riots in Watts (an African-American section of Los Angeles), Louis Jolyon West of UCLA’s (University of California Los Angeles) Neuropsychiatric Institute created the theory that the events were tied to genetic and racial factors and those prone to such violence were mostly young black urban males. He proposed a “Violence Initiative” that would see to it that offenders be treated with psychosurgery and chemical castration. West’s idea was to test his treatment plan in two high schools—one Black, the other Hispanic. (Protests led by CCHR and others concerned caused the government’s funds for this “research” project to be cut.)

Ernst Rodin, head of the neurology department of the Lafayette Clinic in Detroit, Michigan, claimed that children of limited intelligence often turned to violence if treated as “equals.” Rodin called for “dumb young males who riot” to be castrated in much the same way as oxen.

Negative typecasting and comparisons between Blacks and animals continued at the NIMH. In 1992, psychiatrist Frederick Goodwin, director of the NIMH, compared black youth living in inner cities to “hyperaggressive” and “hypersexual” monkeys in a jungle.

The NIMH’s second “Violence Initiative” targeted children as young as five. Their scientific justification was to conduct research to see if African-Americans and Hispanics had a violent gene that could be controlled by psychiatric drugs. Drugs known to cause violent behavior were to be given to the children. Dr. Seth Farber, director of the Network Against Coercive Psychiatry, stated at the time, “Just like the Nazis ... what [psychiatrists] want to do is scapegoat black youth, put them on drugs and take away the rights of their parents. It is an outrageous, racist and oppressive plan.”

Today, in the United States, psychiatrists and psychologists boldly demand more research funds because African-Americans, Native American Indians and Hispanics are over-represented in the ranks of the “mentally ill.” “Whipping the devil out of them” has been replaced with psychosurgery, electroshock and psychiatric drugs. The results are obvious, especially in the inner cities. Racial minorities have been introduced to a whole new level of mind-altering, legally permissible drugs. This has ushered in a new wave of drug addiction, followed by escalating crime, illiteracy and unemployment. Today, single-parent families are common. Too many Black and Hispanic men are imprisoned compared to the rest of the population. Evidence of “racial profiling” abounds, yet the NIMH pours millions and millions into researching “at risk” minority populations and their “aggressive behavior.”

Former clinical psychologist and CCHR Commissioner William Tutman warns, “To oppress a race, and then label its reaction as a ‘mental illness,’ is not only morally wrong, it is criminal and fraudulent.”

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