IMPORTANT FACTS

1. Between 10% and 25% of mental health practitioners sexually abuse their patients.

2. To cover up their crime, psychiatrists have used drugs or electroshock in an effort to eliminate the patient’s memory of the rape.

3. It is estimated that 100 psychologists lose their licenses annually for sexual misconduct but this is rarely permanent. Yet the American Psychological Association expels only 10 members a year for this offense.

4. Psychiatrists and psychologists redefine and excuse their patient rape as “sexual contact,” a “sexual relationship” or “crossing the boundaries.”

5. Instead of treating sexual assault of a patient as a criminal offense, licensing boards have dealt with it as “professional misconduct,” with psychiatrists and psychologists thus escaping criminal prosecution.


CHAPTER ONE Rape by Any Other Name

Question: When is rape not really rape?

Answer: When the rapist is a treating psychiatrist or psychologist.

One of the most infamous cases of psychiatric “non-rape” is that of Dr. Jules Masserman, once revered by his peers worldwide as a leading psychiatric practitioner. A past president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and honorary life president of the World Association for Social Psychiatry, Masserman was a powerful man.

Barbara Noel worshipped Masserman, and considered herself lucky to have him as her psychiatrist. Using his professional influence, Masserman easily convinced Noel that she could get in touch with her “real feelings” by taking sodium amytal, a barbiturate used in the 1960s mind control experiments to block out memory. Noel awoke during one of the drug-induced sleeps he frequently administered to her, to find Masserman panting loudly as he sexually assaulted her.

Noel had never before realized how deep deception could run. She realized that Masserman had been drugging her for years to use her body sexually, a practice just one step short of necrophilia (sexual stimulation from corpses). Understandably, she was enraged.

However, Noel was the “mental patient.” With Masserman declaring Noel was “sick” and lying, it took seven years of court battles, and other women going public after hearing of Noel’s case, before the APA upheld the Illinois Psychiatric Society’s decision to suspend Masserman’s license to practice. But the suspension was only for five years, and it was for inappropriate use of drugs, not for rape. Meanwhile, Masserman remained a voting member of the APA’s Board of Trustees.

The APA did not see fit to banish one of its famous names, claiming the evidence was “unsubstantiated”— as if an insurance company would pay more than $350,000 in settlements and Masserman himself would surrender his Illinois medical license voluntarily on the basis of “unsubstantiated” claims by his female victims.

As reported in 1998, while the U.S. Association of State and Provincial Psychology estimated that 100 psychologists lose their licenses annually for sexual misconduct, the American Psychological Association (APA) expels only 10% of these. They can continue practicing unlicensed and with their APA membership intact.

Psychiatrists and psychologists rarely refer to rape as rape. Instead, they downplay it as “sexual contact,” a “sexual relationship” or “crossing the boundaries” when one of its members sexually forces themselves on a patient, often with the help of drugs or electroshock.

Imagine a criminal court judge hearing a defense argument that, “It wasn’t really rape, more like sexual contact.” Worse still, imagine the victim is your sister, or your daughter, who sought help from a psychiatrist in good faith because of a broken relationship. You would rightly want the rapist prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Unfortunately, that
is unlikely to happen if he’s a psychiatrist, because while psychiatric rape is punishable by the justice system in theory, the stark reality is that in most cases professional registration boards deal with it as mere “professional misconduct.

These boards decide what discipline should be imposed, placing the psychiatric defendant beyond the law—rarely are practitioners who lose their license criminally prosecuted. Following this logic, if a plumber raped a customer, his fate
should be decided by a society of plumbers. That of course will not happen and in the same way, neither should such professional registration boards be allowed to operate as law.

It follows that psychiatry’s perverted ethics system has been universally attacked as soft and inadequate. Australian psychiatrist Paul Stenberg took his patient to a spa where he rubbed her breasts and vagina, telling her it was “therapy.” He had sexual intercourse with another patient and suggested she try heroin. In 2000, Stenberg voluntarily resigned his license, promising the medical board to reform.

Within two years, Stenberg was in the news again for sexually abusing patients. “Anne” had sought help from Stenberg for the years of sexual abuse that she and her sister had endured from their father, while their mother kept it a “family secret.” Anne wanted help to “tame the memories.” “But instead of helping to heal the festering wounds of incest, [Stenberg] gouged them deeper,” the Courier Mail reported in April 2002.

A 1998 review of U.S. medical board actions against 761 physicians disciplined for sex-related offenses from 1981 to 1996 found that psychiatry and child psychiatry were significantly over-represented. While psychiatrists account for only 6% of physicians in the country, they comprised 28% of perpetrators disciplined for sex-related offenses.

The same year, a report from Sweden’s Social [medical] Board on patient complaints over a four-year period found that psychiatrists were responsible for nearly half of the mistreatments of patients reported to the Board, including sexual abuse.

A review of U.S. medical board actions against physicians disciplined for sex-related offenses found that psychiatry and child psychiatry were significantly over-represented.

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) decriminalizes crime by defining criminal behavior as a biologically based aberration.

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