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South Africa
CCHR�s main chapter in South Africa, while investigating mental �health� labor
camps in the 1970s, uncovered that eugenics, the same psychiatric ideology
that formed the foundation of the Holocaust, had also spawned the detestable
apartheid policy. Hendrik Verwoerd, who taught what he called applied
psychology, was the chief architect of apartheid during the time he was
Minister for Education and Native Affairs and, between 1958�64, as Prime
Minister of the country. Verwoerd had studied in German universities in
the 1920s, when psychiatrists there were perfecting their racial purity
ideas. Indeed, Verwoerd was so fond of Germany that a court accused him
of being helpful to the German propaganda machine during WWII. Given this
background, it is not surprising that his apartheid ideas read like the
Nazis� master race plan.
Members of the Church of Scientology and CCHR discovered that tens of thousands
of Blacks were incarcerated against their will, in disused mining compounds
converted to psychiatric camps, and were excessively drugged and subjected
to painful electroshock without anesthetics. They were hired out to companies
to perform unpaid labor�making coat hangers, brushes, mats, sheets and
other items under the guise of �industrial therapy.� Shocked by this first
expos� of their hidden slave camps, the guilty psychiatrists convinced
the apartheid gov- ernment to revise the Mental Health Act to make it
a criminal offense to report on conditions in any psychiatric hospital
or to take photographs of them. Unwilling to have a dictatorial ban inhibit
its free speech rights, CCHR went outside of South Africa, reporting its
evidence to the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO responded with an
investigation of the psychiatric camps and in 1983, published a report:
It confirmed CCHR�s reports and findings and condemned the use of patients
for unpaid labor, stating, �This situation has no parallel in the history
and present state of psychiatric care; it certainly does have a parallel
in the ownership and trading of slaves.�
In 1997, CCHR presented oral and written testimony to South Africa�s post-apartheid
Truth and Reconciliation Commission about crimes committed by both psychiatrists
and psychologists during the country�s dark days of racial segregation.
Confronted with indisputable evidence, the Psychological Society of South
Africa finally had to admit that psychological studies had aimed at discrediting
Blacks as intellectually inferior. Subsequently, in 1998, legislation
was called for to scrap all racist psychological tests.
In 2001, the new South African government repealed the apartheid-era ban on
photographing or reporting abuses in psychiatric facilities. Psychiatry
can no longer be shielded from the external scrutiny it requires. Next
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