Genocide and the Healing Professions

Abstract

Nazism is not a closed episode. Like nuclear war and environmental destruction, it warrants universal concern. The professions in general, and the mental health and helping professionals in particular, have played key roles in waging the 'war on terror'. In 2007, a British doctor attempted to bomb Glasgow airport. Dr Che Guevara, Dr Radovan Karadzic, and those supporting Hamas provide examples of doctors or psychiatrists allied to state violence, as shown below and by Kaplan and Walter in this volume. Though it is imperative that helping professionals ponder professional abuses and their origins, contemporary bioethics generally neglects this record. 2 Individual professionals may exploit patients in a manner universally regarded as criminal or in breach of codes, but may also follow political-institutional or state-based rules without necessarily knowing (or perhaps 'knowing'-that is, they are denying at some level) that their behaviours are abusive. Such systemic abuses frequently involve loyalties divided between patients and third partiesin this case, the state. In this contemporary setting, we examine the actions of Nazi doctors and psychiatrists, the lasting outcomes of the Nuremberg medical and other trials for both human rights and mental health, and most significantly, the motives and reasons for three kinds of behaviour: harming, standing by, 1 This is a revised version of the chapter 'Through a Glass, Darkly: Nazi era illuminations of psychiatry, human rights and rights violations' that appears in their book,