Earlier this year, I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against fascism and declared the outbreak of the Second World War. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship: that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Brown was clueless. Turing had nothing in common with LGBT activists. Comfortable in his identity as a homosexual man, he killed himself because the “treatment” “transgendered” him in ways he did not expect and was not told about. Calling Turing “a quite brilliant mathematician” was another of Brown’s gaucheries. Turing, Brown continued, “was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely.” Would Turing have been less deserving of belated compassion if he had been just another Englishman caught in the web of his country’s anti-homosexual laws?

“Laws,” warned Solon, the sixth-century B. C. Athenian philosopher, “are the spider’s webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.” The special irony of the Turing case is that he was not treated as any ordinary violator of the prohibition against gay sex would have been: He was allowed to choose between imprisonment and “medical treatment.” He made the wrong choice. Despite his high intelligence and familiarity with medical crimes in the Third Reich, Turing failed to understand that medical criminals abound in all modern societies, most insidiously in so-called “free societies.”

Brown says that Turing was “treated inhumanely.” That’s not exactly true. He could have gone to prison, where he could have worked, had visitors, and would have been unmolested by psychiatrists, and from which he would have emerged physically and mentally undamaged, as had Gandhi, Nehru, Castro, and many other prominent historical figures. Turing was treated inhumanely because he as well as his doctors failed to heed George Washington’s famous warning: “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

Physicians who work for the government’s law-enforcement apparatus do not practice therapeutic medicine and are not healers. They practice anti-therapeutic prosecution, governed by the principle Primum nocere (first, do harm): They are professional injurers who define the harm they do as help. Such doctors are medical criminals, the gravity of their crimes depending on the particular laws they help to enforce and the methods they use.

Therapeutic Scapegoating

Turing was blind to the nature of the political system that victimized him. Brown is blind to the nature of the political system over which he presides and the fundamental similarities between it and the system he criticizes. Many more people are now persecuted in the United Kingdom (and in the United States) for “abusing” drugs than were persecuted for “abusing” sex. Neither of these modern (quasi-religious) scapegoat-persecutions could have occurred without the approval and assistance of medical professionals. Yet it does not seem to occur to Brown to mention the role of doctors in the Turing affair, much less blame them or suggest that they, too, owe apologies to Turing and others.

German politicians have apologized for the Holocaust. American politicians have apologized for slavery and post-Pearl Harbor concentration camps. Psychiatrists have not apologized for their institutionalized misdeeds. The American Psychiatric Association (or the Royal College of Psychiatrists) is not about to declare:

We apologize. We erred when we declared homosexuality a disease and the forcible injection of female sex hormones an effective treatment for it. We committed evil when, instead of joining the defenders of liberty and endorsing the abolition of anti-homosexual legislation, we eagerly supported the coercive apparatus of the State and prostituted ourselves in the service of the social control of society’s unwanted.

As an aside, it should be noted that the past medical treatment of homosexuals had included procedures such as surgical sterilization, carbon dioxide inhalation (a kind of suffocation by “gas-boarding”), and electric shock therapy.

Psychiatrists will never apologize for their crimes because they never acknowledge responsibility for harming people. For example, when criticized for depriving people of liberty, they assert that they do not commit mentally ill persons to insane asylums—judges do. “Mental health professionals must understand,” explains Robert Simon in Psychiatry and Law for Clinicians, “that it is not they who make commitment decisions about patients. Commitment is a judicial decision that is made by the court or by a mental health commission.” Psychiatrists call ordinary criminals who deny responsibility for their misdeeds “psychopaths” and say they have no conscience. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, and the press call psychiatrists who deny responsibility for 300 years of psychiatric slavery “conscientious physicians” and honor them as medical healers. Reality, not just history, is written by the victors.

As long as psychiatrists are accepted as medical specialists possessing the privilege to forcibly classify persons as patients and impose tortures on them as treatments, they will not apologize. Acknowledging that the classification of homosexuality as a disease was a mistake would open a Pandora’s box of doubts about the disease status of currently fashionable mental illnesses.

Brown ended by exulting, “This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality, and long overdue. . . . Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was convicted, under homophobic laws, were treated terribly.”

Turing was not a victim of homophobia. Many persons are still “homophobic”—and “phobic” as well of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and atheists, among others—but they have no power to deprive the persons they fear and hate of liberty. Turing was the victim of medical doctors who declared male homosexuals ill and declared torturing them a form of humane “medical treatment.”

Turing was a mathematician, cryptographer, and pioneering computer scientist. He was good-looking, athletic, eccentric, and openly homosexual. In 1935, backed by John Maynard Keynes, Turing was elected a Fellow of King’s College, a remarkable achievement for so young a man. In 1936 he published a paper that immediately became a classic in mathematics and earned him an an invitation from John von Neumann to continue his studies at Princeton University. In 1938, having been awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics, Turing returned to Cambridge and was soon working at Bletchley Park, the famous British code-breaking “factory.” When the war ended, Turing moved to Manchester where the university created a special readership in the theory of computing for him.

In 1951 Turing began a homosexual relationship with a working-class youth. Returning home one evening, he found that his house had been burglarized. He reported the crime to the police and communicated his suspicion that the culprit was an associate of his gay friend. He confessed to his homosexual affair and was charged with “gross indecency,” a crime then punishable by a maximum of two years’ imprisonment. The judge, taking into account Turing’s intellectual distinction and social position, sentenced him to probation, “on the condition that he submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner.” In April 1952 he wrote to a friend, “I am both bound over for a year and obliged to take this organo-therapy for the same period. It is supposed to reduce sexual urge whilst it goes on, but one is supposed to return to normal when it is over. I hope they’re right.” Turing was never the same again. His body became feminized. He grew breasts.

Fatal Treatment for a Fictitious Disease

On June 8, 1954, Turing was found dead by his housekeeper, a partly eaten apple laced with cyanide next to his bed. At the inquest, the coroner ruled his death a suicide. Neither his homosexuality nor his psychiatric treatment was mentioned. The coroner said, “I am forced to the conclusion that this was a deliberate act. In a man of this type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next.” The verdict was “suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.” Even in death, psychiatry and the state stigmatized Turing as mad. The posthumous diagnosis of suicide as mental illness is the ritual degradation ceremony of our therapeutic age, much as the posthumous burning of the heretic’s corpse was the ritual degradation ceremony of an earlier theological age.

No one in Turing’s circle, himself included, was able or willing to transcend the psychiatric zeitgeist: Homoerotic behavior and self-determined death are self-evident symptoms of mental illness, it argues, requiring and justifying coercive medical-psychiatric treatment. Turing’s psychiatrist, Dr. Frank M. Greenbaum, vehemently rejected the coroner’s diagnosis, though not by contesting the claims that engaging in homosexual conduct and self-killing are evidence of diseases curable by doctors. “There is not the slightest doubt to me that Alan died by an accident,” declared Greenbaum.

In 1967 the UK decriminalized homosexuality. Overnight it ceased to be a disease in England but not the United States, where for six more years it remained both a crime and a “treatable disease.”

Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges, notes that Turing did not consider his homosexuality a disease, a crime, or a shameful condition. He suggests that Turing opted for medical treatment rather than a brief period of imprisonment because he feared that a criminal conviction would be fatal for his career. Countless of Turing’s gay contemporaries at Cambridge and in London—Wittgenstein, Keynes, Lytton Strachey, many of the Apostles and Bloomsburys—sensibly stayed away from psychiatrists. Many famous people—Gandhi, Russell, and Nehru—spent time in prison, though, and went on to do memorable work. This is not true for people imprisoned in mental hospitals. After the psychiatric degraders finish their job, the “patient” is dead—if not biologically then socially.

Psychiatric destruction often begins with psychiatric self-destruction, the denominated patient believing the psychiatrist’s self-deceptions about nonexisting diseases and their damaging treatments. “The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society,” declared Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), “is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.” Let us not forget that the power of science is limited to informing and misinforming. It does not have the power to coerce. In contrast, power to coerce is the very essence of psychiatric pseudoscience allied with the state. Psychiatrists regularly characterize their power to coerce as “suicide prevention.” The opposite is often the case.

The original function of psychiatry—which is approximately 300 years old—was penological: The psychiatrist stigmatized persons as “mad,” deprived them of liberty, and assaulted them with chemical and physical interventions. A little more than 100 years ago individuals began to seek psychiatric help for their own problems. As a result, many people who entrusted themselves to the care of psychiatrists became entrapped in the machinery of punitive mad-doctoring, dramatically portrayed in Ken Kesey’s best-selling novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the film based on it. The recent film Changeling presents a real-life example.

So does Alan Turing’s psychiatric undoing.

Psychiatry: Trap, Not Treatment

The identification of psychiatry with medical healing and humane helpfulness is factually false and morally deceptive, concealing an existential trap with untold-of potentialities for injury and death for the entrapped. More successfully than ever, the modern “biological” psychiatrist misrepresents his profession as based on biological science and medical discovery, while more than ever it is based on pseudoscience and therapeutic deception.

The persecution of homosexuals is paradigmatic of the history of psychiatry’s monumental blunders and brutalities and of its policy of never acknowledging nor apologizing for them. Instead, organized psychiatry intensifies the celebration of its founding quack, Benjamin Rush (1746–1813). Declared Rush, “I have selected those two symptoms [murder and theft] of this disease [crime] (for they are not vices) from its other morbid effects, in order to rescue persons affected with them from the arm of the law, and render them the subjects of the kind and lenient hand of medicine.” What did Rush mean when he spoke of medical kindness and lenience? Lamenting the “excess of the passion for liberty inflamed by the successful issue of the [Revolutionary] war,” he explained, “Were we to live our lives over again and engage in the same benevolent enterprise, our means should not be reasoning but bleeding, purging, low diet, and the tranquilizing chair.” Psychiatry—glorifying the use of coercion as cure—is the shame of  medicine.

—Charles Mackay

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

The contemporary mental health movement—epitomized by the dogmatic belief that “mental illness is like any other illness”—is an instance of what Charles Mackay called a “crowd madness.” It is in the very nature of such a popular delusion that, while it rages, it is impervious to criticism. The belief’s overwhelming popularity and the absence of authoritative opposition to it are viewed as proof of its validity.

Long ago I became persuaded that it is not possible to understand modern psychiatric practices unless they are seen as manifestations of a popular madness; and that it is not possible to perceive them in such a light without being familiar with the history of psychiatry, which furnishes ample evidence to compromise its moral and scientific pretensions. In my January column—on Krafft-Ebing and the birth of sexology—I presented an illustrative episode from that history. Here, I shall briefly retell the story of what, until relatively recently, had been the most commonly diagnosed and most enthusiastically treated mental disease in the history of medicine, namely, masturbation.

Masturbation was—and, in principle, remains—the ideal mental illness. First, it is a form of behavior: that is, something people do, not something that happens to them. Second, it is a form of behavior universal to mankind, engaged in from early childhood^*: this makes it ideally treatable, since behaviors can be controlled, especially in children who are powerless to resist the well-intentioned brutality of adults. Third, the act makes use of a sexual organ, ideally suited for attaching fantasies of great harm (as well as great pleasure) to its uses and abuses.

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* Actually, masturbation occurs in utero as well.

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Not surprisingly, masturbation is a disease of modernity. In antiquity and the Dark Ages, people worried about real diseases, such as the plague and consumption. Only after the Enlightenment did people awaken to the possibilities of scientific medicine, assigning material (physical), rather than spiritual (religious), causes to disease, disability, and death.

Not having the faintest idea what caused most diseases, the medical mind went in search of a scapegoat and found it in self-abuse. By the end of the 1700s, it was medical dogma that masturbation caused blindness, epilepsy, gonorrhea, tabes dorsalis, priapism, constipation, conjunctivitis, acne, painful menstruation, nymphomania, impotence, consumption, anemia, and of course insanity, melancholia, and suicide.

How did physicians know and why did people believe that masturbation caused all these diseases? The same way that physicians now know and people believe that chemical imbalances cause mental diseases, such as attention deficit disorder: by “diagnosing” and “treating” the (involuntary, child) “patient” and by discovering “cures” for the disease. Among the widely accepted treatments of masturbation, the most important were restraining devices and mechanical appliances, circumcision, cautery of the genitals, clitoridectomy, and castration. As recently as 1936, a widely used pediatric textbook recommended some of these methods.

Who were the beneficiaries of these medical miracles? Children and the insane—then, as now, the two groups of ideal (involuntary) “patients.” Powerless vis-à-vis their relatives and doctors, minors and mental patients could not resist being fitted with grotesque appliances, encased in plaster of Paris, having their genitalia cauterized or denervated, or being castrated—for their own good.

Error or Arrogance?

The contemporary reader is likely to dismiss masturbation-as-disease as a medical mistake. However, scientific errors, especially obvious ones, are usually soon detected and corrected.

Young males always experienced and displayed nocturnal emissions, the manifestations of normal pubertal male genital physiology. What, in the eighteenth century, made nocturnal emissions turn into the dreaded “symptoms” of dangerous “spermatorrhea”? The same thing that has turned youthful male exuberance into the dreaded symptoms of dangerous attention deficit disorder in our day: parental annoyance and anxiety combined with medical imperialism and furor therapeuticus. Today, diagnosing ADD and prescribing Ritalin are big business. A hundred years ago, it was big business to diagnose “spermatorrhea” and “treat” it with spike-lined rings. For a glimpse into this aspect of the medical-economics of the anti-masturbation business, the reader may consult the facsimile catalogue of the 1898 American Armamentarium Chirurgicum—which contains pictures and prices of many anti-masturbation devices.

Belief in masturbatory insanity and its treatment with castration and clitoridectomy was not an innocent error. This belief—like beliefs in other popular delusions—enhanced the identity and self-concept of the believers. Ostensibly, such beliefs assert facts; actually, they credential believers.

Henry Maudsley, the acknowledged founder of British psychiatry, stated: “The sooner he [the masturbator] sinks to his degraded rest, the better for the world which is well rid of him.” For this and similar views he was hailed as a great humanitarian: A famed psychiatric institute in London is named after him. For Freud, too, sexual behaviors of all kinds, especially masturbation, were manifestations of maladies of which he was a master diagnostician and therapist.

As recently as 1938, Karl Menninger—the undisputed dean of American psychiatry in mid-century—declared: “In the unconscious mind, it [masturbation] always represents an aggression against someone.” (Emphasis added.)

None of psychiatry’s classic mistakes—from masturbatory insanity and its cures, to the disease of homosexuality and its compulsory treatment with “aversion therapy,” and to the attribution of the cause of schizophrenia to reverberating circuits in the frontal lobes and its cure with lobotomy (rewarded with a Nobel Prize in Medicine)—are “innocent” errors. Invariably, the false belief and the medical interventions it appears to justify serves the needs of the believers, especially the relatives of “patients” who seek control over the misbehavior of their “loved ones,” and the physicians who gain prestige and power by “diagnosing” and “treating” misbehavior as if it were disease.

We fool ourselves if we believe that psychiatry’s current popular delusions—such as the chemical causes and cures of depression, schizophrenia, suicide, and so forth—do not fit the same mold.