Psyche, Science, and Society

Former South African abusive psychiatrist arrested in Canada for molesting male patient

A former South African psychiatrist, who was accused of numerous human rights abuses in South Africa, managed to emigrate to Canada. In South Africa he was notorious for use electric shock on gay soldiers and for locking up conscientious objectors in mental hospitals. In Canada, where he has resided for 15 years, he has been arrested for making sexual advances against a male patient and is being investigated on charges of abusing 30 others. The Guardian has the story:

‘Doctor Shock’ charged with sexually abusing male patient
Canadian police investigate dozens of allegations against psychiatrist nicknamed for use of electricity to ‘cure’ gay soldiers

By Chris McGreal

A leading Canadian psychiatrist who kept accusations of gross human rights abuses in apartheid-era South Africa hidden has been charged in Calgary with sexually abusing a male patient and is being investigated over dozens of other allegations.

Dr Aubrey Levin, who in South Africa was known as Dr Shock for his use of electricity to “cure” gay military conscripts, was arrested after a patient secretly filmed the psychiatrist allegedly making sexual advances. Levin, who worked at the University of Calgary’s medical school, has been suspended from practising and is free on bail of C$50,000 (£32,000) on charges of repeatedly indecently assaulting a 36-year-old man.

The police say they are investigating similar claims by nearly 30 other patients. The Alberta justice department is reviewing scores of criminal convictions in which Levin was a prosecution witness.

Levin has worked in Canada for 15 years since leaving South Africa, where he was chief psychiatrist in the apartheid-era military and became notorious for using electric shocks to “cure” gay white conscripts. He also held conscientious objectors against their will at a military hospital because they were “disturbed” and subjected them to powerful drug regimens.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard that Levin was guilty of “gross human rights abuses” including chemical castration of gay men. But after arriving in Canada in 1995 he managed to suppress public discussion of his past by threatening lawsuits against news organisations that attempted to explore it.

Following the arrest, other male patients have contacted the authorities. One, who was not identified, told CTV in Canada that he had gone to Levin for help with a gambling addiction and alleged he had been questioned about his sex life and subject to sexual advances.

The arrest has raised questions about how Levin was allowed to settle in Canada. Canada admitted other South African medical practitioners accused of human rights abuses, including two who worked with Wouter Basson, known as Dr Death for his oversight of chemical and biological warfare experiments that included the murder of captured Namibian guerrillas.

Levin, who made no secret of his hard rightwing views and was a member of the ruling National party during apartheid, has a long history of homophobia.

In the 1960s, he wrote to a parliamentary committee considering the abolition of laws criminalising homosexuality saying that they should be left in place because he could “cure” gay people.

His efforts to do just that in the army began in 1969 at the infamous ward 22 at the Voortrekkerhoogte military hospital near Pretoria, which ostensibly catered for service personnel with psychological problems. Commanding officers and chaplains were encouraged to refer “deviants” for electroconvulsive aversion therapy.

The treatment consisted of strapping electrodes to the upper arm. Homosexual soldiers were shown pictures of a naked man and encouraged to fantasise, and then the power was ratcheted up.

Trudie Grobler, an intern psychologist on ward 22, saw a lesbian subjected to severe shocks.

“It was traumatic. I could not believe her body could handle it,” she said later.

One gay soldier claimed to have been chemically castrated by Levin. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was told by investigators that he was not alone. It also heard that at least one patient had been driven to suicide. Levin refused to testify before the commission.

Levin also treated drug users, principally soldiers who smoked marijuana, and men who objected to serving in the apartheid-era military on moral grounds, who were classified as “disturbed”.

Levin subjected some patients to narco-analysis or a “truth drug”, involving the slow injection of a barbiturate before the questioning began. In an interview with the Guardian 10 years ago, he did not deny its use but said it was solely to help soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress.

Levin said he left South Africa only because of the high crime rate, and denied abusing human rights. He said electric shock therapy was a standard “treatment” for gay people at the time and those subjected to it did so voluntarily.

“Nobody was held against his or her will. We did not keep human guinea pigs, like Russian communists; we only had patients who wanted to be cured and were there voluntarily,” he told the Guardian in 2000.

March 29th, 2010

Inside the beautiful mind of a schizophrenic psychologist

The Canadian National Post has a fascinating piece on Frederick Frese, psychologist, director of psychology at an Ohio mental hospital , and admitted schizophrenic:

Inside the beautiful mind of a schizophrenic psychologist

By Joseph Brean

Schizophrenia gripped the mind of Frederick Frese in the usual fashion, with an abrupt psychotic break in his early twenties that felt like terrifying insight.

Now a prominent clinical psychologist and mental health advocate, who is still afflicted by his field’s most mysterious delusional pathology, Dr. Frese was then a U.S. Marine captain with an advanced math and science education, fluent in Japanese, and assigned to guard nuclear weapons at the Jacksonville, Fla., naval base.

He was also preoccupied with U.S. military failures in Korea, and China’s successes, and he came to believe that the only explanation was long-distance Chinese brainwashing of U.S. officials.

Fatefully, he took his concerns to the one person he figured would know most about brainwashing, the base psychologist, who was only too keen to smile and listen, flanked by large men in white coats.

“I’m psychotic, remember, so it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense, but to me it made beautiful sense,” Dr. Frese said in an interview this week in Toronto, in advance of a lecture hosted by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario. The Chinese “had to have something, and the only thing I could crystallize on was hypnosis,” he said.

He recalled the terror at his immediate incarceration, and his belief that the nurses were assassins. He demanded a priest give him the last rites, and surprisingly one did indulge him, going so far as to leave him material about how he could join the priesthood. Even when he accidentally saw his own chart, with the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, he thought this was a ploy by the government to protect him from the Chinese, and so he should pretend to be insane to keep the ruse going.

In a way, everything made sense.

Two years later, discharged from the military and living in Ohio, he had another in a series of relapses that would see him institutionalized by the state as “insane,” but also set the stage for his unique story of redemption, in which schizophrenia was merely an obstacle to a successful life, a disability, but not the mental death sentence it can often seem.

Twelve years later, he had completed his doctorate in psychophysiology, and was appointed director of psychology at Ohio’s largest mental hospital. The inmate was literally running the asylum.

That improbable process began with a crisis in a church, as the disoriented and floridly psychotic young man — then unemployed with uncertain housing, like many schizophrenics — walked up the aisle to stand beside the priest, his head awash in terrifying superstitions about the numbers 13, 3 and 4. Someone called police as he fell to the floor by the altar.

“I was like a snake writhing around on the floor. Then I was like an amoeba, then an atom,” Dr. Frese said. “I had to be the hydrogen atom [the smallest and most basic], but isotope three, tritium, the kind used in the hydrogen bomb, the kind that would be “split,” which in Greek is “schizo,” the linguistic root of the disease. I had become the instrument to usher in the holocaust.”

That was the summer of 1968, and his mind was engaged in what he now calls, quoting the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, an “expanded horizon of meaningfulness.” In such a mindset, coincidence becomes sinister and all conclusions are grandiose. His brain “over-connects.” For example, two major assassinations happened that summer, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, which fed his delusion that he would be next, to complete the trinity.

He was put on thorazine, the original anti-psychotic, the side-effects of which can still be seen today in his “bucal movements,” the strange twitching of his jaw that makes him talk like a cross between Bruce Lee and Christopher Walken, with a southern accent.

He expected to be institutionalized forever, but instead managed to apply to graduate school, and over time was hired by his former host, Ohio’s Department of Mental Hygiene and Corrections, to write pre-parole personality evaluations for inmates. Gainfully employed, and by then married, his abilities started to win out over his disability.

In that process, he flirted with the anti-psychiatry movement, helping to publishing the Madness Network News (“All the fits that’s news to print”) and making T-shirts with the slogan “Shrink Resistant.” Now, however, he is more integrated and cordial with the psychiatric establishment, and sits on many prominent boards, some as the “token psychotic,” although he continues to make jokes about how “chronically normal” people misunderstand schizophrenics.

That joke conceals his singular medical accomplishment, which is to provide psychiatry with a first-hand scientific account of psychosis, one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted medical conditions.

He understands, for example, why the bizarre writings of the prophet Ezekiel, “one of our people, no question,” are most often favoured by schizophrenics, followed by the naked preacher Elijah. As for angels, he reports that Muslim schizophrenics tend to prefer Gabriel, and Judeo-Christians prefer Michael.

Dr. Frese cites the question of suicide in schizophrenia — often by falls from a great height — as a particularly misunderstood phenomenon, with so many investigations lacking the kind of sympathy his personal experience provides. He means that if someone believes he can fly, jumping off a bridge is not suicide, and in cases such as former U.S. Defense Secretary James Forrestal, who jumped out of a 16th-floor hospital window, what looks like suicide might in fact be medical negligence. Ever since that death, in 1949, windows on U.S. psychiatric wards are fitted with “Forrestal screens.”

This week, in a lecture that is so well-rehearsed and folksy that it verged on stand-up comedy (although, he notes that a standard script keeps him from getting too excited, which risks a relapse), Dr. Frese also offered a re-analysis of the common image of a schizophrenic talking to himself. Sometimes this is because he is hearing voices, and there is truly some kind of hallucinated two-part conversation going on. But in Dr. Frese’s experience, schizophrenics are especially sensitive to social interactions, and tend to replay them over and over again in their mind, just as everyone sometimes does, finding some solace in this role-playing.

He also cited social exclusion as an important factor in psychotic breaks. “When you get into these things, you know you’re acting a bit weird, but you think you’re OK, and if no one around you gives you feedback, you are convinced you’re normal,” he said. “I’ve been learning that you can’t really tell when it’s happening to you. If you knew it was a delusion, it wouldn’t be a delusion.”

Dr. Frese’s last hospital admission was in 1977, but he is not cured. In the years since, he has been stopped by authorities for such strange behaviour as trying to dance among a group of Hasidic Jews at an airport, and his wife Penny is on a constant watch for the signs of psychotic onset, which she can manage with extra medication. He said it usually begins with a pleasant excitement that builds a momentum of its own.

Their four children are grown, but when they were at home, “Rule number one was that when Daddy’s like this, the kids can’t have any friends over,” Dr. Frese said.

Strange as it may seem, dance is an important part of how he manages his symptoms, often retreating to his basement to play ABBA records and dance until he sets himself back on the path to normal.

When he was in the grip of his psychosis, Dr. Frese never really had intense visual hallucinations. Nor did he think he could fly. His delusions were coloured more by his fixation on numbers and his role in the military. But with his uniquely scientific bird’s-eye view of the cuckoo’s nest, he stands today as an especially powerful inspiration for anyone whose horizon is expanding out of control.

March 29th, 2010

Torture “an experiment,” officials allege

Jason Leopold, in a new Truthout piece on the diaries of Abu Zubaydeh, provides further evidence that the CIA was explicitly conducting research through its enhanced interrogation program:

These sources, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because details remain classified, said one of the main reasons Zubaydah’s early torture sessions were videotaped was to gain insight into his “physical reaction” to the techniques used against him, which was then shared with officials at the CIA and the Justice Department, who used that information to help draft the August 2002 torture memo stating what interrogation methods could be legally used, how often the methods could be employed and how it should be administered without crossing the line into torture.

For example, one current and three former CIA officials said some videotapes showed Zubaydah being sleep deprived for more than two weeks. Contractors hired by the CIA studied how he responded psychologically and physically to being kept awake for that amount of time. By looking at videotapes, they concluded that after the 11th consecutive day of being kept awake Zubaydah started to “severely break down.” So, the torture memo concluded that 11 days of sleep deprivation was legal and did not meet the definition of torture.

“I would describe it this way,” said one former National Security official. “[Zubaydah] was an experiment. A guinea pig. I’m sure you’ve heard that a lot. There were many enhanced interrogation [methods] tested on him that have never been discussed before we settled on the 10 [techniques].”

Anyone reminded of the Nazi doctors’ trials?

March 29th, 2010

Antigovernment Republicans refusing census, threatening Congressional representation and money

The Houston Chronicle reports that Republicans are less likely to complete the census forms than others. It seems that months of anti-government messages are having an effect:

Polling by the Pew Research Center finds Democrats are more likely than other Americans to view the census as “very important” to the country. Seventy-six percent of Democrats call this year’s count very important, compared with 61 percent of Republicans and independents.

In Texas, some of the counties with the lowest census return rates are among the state’s most Republican, including Briscoe County in the Panhandle, 8 percent; King County, near Lubbock, 5 percent; Culberson County, near El Paso, 11 percent; and Newton County, in deep East Texas, 18 percent. Most other counties near the bottom of the list are heavily Hispanic counties along the Texas-Mexico border.

There is a reason for the enthusiasm gap on the census: A number of prominent conservative and libertarian Republicans have been blasting the census for months.

This difference apparently is having an effect in Texas:

As of Friday afternoon, only 27 percent of Texas households had filled in and returned their census forms — well below the national average of 34 percent — according to computer data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In Harris County, the response rate is 23 percent. Houston’s returns are running at 21 percent.

If this trend continues, it could lead to a reduction in Republican-leaning seats in Congress and to less Federal money — as much as $12,000 per non-respondent over the next decade — for those areas of the country.  If this trend continues, it just might compensate for the traditional under-count of the poor and non-whites. Perhaps Republicans will have a change of heart on the use of statistical estimation for the census in the future.

March 29th, 2010

Congressional terrorists?

[H/t Andrew Sullivan.]

March 29th, 2010