77th Issue: Thomas Szasz and John C. Woods
Discussion of mental health and executions of war criminals ahead FYI
I was learning a little bit about the anti-psychiatry movement the other day. It led me to a man named Thomas Szasz, who was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He was born in 1920, and he was Jewish. His family moved to the United States just before World War II. He worked as both a practicing psychiatrist and an academic researcher, in various cities across the United States.
Szasz argued that keeping people at mental hospitals against their will because they were classified as insane turned the doctor into a warden. He thought that things like lobotomies and involuntary mental hospitalizations were inhumane. He said that mental illness was a judgment made by a doctor or someone in power and not a real term that could be used. Schizophrenia was his example, and he classified it more as a “problem in living”. He said that behaviors that the state disapproved of were “mental illness”. Basically, he was saying that psychiatry is often used as a tool to incarcerate people who were troublesome to those in charge. He argued that the same persecution that targeted vulnerable populations like gay people, witches, Jews, etc, was now being used to target insane people and drug addicts, making them scapegoats.
He argued that the “therapeutic state” was a collaboration between psychiatry and government, where things from unconventional religious beliefs, racial bigotry, unhappiness, anxiety, shyness, sexual promiscuity, shoplifting, gambling, overeating, smoking, to illegal drug use were all considered symptoms or illnesses that need to be cured. Szasz helped found the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization. He also worked with the Church of Scientology, who famously oppose psychiatry, and when asked about collaborating with such a controversial cult, Szasz said he did it because they had money and believed in the same cause.
Of course there were responses to his beliefs and writings. One obvious one is that modern psychiatry is more oriented towards biology now, and therefore Szasz’s theories don’t hold up. I personally think that psychiatry is important and sometimes involuntary hospitalization is necessary, but I understand how Szasz came to his conclusions when you read something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry
Another thing I was reading about, I can’t remember how I got here, but I somehow found the Wikipedia page of John C. Woods, who was the executioner of the Nazis after the Nuremberg trials. His life was more interesting than I expected. He was born in Kansas and joined the Navy in 1929, but then he went AWOL and they diagnosed him with “constitutional psychopathic inferiority without psychosis”. I’m not sure what that is but it was enough to discharge him from the Navy. He worked odd jobs during the Great Depression. He married and had no children.
John joined the army after that, and when military executions in France were being scheduled the Army asked about if there were any hangmen among the people they already had. John lied and said he had worked as an assistant hangman in Texas and Oklahoma so he could get the job. Nobody checked John’s claims which would have been easy to disprove since Texas and Oklahoma killed people by electrocution instead of hanging by this time. John was promoted to master sergeant and participated in at least 35 hangings. He also participated in the hangings of 45 war criminals. He wasn’t very good at it, predictably. Many of the Nazis at Nuremberg took time to die and suffered instead of it being quick as it was meant to be. The ropes were not properly tied and there was not enough room for the men to drop.
John had a lot of stories to tell. He said that the Nazi war criminals deserved to be hanged, he said that they died bravely. He said that there were attempts on his life, including food poisoning and an attempted assassination by gunshot. He retired from being an executioner when his wife found out about it. She wasn’t happy about it. In 1950, John was serving in the Marshall Islands, but he died when accidentally electrocuting himself while attempting to repair some lights. Some believed that his death wasn’t an accident because there were a lot of German scientists working on the island as part of Operation Paperclip, but the US Army officially ruled the death as an accident.