Recently, I wrote an essay for a module on nuclear politics and strategy (yes, I am the classic international relations student, but I swear it’s in a red way, okay?). I was answering a question I’d put together myself – “Why is the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (1946) incomplete in its overview of the impacts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima?” I formulated that essay question thinking it’s a pretty simple answer; the more subjective, emotional, human impacts go practically ignored. The survey speaks only of ports, roads, fires, deaths, radiation sickness, the influence of the bomb on Japanese surrender and warfighting morale. I took understandable issue with that omission, so I decided that would be my criticism, my answer. But, as I pushed my argument further and kept asking “okay, but why?” as I made each subsequent point, I kept landing on my arch nemesis – psychiatry.
Now, this isn’t something I could exactly center my international relations essay on. It can be made relevant, it can be weaved into an argument, and I hope to do that for many more essays (and a dissertation) to come. In a module on capitalism, race relations, carcerality, justice, disability studies, and so forth, it’d be much more explicitly relevant. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to drop the sociology minor I had come into this degree with. Fuck me, I guess. Anyway, I had a challenge on my hands in a nuclear strategy class. I had to find a way to weave some tepid antipsychiatry into this essay, and honestly, it didn’t take much research to find out it wouldn’t be as difficult as I initially thought. Without boring you with all 2700 words of me trying to balance my quite radical psych abolitionism with “I need to actually answer this question and pass this class,” I’ll relay my basic argument to you.
I started with my surface-level answer; the USSBS’ overview is incomplete because it ignored the emotional impacts of survivors of the atomic bombings. Then, as for why it ignored those, I laid out a seemingly-logical explanation (if you believe that psychiatry/ology does what it says it intends to do); psychiatrists, psychologists, etc., weren’t really involved in the studies. The USSBS’ research was military-conducted for the most part – it involved some doctors, and some survivors, but largely, it was military. Therefore, involve those who are super good at understanding mental health in a holistic and completely, totally, always unbiased way. Boom, your research is good. I think you can probably tell that the essay’s next paragraph went something along the lines of “psychiatry is far from unbiased and able to look non-militarily at war victims, it’s so entwined with the military that it simply can’t do that.”
That’s what I actually want to write about here, not just my essay. I’ve followed for months, even years, the core ideas of antipsychiatry, or psych abolition. I spent the last four years being seen by the psychiatric system as someone who’s just dramatic, who just needs a bath and cup of tea (or, as the NHS once actually said to me while acutely experiencing mania, to play block blast!). Now, I’m someone with a scary psychiatric diagnosis* who is to be put away if I dare to react to a shitty psychiatrist or therapist (block blast guy recently threatened the police on me for literally just crying and saying “I don’t know, nothing makes sense” when asked why I was so upset). Now, if I’m distressed in a way they don’t like, they can get my basic freedoms taken away from me, even if I insist it will only distress me more. My sane friends acting as advocates and my luckily very sweet GP are sometimes all I’ve got ensuring that doesn’t happen. That shift makes it quite difficult to not question psychiatry, and how it treats us as if we don’t deserve a say on our own bodies.
*I’d like to clarify that I’m a white [clearly trans] dude diagnosed with bipolar disorder who doesn’t really use drugs – there’s plenty of people seen as “scarier” than me. Let my experiences of psychiatry being pretty bad lead you to intersectionality and make you think “wow, how bad must it be for, say, a Black woman diagnosed with schizophrenia?”
But, even without first-hand experience, it’s a pretty easy system to question once you understand sociology-101 level race, class, disability relations, and so on; there’s plenty to hate. The pathologisation of behaviour that is oftentimes a response to interpersonal and/or structural abuse (e.g. sexual violence or poverty – you are the one whose psyche is forever damaged, you are the problem! Work on yourself, what’s a societal force?). The circular nature of psychiatry’s explanations of mental illness (“you have bipolar disorder because you experience mania and depression; you experience mania and depression because you have bipolar disorder,” with no one proven, observable, biological thing to further the illness explanation). Issues of internal and structural biases, such as the history of drapetomania, and today, schizophrenia and oppositional defiant disorder being ‘Black disorders.’ Knowledge (re)production in psychiatry; who gets to decide what normal behaviour is, what constitutes harm, and why do they get to decide that? Who doesn’t get to decide? Mostly of interest to me at the moment are questions of abuse, consent, autonomy, carcerality, and the psychiatric ward. Namely, what the actual fuck the sense is in “let’s take all of this person’s belongings, normal life, and loved ones from them, then pin this person who’s so scared all they can do is scream to the ground and inject them with a drug against their will – that’ll make them want to kill themselves less!”
These issues are all beyond crucial to a holistic and complete belief system focusing on justice, bodily autonomy, and anti-capitalism. We deal a lot with psychiatry as an extension of the carceral system, the involvement of the police, and so forth. Often unmentioned in antipsychiatry theory and online discussion, though, is the issue of psychiatric and military entanglement. I find the existence of this gap really interesting, considering a lot of antipsychiatrists are approaching the concept from a far-left angle, understanding issues with the armed forces, especially of the US and its allies. For the sake of this blog post and the essay that sparked it, I’m going to be referring pretty exclusively to the US here. Please, though, don’t take that to mean this is only an American issue – it isn’t. I’m going to refer to the entanglement of psychiatry and the military as the military-psychiatric complex. From what I can tell, this isn’t a widely-used academic term, but I’m not out here to be a widely-acclaimed academic. This is a blog post, I’m curled up in bed in Among Us pyjamas with a diet coke writing this. I just want to lay out a few examples I found in my essay research of the military-psychiatric complex, hopefully adding something to conversations around corruption, bias, and psychiatric abolition. Or, at least, teaching one person one new thing that makes them go “hey, maybe psychiatry isn’t what it claims to be.”
Let’s return to my essay for a moment. I mentioned my argument that one psychiatrist in particular – Robert Jay Lifton – did some pretty good research into the psychological impacts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. If you’re uncritical of psychiatry, this is absolutely true. I found Lifton’s work genuinely interesting myself, despite his position as an American psychiatrist, and criticisms I’m going to give soon. First, though, I want to talk about how I especially took to his point that delayed radiation sickness from the bombing planted anxiety into Hiroshima of a weapon that can sneak back up on you at any time, killing you or your loved ones in a deeply undignified and violent way. It’s a point reminiscent for me of Joseph Masco’s concept of the nuclear uncanny, born from Freud’s das unheimlich (you’re putting the pieces together here already, I hope). All of these ideas relay anxiety around some kind of unsettling, unknowable, downright creepy force – here, nuclear weapons, radiation, et cetera. I liked this point of Lifton's as it suggests that, no, this is not something inherently now broken about the survivors of the atomic bombing. They have witnessed exactly what they are afraid of. There isn’t much pathologisation of this response as an illness, and the fear is clearly portrayed as understandable, and not the fault of the survivors in any way.
I do hold my criticisms of Lifton’s research, too, though. Mainly, his labeling of other responses psychiatry would probably now refer to as dissociation as ‘psychological closure,’ which he reports lead to long-term depression in some cases. I don’t think such deep and vast horrific experiences can or should be narrowed down into a phrase so short and unemotional. The nuance and human emotion is removed, defeating ‘the point’ (wink-wink) of research to expand our knowledge of the human mind and experience. This is a statement that any antipsychiatrist has made/read before in regards to DSM/ICD diagnostic labels.
My criticism of Lifton is my lightest criticism of the military-psychiatric complex. He might be the only psychiatrist except my own I’ve ever let off so easy. Pathologisation of responses to abuse is something I’ve already mentioned as a core tenet of antipsychiatry, and it’s no different when looking at the military through an antipsych lens. I want to put forward two familiar ways in which (nuclear) anxiety is treated within psychiatry/the military, one of which being pathologisation. The other is denial – your anxiety being irrational, silly, get over yourself - we’ve got a war to win. However, pathologisation of nuclear anxiety goes far beyond Lifton’s tendency to reductively name and label complex emotional processes.
During the intensification of the Cold War, many USAmerican psychiatrists began research into how the US military could, hypothetically, win a nuclear war against the Soviets. A key part of this would be to prevent panic in the population – God forbid there’s resistance to nuclear holocaust, right? Americans, in the mind of psychiatry, had to adjust to the ‘new nuclear reality.’ Not much more, clearly, than an effort to manufacture consent for the existence and/or use of WMDs in the name of national interest and defense from The Reds. I’m going to let this passage from Zwigenberg’s ‘Wounds of the Heart: Psychiatric Trauma and Denial in Hiroshima’ speak for itself:
“Nuclear anxiety in these studies was medicalized and dealt with ‘scientifically’ by the growing number of psychiatrists in the defence establishment. Such expansion in the realm of defence was closely connected to the growing role of psychiatry in society as a whole. As historian of medicine Andrea Tone points out, pharmaceutical companies were mounting campaigns to market tranquilizers to stressed housewives and businessmen at the same time as the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) was urging Americans to stay calm under nuclear attack. When the tranquillizer known as the Miltown pill was introduced to the American market in the late 1950s, with immediate success, the New Yorker declared, ‘An age in which nations threaten each other with guided missiles and hydrogen bombs is one that can use any calm it can get, and calm is what the American pharmaceutical industry now abundantly offers’. Indeed, the FCDA itself was urging Americans to stock their fallout shelters with tranquilizers. ‘A bottle of a hundred’, declared the government, ‘should be adequate for a family of four.’”
The existence and marketing of the Miltown pill (Meprobamate – a minor tranquiliser that has since been replaced in anxiolytic drug use by benzodiazepines) returns us to two common antipsychiatry talking points. Firstly, it shows incredibly clear support for the idea that some drugs are okay – even good – while others make you dirty and will get you incarcerated. There is, fundamentally, no difference between a middle-class American family being sold an anxiolytic by the state for a rational fear of nuclear holocaust, and a person facing abject poverty who self-medicates with street-sold Xanax. The only difference is the control of the substance (production and prescription), and the entirely voluntary racialisation of non-prescribed drugs (even those intended for prescription such as Xanax). Secondly, the Miltown pill is a shining example of psychiatry’s incessant pathologisation of responses to societal events, structures, forces, etc. We have (at the time new and less-understood – bringing us back to the nuclear uncanny) weapons which have the capacity to kill hundreds of thousands, maim millions, and flatten entire populations in mere minutes. The state threatens time and time again to use such weapons against an ideology you’ve been conditioned for decades to fear. You’re told “better dead than red” while these politicians wave their warheads capable of making you dead-not-red in your face at every opportunity. Military psychiatry looks at this and decides you are the problem, that your anxiety is the problem, rather than the state's unwavering need to always be ready to drop a big fat nuke on those damn commies. We have a war to win, for Christ’s sake!
This conflicting attitude on drugs and pathologisation and need to treat (read: sedate) is evident in all corners of psychiatry to this day. If you’re too upset, you can get pinned down and drugged by the state. If you’re good enough at keeping your cool, but still a little too insane, you might get some not-as-forced-but-you-will-be-punished-if-you-refuse drug, that no one really knows how it works, just take it and go away. God forbid your dealer gives you an ounce of the thing you know actually makes you a little less miserable, though. That’d be deeply evil – not just a little unsafe because you don’t know what it’s cut with. Evil, disgusting, immoral, and therefore to be punished. Of course, though, if you get a similar thing from the nice doctors who just want to help you (stop resisting, it’s for your own good, quiet down, take it or I’ll have to force you, we wouldn’t want that now would we?), that’s more than okay. You should do that, actually. Very good for the mind. You can even give it to your kids, and your bitch of a wife who won’t do as she’s told.
As for denial, the examples are plentiful. On a crudely simple level, searching “military psychiatry” brings up only the treatment of soldiers and veterans. That’s all the term refers to; there’s a surely ridiculous war-victim-shaped gap. I don’t know about you, but I think they’re perhaps the more important sufferers of The Military here. Turn to even academic searches and databases – you’ll see the same pattern. Soldiers are there, veterans are there, victims are missing almost completely. If you want to find any criticism of the entanglement of the two fields, or even of the victimisation and centering of war-winning and war-winners-read-murderers, you’ll have to dig. There’s a criticism within itself.
An example I think is particularly striking is one which relates to survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima, and the American response to survivors. The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), in Chicago in April 1948, held a conference on the psychological impacts of radiation hazards, as it was described. In attendance, high-level military and civilian doctors. It would follow that survivors of atomic bombings would be central to a conference on the psychological impacts of radiation hazards, no? Or, perhaps, Indigenous and Nuevomexicano communities surrounding, within, and squashed-by critical nuclear infrastructure such as Los Alamos National Laboratory?
Of course, the conference was “completely dedicated” to issues of propaganda, as Zwigenberg describes here. The conference spoke of logical, rational thought, and how to push this onto the public and soothe fears about nuclear war. It also spoke of protecting those within the military working with atomic bombs from psychological harm, a particularly egregious undertaking when survivors – the ones who had actually witnessed the mass death and destruction beyond comprehension on an intimate level – are left out of the same conversation. Americans were to develop a “healthy familiarity” with the bomb.
“ On the subject of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the conference heard Austin Brues of the ABCC summarize the impact of the bomb. Referring dismissively to rumours about radiation in the stricken cities, Dr Brues told the committee that when it came to mental issues, ‘the population appeared to unduly believe anything they heard’. As for more immediate psychiatric issues beyond mere propaganda, Brues concluded, ‘this is difficult to evaluate because of the differences between the Japanese pattern and our own’. From there the discussion quickly turned to how better to introduce atomic energy to the US, to problems of ‘disaster control’. “
Here, a paradox appears. Military and psychiatric personnel deny and brush off the psychological impacts of nuclear weapons on those most acutely and tragically familiar with them. They also do this to your average detached white-picket-fence Americans – your fear of nuclear war is irrational, you just need to think logically, turn that damn TV off. At the same time, they insist on the necessity of more psychiatrists, more psychologists; psycho-social research has a crucial place in defense and military spheres. A quote from Irving Janis, psychologist at Yale, sums this up quite perfectly; “psychiatry and its allied professions, psychology and sociology, [can] contribute to the prevention of untoward mass reactions and to the prevention of individual personality disorders.” However, Janis has also said such lovely things as “chronic psychological reactions (such as traumatic neurosis) occurred very rarely as a result of bombing.” Or, that psychological impacts which did occur were only “temporarily shattering,” and were linked to peoples’ feelings of “personal vulnerability.” Here, blame gets put on the people who were forced to bury the burnt, blackened, if-even-identifiable bodies of their children, parents, grandparents, and neighbours by the river, lit only by raging fires engulfing all they had known. Reactions to this in the general population, fear of this, would be untoward. Your distress is “personality disorder” – it’s you. The victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are simply feeling vulnerable, they’ll be fine in the end, just let the psychiatrists at them. They’ve done a good job of that so far, right? It was even said by John Spiegel in FCDA research that there was no panic in Hiroshima at all, but rather, the concern was instances of panic in the States regarding smaller incidents. The American populace reacting to such an event needs to be managed and put into their place. They are “corrupted by mass consumption… addicted to pleasure and… morally decadent,” unlike the stoic and calm Japanese, who need psychiatrists, but who didn’t panic at all when their city was reduced to ash in seconds.
It isn’t difficult to see a few things here. Firstly, the paradox between denial of psychological impacts of the bombing, and the need for more psychiatrists involved in research on the bombing. This becomes less paradoxical and confusing when it’s considered that psychiatry aids the military in strengthening its soldiers, helping it win a war – forget the victims. The military and psychiatry don’t want to be entangled to help anyone but themselves. Secondly, the classic psychiatric trick of placing the blame onto the “mentally ill” person persists. Here, if you experienced the bomb, you’re an outlier if you experience fear. Did you experience fear at all? Are you sure you’re not just personally weak? Your culture is so strong and stoic, though! If you didn’t experience the bomb, but understandably fear it, you’re to be managed, subdued, and shoved out of the way. Nothing gets in the way of our co-authored nuclear holocaust. Psychiatry weaves itself through the military, through war, as if medicine, schools, the police, courtrooms, our homes, our bedrooms, weren’t enough for it.
I haven’t done any outstanding analysis here. I haven’t said anything another antipsychiatrist hasn’t said before. We’re all aware of psychiatry’s classic tricks of finger-pointing at victims, denial of suffering, hunger for money and power. All I’ve done, I hope, is show a handful of examples of how it does this in more spheres than the ones more commonly spoken of, such as the carceral system. As if the damage psychiatry has already done isn’t enough for it, it also aids in manufacturing consent for the existence and use of weapons so powerful they produce scenes we once wouldn’t have even thought to imagine in our wildest nightmares. Don’t forget though, no untoward mass reactions.
Reading list and references:
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is available here: https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/AtomicEffects/index.html.
For those uninitiated in antipsychiatry, go here for a beginners’ FAQ and foundational reading list: https://pasleciel.substack.com/p/an-antipsychiatry-faq.
Main reference and suggested reading: Zwigenberg, R. (2017). ‘‘Wounds of the Heart’: Psychiatric Trauma and Denial in Hiroshima.’ History Workshop Journal, 84, pp. 67-88.
Not on psychiatry, but language, sex-gender, and nuclear weapons – a really interesting read I suggest to anyone: Cohn, C. (1987). ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defence Intellectuals.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12(4), pp. 687-718.
On the entwinement of psychiatry with the military after WWII: Scull, A. (2011). ‘The Mental Health Sector and the Social Sciences in Post-World War II USA. Part 1: Total War and its Aftermath.’ History of Psychiatry, 22(1), pp. 3-19.
Lifton, R. J. (1963). ‘Psychological Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima: The Theme of Death.’ Daedalus, 94(3), pp. 462-497.
Ramos, M.A. (2013). ‘Psychiatry, Authoritarianism, and Revolution: The Politics of Mental Illness during Military Dictatorships in Argentina, 1966–1983.’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 87(2), pp. 250-278.
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