In The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today, I look at the history of twentieth century eugenics, focusing on the Nazi euthanasia programs, while also examining how that history has impacted contemporary psychiatry. After all, it was the German doctor Emil Kraepelin—a man who trained some of the worst of the Nazi doctors—who inspired the U.S.’s “neo-Kraepelinian revolution” in psychiatry in the late twentieth century. We’re still in that “revolution.” Considering our current state of mental misery, it’s hard to justify this radical switch from understanding distress as social and psychological to an almost purely biological psychiatry. I also use my own story, a lifelong patient diagnosed as bipolar. 

There are two wonderful German figures in my book who form a counterweight to that predominant narrative of bad brains and bad genes. These are Paul Schreber and Dorothea Buck. Many people are familiar with Schreber, who wrote a memoir that got analyzed at a distance by most of the leading lights of mental health theory—Freud and Jung, then Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, and more. My feeling about Schreber is that these thinkers often tripped over the real man in order to get to the analysis. I accept and celebrate Paul Schreber’s profound visions and his gender transition as they stand. Dorothea Buck was a somewhat later historical figure. She was sterilized at the age of nineteen under the Nazi hereditary disease law and became a lifelong activist for humane psychiatric care—and she utterly rejected biological psychiatry. She created her own methods for dealing with mental distress, focused on dialogue and understanding the individual and their needs. So while I am looking at things historically, I also bring them into the present, to interrogate the concept of “madness” and other states, and to ask how we can do better with mind care.

Ongoing thread. More from Susanne Paola Antonetta to follow.