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The Shame of Medicine:: Most Popular

The document discusses the case of General Edwin Walker who was arrested for his role in opposing the enrollment of James Meredith, the first African American student, at the University of Mississippi. Walker was detained and sent for psychiatric evaluation by the government without trial. The document outlines the legal challenges to Walker's detention and psychiatric evaluation and how his lawyers were able to get him declared fit for trial.

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George Rose
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51 views9 pages

The Shame of Medicine:: Most Popular

The document discusses the case of General Edwin Walker who was arrested for his role in opposing the enrollment of James Meredith, the first African American student, at the University of Mississippi. Walker was detained and sent for psychiatric evaluation by the government without trial. The document outlines the legal challenges to Walker's detention and psychiatric evaluation and how his lawyers were able to get him declared fit for trial.

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George Rose
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009


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The Case of General Edwin NEW ON AMAZON!

Walker
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by Thomas S. Szasz
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I n 1962 James Meredith, an African-American student, tried to
enroll at the University of Mississippi. His admission was
opposed by Ross Barnett, the Democratic governor of the state,
former Major General Edwin A. Walker (1909–1993), a decorated
hero of World War II and prominent “right-winger,” and a group of Featured Course
segregationist white students. To ensure Meredith’s enrollment and
maintain order, President John F. Kennedy sent 400 federal
marshals and 3,000 troops to Oxford, Mississippi.

On September 29, 1962, Walker issued a public statement: “This is


Edwin A. Walker. I am in Mississippi beside Governor Ross Barnett.
I call for a national protest against the conspiracy from within. Rally
to the cause of freedom in righteous indignation, violent vocal
protest, and bitter silence under the flag of Mississippi at the use of Economics in One Day
Federal troops. . . .” Learn about scarcity, prosperity,
values, cooperation, character,
The campus demonstration led to a riot in which two people were markets, spontaneous order, and
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killed and six federal marshals were injured. Importantly, according entrepreneurship. You'll see the
to a United Press report, “During a lull in the rioting, General Walker profound effect of free markets on
mounted a Confederate statue on the campus and begged the our standard of living across the

students to cease their violence. . . . His plea was greeted with one globe and over hundreds of years.

massive jeer.”

Unnoticed at the time and forgotten today is the fact that while the FREE COURSE
federal government used the military to guarantee Meredith’s
constitutional right to equal protection of the laws, it used psychiatry
to deprive Walker of his constitutional right to trial. This was another
example of my long-held view that we are replacing social controls
justified by race with social controls justified by psychiatric
diagnosis.
Follow FEE on
Guilt by Diagnosis Flipboard
Arrested on four federal charges, including “inciting, assisting, and
engaging in an insurrection against the authority of the United Flipboard Articles
States,” Walker was taken before a U.S. commissioner and held
pending the posting of $100,000 bond. While he was making
arrangements to post bail, Attorney General Robert Kennedy
ordered Walker flown, on a government aircraft, to Springfield,
Missouri, to be incarcerated in the U.S. Medical Center for Prisoners
for “psychiatric observation” on suspicion that he was mentally unfit
to stand trial. Follow FEE on Medium

Walker’s entry in Wikipedia mentions neither this nor the ensuing


confrontation between Walker’s legal team and the government’s
psychiatric team. The reader is told only that Walker “posted bond Medium Articles
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and returned home to Dallas, where he was greeted by a crowd of
200 supporters. After a federal grand jury adjourned in January Advertisement
1963 without indicting him, the charges were dropped.”

How could this happen? Was it legal? It was legal, and in


Psychiatric Justice (1965) I presented a detailed, documented Support
account of how it happened. Here I wish to add a few personal Foundation for
details not previously reported. Economic Education.
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News of Walker’s psychiatric incarceration had barely hit the Amazon donates.
newspapers when I received a telephone call from Robert Morris,
then president of the University of Dallas, formerly chief counsel to
the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Internal Security. He
identified himself as one of Walker’s attorneys, explained he had
been given my name by William F. Buckley, Jr., and asked me to
help his team to free Walker from psychiatric imprisonment.

I flew to Dallas and spent a long afternoon and evening with Morris
and his team of lawyers. They believed it was obvious that Walker
was sane. They wanted me to examine him and say so in court. It
was not easy to disabuse them of their conventional beliefs about
mental illness as a medical disease and psychiatry as a medical
specialty. I summarized the evidence for my view that psychiatry is
a threat to civil liberties, especially to the liberties of individuals
stigmatized as “right-wingers,” illustrated by the famous case of Ezra
Pound, who was locked up for 13 years while the government
ostensibly waited for his “doctors” to restore his competence to
stand trial. Now the Kennedys and their psychiatrists were in the
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process of doing the same thing to Walker.

I reminded the attorneys that a courtroom confrontation concerning


his “sanity” would not be a search for truth or justice (which they
well understood), and noted that they were on the losing side of the
civil rights battle (which they well knew). I urged them to avoid
unnecessary dramatics and focus on freeing Walker from psychiatric
detention as their sole goal. Finally, I persuaded them that in a
Mississippi courtroom, I–with a foreign name and a foreign accent–
would not be the best possible expert for Walker and talked them
out of their plan to have me examine him and engage in a contest of
“expert opinions” about the predictably dire diagnoses of the
government’s psychiatric experts. Instead, I proposed that they
“nominate” a prominent Dallas university psychiatrist as their
defense expert–that is, a local, publicly employed physician who
could ill afford to declare Walker insane on the basis of his “racist”
views. (Before the Civil War, proslavery physicians in the South
diagnosed black slaves who tried to escape to the North as mentally
ill, “suffering from drapetomania.” In the Walker case, pro-
integration psychiatrists in the North diagnosed white segregationists
as mentally ill, “suffering from racism.”) Next morning I flew back
to Syracuse.

For Whose Own Good?

A competency hearing was scheduled. Dr. Robert L. Stubblefield,


chief psychiatrist at the Southwest Medical Center in Dallas, was to
examine Walker and testify in his defense. The prosecution’s expert
was Dr. Manfred Guttmacher, long-time chief medical officer at
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Baltimore City’s Supreme Court. Walker’s attorneys had no trouble
exposing Guttmacher for the evil quack he was. Guttmacher kept
referring to Walker as if Walker were his patient and supported the
prosecution’s request that Walker be incarcerated (“hospitalized”)
for up to three months, testifying under oath that doing so would be
“for Mr. Walker’s own good from a medical point of view.”

In the end, the government’s psychiatric plot failed. Walker was


declared mentally fit to stand trial, a federal grand jury refused to
indict him, and the charges against him were dropped.

Less than two years later, my view that organized American


psychiatry was becoming overtly political, seeking the existential
invalidation and psychiatric destruction of individuals who do not
share the psychiatric establishment’s left-liberal “progressive” views,
received further dramatic support. In 1964, when Senator Barry
Goldwater was the Republican candidate for president, 1,189
psychiatrists publicly declared–without benefit of examination–that
Goldwater was “psychologically unfit to be President of the United
States.” Many offered a diagnosis of “paranoid schizophrenia” as the
basis for their judgment.

Psychiatry is despotism in the service of the Therapeutic State,


rationalized as “progressive” science and “compassionate” medical
care. In the past, racial stigmatization and segregation were
indispensable for the political class and the State. Today, psychiatric
stigmatization and segregation are indispensable for the political class
and the State. This is why no exposure of brutal psychiatric
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injustices makes a dent in the mental health system’s lofty social
status as a benevolent, ethical, scientific medical discipline.

Thomas S. Szasz

D r. Thomas Szasz (1920-2012) was a


Psychiatrist, academic, and champion of
individual rights. He devoted much of his life to campaigning against
many aspects of conventional psychiatry, in particular involuntary
psychiatric treatment and commitment.

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