Month: January 2026

Categories
Public health psychiatry

Psychological First Aid.

My plan over the past week was to craft a post about psychiatrists becoming agents of social control in China. Then federal agents killed another person in Minneapolis.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I posted few entries here. This was a natural consequence of me not writing in general. Fatigue and anxiety were constant companions. Why was a psychiatrist working as the medical director for one of the largest homelessness services agencies in the county during a public health crisis? The pressure felt relentless.

By December 2020, I also felt anger because I was disappointed:

As the federal government has not provided any coherent response to the actual disease pandemic, I do not expect that it will provide any response to the psychological suffering that has already occurred and will continue to occur due to Covid-19.

Nearly a year had passed since the first US death from Covid. There was no indication that this federal government had any interest in applying lessons learned from epidemics elsewhere. The Pan-American Health Organization published a free document—free!—entitled, Protecting Mental Health During Epidemics.

At that time, though, I still held hope in my heart. Government often does not move fast. This is desirable: If government moves too fast, smaller jurisdictions don’t have the chance to give feedback or adapt.

By 2025, we would all learn that this government would use speed against its people.

By January 2022, my anxiety, anger, and disappointment had disappeared. The chronic anxiety and fatigue had squashed everything else.

I recognized at the time that this was a problem.

Worry had become an ingrained habit, so it was easy to express this concern:

I worry about the psychological consequences of this pandemic in the years to come. We continue to focus on the viral pandemic; the psychological pandemic has already arrived. We have yet to see an organized response to that.

Months ago I had already reluctantly recognized that we could not rely on this government to help us. We crafted our own best practices; we cobbled together our own policies and procedures. Within the community we shared information and ideas. We pooled together what power we had to push local government authorities to meet our needs.

You, dear reader, are gracious to give me the gift of your attention. I know some of you work as psychiatrists, psychologists, and other health professionals. Because this federal government is moving fast and has shown that it is unreliable, let me share with you the manual for Psychological First Aid:

Gives guidance on responding to disaster or terrorism events using the Psychological First Aid intervention. This evidence-informed approach helps to assist children, adolescents, adults, and families in the aftermath of disaster and terrorism.

Here’s the two-page overview.

I wish it had a stronger evidence base, and I don’t like that the last update was in 2006. (WHO has a similar psychological first aid manual, though its last update was in 2011.)

People other than mental health professionals can administer psychological first aid. Much of it seems like common sense, but if you have made it this far in this post, you’re probably feeling generally calm. Common sense often disappears during times of stress. The time to learn how to manage yourself, to practice having equanimity in the face of calamity, is when you are calm.

May what is happening in Minneapolis not happen in your city. May you already be a member of PRKA (People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction):

resisting the urge to generalize, insisting upon valuing: the individual over the group; the actual over the conceptual; the small, decent act over the sudden violent lunge; the complicated reality of the present moment over the theoretically euphoric future supposedly to be obtained via murder or massacre.

Categories
Homelessness NYC Policy Public health psychiatry

Trump Talked About Community Psychiatry Today.

Guys, I know we’re all tired for many different reasons. But we should probably review what President Trump said today. During his press conference he talked about community psychiatry!

I’ll go over the transcript below, but if you want to watch the video, it starts at 51:34 on C-SPAN.

As he was listing his accomplishments, he said the following. My commentary follows in the numbers below.

Signed an executive order to bring back mental institutions and insane asylums. [1] We’re going to have to bring them back. Hate to build those suckers, [2] but But you got to get the people off the streets. [3] You know, we used to have when I was growing up. We had it in my area in Queens. I grew up in Queens. We had a place called Creedmoor. Creedmore. Did anybody know that Creedmore? It was a big, [4] I said, Mom. Why are those bars on the building? I used to play Little League baseball. They’re at a place called Cunningham Park. Who’s quite the baseball player, you wouldn’t believe, but I said to my mother, Mom, she would be there, always there for me. She said, uh, son, you could be a professional baseball player. [5] I said, thanks, Mom. I said, why are those bars on the windows? Big building, big. Powerful building. It loomed over the park [6] actually she said, well, People that are very sick are in that building. [7] I said, boy, I used to always look at that building and I’d see this big building, big tall building. It loomed over the park. It was sort of, now that I think it was a pretty unfriendly sight, but I, I’ll never forget, I don’t know if it’s still there. [8] Because they got rid of most of them, you know, they, the Democrats in New York, they took them down, [9] and the people live on the streets now. That’s why you have a lot of the people in, in California and other places, they live on the streets. They took the mental institutions down, they’re expensive, [10] but I’d say, why does that building have those bars, boy. It didn’t, it wasn’t normal, you know, you’re used to looking at like a window. But this one you’re looking at all the steel, vicious steel, tiny windows, bars all over the place, nobody was getting out. [11] It’s called the mental institution. That was an insane asylum.

(sigh) Okay, let’s go over this:

  1. The executive order he signed has the formal title of “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets”. There’s a major cognitive error in the order, which I wrote about here.
  2. Never before have I heard anyone refer to mental institutions as “suckers”.
  3. Are there people who are homeless who would be best served in a mental institution? Yes. Do all people who are homeless need to be in a mental institution? No. Another way—more humane and cost effective!—to “get people off the streets” is to create and sustain conditions where people can afford and remain in housing.
  4. It looks like the highest census at Creedmoor was around 7,000 patients in 1959. President Trump would have been 12 years old at that time.
  5. Of course, someone did a deep dive about Trump’s record as a baseball player. If he were that good, surely he would throw out a first pitch at a major league game? (He has not.)
  6. A quick peek at a map shows that Creedmoor does not “loom over” Cunningham Park. They’re three miles apart. There are two athletic fields nearby. Creedmoor is visible from Alley Athletic Playground.
  7. I wonder if Trump’s mother spoke of the “very sick” people with disdain, pity, or compassion. Is it possible that all 7,000 people were “very sick”? Maybe. Is it possible that some of those 7,000 people did not need to be in an institution? Yes.
  8. Yes, Creedmoor still exists. It’s unclear what the census is now (it’s certainly not 7,000), but it’s not just an inpatient unit. They provide an array of outpatient services, too.
  9. There are multiple reasons why psychiatric institutions closed. One major reason was the advent of antipsychotic medication, which allowed more people to be treated in the community. There were also reports of abuses within these behemoth institutions. Long Island, a suburb of New York City, was the site of three major psychiatric institutions. Around 1954 Pilgrim State Hospital was probably the largest psychiatric hospital in the nation; there were over 13,000 patients there. I don’t know the history of New York State well enough to know if “Democrats in New York… took them down”. Recall that Trump was a Democrat for much of his life prior to running for President.
  10. Historically, states had to fund mental institutions. Medicaid (federal money) could not be used to pay for hospital services. This is another reason why states shut down psychiatric institutions; they didn’t have enough money to keep them running. If this policy discussion excites you (…), learn more about the IMD exclusion here.
  11. Yeah, man. If you don’t like “steel, vicious steel, tiny windows, bars all over the place”, then you’re like everyone else who doesn’t want a proliferation of mental institutions.
Categories
Lessons Nonfiction Reading

How to Avoid Becoming an Agent of Social Control: Viktor Frankl

In our ongoing study in how governments have used psychiatrists as agents of social control (and how psychiatrists resisted these pressures), let’s learn about Viktor Frankl.

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian man who was Jewish. He worked as psychiatrist and is best known for his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. (It’s a slim book and worth a read.) In it he describes his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and the development of logotherapy.

Before the Nazis deported Frankl, he worked in the Neurological Department of the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna. His title was apparently “Jewish Specialist”; it was one of the last places Jews could work.

The Viktor Frankl Institute notes that, in 1940,

In spite of the danger to his own life he sabotages Nazi procedures by making false diagnoses to prevent the euthanasia of mentally ill patients.

though I am unable to find other evidence to support this.

There is more evidence that Frankl worked with people who had tried to kill themselves. Most of his Jewish patients attempted suicide because they had received deportation orders. Certain death was already awaiting them.

Frankl does not discuss in Man’s Search for Meaning how he tried to save these patients from suicide. Others do. Mikic writes:

Frankl tried to bring the suicidal patients back by injecting them with amphetamines, but it didn’t work.

And so, Frankl bored holes in the skulls of his Jewish patients, who had taken overdoses of pills in the hope of escaping their Nazi tormentors, and jolted their brains with Pervitin, an amphetamine popular in the Third Reich.

Pytell also comments:

… in the circumstances of Nazi oppression suicide was often considered a viable option if not a form of resistance, and [Frankl] was therefore undermining the choice of people who made such a difficult decision.

Frankl tried to protect the lives of Jewish people. The Nazis did not like this (or maybe they did?); they also did not like him.

In the preface to the 1992 edition of Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl shares:

The reader may ask me why I did not try to escape what was in store for me after Hitler had occupied Austria. … Shortly before the United States entered World War II, I received an invitation to come to the American Consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration visa. My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria. I suddenly hesitated, however. The question beset me: could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp? Where did my responsibility lie?

Frankl writes that “this was the type of dilemma that made one wish for ‘a hint from Heaven’.” He describes the following as a sign:

… I noticed a piece of marble lying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was a part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly, I asked, “Which one is it?” He answered, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.” At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.

Ultimately, his father, mother, and wife all perished. The Nazis killed them all in concentration camps.

From this, it seems that Viktor Frankl held fast to a set of values. We can never fully know all the intentions people hold in their hearts, but we can make educated guesses from their behaviors. He had an internal compass.

From his behaviors we can surmise the points of his internal compass:

Frankl valued the lives of his fellow Jewish people. If it is true that he made false diagnoses to prevent euthanasia, he used the power that he had to protect those who had less. One can argue that Frankl abandoned his professional duties by making diagnoses meaningless. However, the purpose of diagnosis is to guide treatment. If a government uses diagnosis to assign death, then the purpose of diagnosis has already been perverted.

Frankl had a clear vision of what medicine he should practice. If suicidal behavior was the enemy, Frankl used all the tools he had—including cranial surgery and stimulants!—to combat this. I don’t know what amount of amphetamines (or skull boring) can stop people from killing themselves. But if a government is going to execute you anyway for who you are, it seems like no amount will be enough.

Frankl valued his parents. He, his wife, and his parents, all Jewish, knew what the Nazis were doing. He could have escaped. He chose not to. It’s hard for any of us to understand what it means to die. Even if he only understood genocide as an abstraction, it was a consequence he was willing to accept. Being with his parents was a priority to him.

Perhaps the lesson we can learn from Viktor Frankl is to know what your values are. Understand what your priorities are and why. Once you have clarity on your values, then you will be less susceptible to corruption.

Those who live by cunning and duplicity may comment that integrity doesn’t matter if you are dead. Sure, but do you really want the alternative of an exhausting, joyless, and meaningless life?

Categories
Lessons Nonfiction Systems

How to Avoid Becoming an Agent of Social Control: Anatoly Koryagin

Psychiatrists are always at risk of becoming agents of social control. In most U.S. states, we have the power to force people, under specific conditions, into psychiatric hospitals. (Washington State is one of the few states where psychiatrists cannot do this. We have to call someone else with that authority.)

A Very Important Person in the U.S. government has said, “… we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” The federal government has manifested this intention in both internal and external affairs.

As a result, I have growing concerns that the U.S. government will use psychiatrists as tools for force. This has happened before. How have psychiatrists in the past resisted these pressures? How can I prepare myself to do the same?

The Lancet published a paper in 1981, “Unwilling Patients“, by Soviet psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin. Dr. Koryagin (stationed in the then state of Ukraine…) wrote this paper

to analyze the conditions in which healthy people in the U.S.S.R. are pronounced mentally ill and are condemned to exist as such.

Dr. Koryagin describes conditions that encouraged psychiatrists to become extensions of the government:

The government passed laws that recognized “anti-Soviet” speech and activities as crimes.

Law enforcement officials at all levels of government picked up people for violating these laws. They then brought them to psychiatric hospitals for observation or evaluation. If psychiatrists diagnosed them as mentally ill, then compulsory treatment followed.

Some people, brought in by law enforcement, were detained even though no psychiatrist ever evaluated them. This means one of two things happened:

  • psychiatrists in the community signed detention orders without ever meeting the person, or
  • hospital psychiatrists automatically signed detention orders when law enforcement arrived.

Psychiatrists shifted clinical definitions.

At that time in the U.S.S.R., the clinical meaning of “socially dangerous” was a person “in danger of committing acts which would endanger his own health or that of people around him.” This is largely consistent with the detention threshold now in the United States.

However, some U.S.S.R. psychiatrists began detaining people because they were “capable of harming the social system as a whole”. This was a judicial interpretation of “socially dangerous”. Thus, for detention to occur, both the referring psychiatrist and accepting hospital psychiatrist substituted the judicial definition for the clinical one.

Even though the only symptoms these patients exhibited were “‘anti-Soviet’ attitudes, expressions, and actions”, most people were diagnosed as “psychopaths (70%) or schizophrenics (30%)”. (A.I. tells me that the DSM-5 equivalent of “psychopath” in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s is antisocial personality disorder.) One Soviet forensic psychiatrist wrote of a patient, “No normal person can be opposed to the Workers’ and Peasants’ State.”

Psychiatrists acquiesced and transformed hospitals into sites of punishment, not treatment.

Once people were hospitalized, “the main aim of these confinements to hospital was the isolation of the patient and not treatment of mental illness”. Gallows humor emerged: The term for this was apparently “wall therapy”.

For those who received medical interventions, they were severe:

  • “insulin comas”
  • “intensive course of injections with neuroleptic drugs for a week”

A 16 year-old girl reported that she was “severely beaten by the medical staff” after she tried to escape. She then was “subjected to treatment with neuroleptic drugs”.

Psychiatrists gave up on patient care and abandoned their professional duties.

Dr. Koryagin notes:

Not one of these people has said that the health authorities or, more particularly, the doctors at psychiatric clinics, have helped them in any way whatsoever.

Given the context, these were not disgruntled patients. Doctors almost always have more power than patients. It is easier to identify abuses of power, like when doctors inflict harm on their patients.

However, not using the power one has is also a misuse of power. Pressure and coercion from the government are always overwhelming. To yield to that pressure creates a vacuum that those who covet strength, force, and power race to fill.

The psychiatrists Dr. Koryagin describes abandoned their power and authority as physicians. Their “patients” suffered the consequences. Thus, Dr. Koryagin reminds us (emphasis mine):

A doctor is obliged to take an active interest in all the patients on his list, so that he may help them in legal and social, as well as medical matters.

In my view this guidance applies not only to the patients who are under our care now, but also to those who were and those who will be. This is why it is vital to advocate for the health and well-being of all. Even—and especially—if the government thinks some people are undeserving.

Categories
Nonfiction Observations

Trump and Bundy.

When I read what Donald Trump said, it immediately made me think of comments by Ted Bundy.

From today’s New York Times:

“Ownership is very important,” Mr. Trump said as he discussed, with a real estate mogul’s eye, the landmass of Greenland….

When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

From the Wikipedia page about Ted Bundy:

Possession proved to be an important motive for rape and murder as well. Sexual assault, [Bundy] said, fulfilled his need to “totally possess” his victims. At first, Bundy killed his victims “as a matter of expediency … to eliminate the possibility of [being] caught”; but later, murder became part of the “adventure”. “The ultimate possession was, in fact, the taking of the life”, he said. “And then … the physical possession of the remains.”

And further elaboration:

“[Bundy] said that after a while, murder is not just a crime of lust or violence”, [FBI Special Agent] Hagmaier related. “It becomes possession. They are part of you … [the victim] becomes a part of you, and you [two] are forever one … and the grounds where you kill them or leave them become sacred to you, and you will always be drawn back to them.”

When one covets this much, it is no longer possible to recognize the humanity of others.