Peter Lehmann
The Chemical Gag: Why Psychiatrists Administer Neuroleptics
(= Der chemische Knebel – Warum Psychiater Neuroleptika verabreichen)
Soft
cover, XVIII + 428 pages, 14,8 x 21 cm, ISBN 978-3-925931-31-4.
Berlin / Eugene / Shrewsbury: Peter Lehmann Publishing, 6th edition
2010.
Published only in the German language!
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About
the author |
Review by Jeffrey
M. Masson |
Information in German |
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Preface by Jeffrey M. Masson, reprint of the first edition of 1986
with an updated preface by Peter Lehmann
Publisher's information about
the 2nd edition of 1990
In all psychiatry-critical circles the book, 1986
been published primarily, has made a stir. The book preoccupies
mainly with the modern psychiatric antipsychotic drugs and is
called yet now a standardwork of psychiatry-critics. In 1988 American
psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin praised it "the best book about
the danger of those drugs".
From asthma
to schizophrenia, from bed-wetting to neurosis, from skin-irritation to depression,
there is scarcely a diagnosis that cannot result in the application of neuroleptics.
In doing so, the side-effects of these psychiatric drugs consist in hard physical,
mental, and psychic damages (f.e. shaking palsy, tardive dyskinesia (chronic St.
Vitus's dance-form movement-disorder), disorders of the heart-rhythm, impotence,
mammary gland neoplasias (tumors), falling out of the teeth, and desperation).
In the "Chemical Gag" Peter Lehmann uncovers what psychiatrists are hiding to
the treated persons, to their relatives and to the public. In the preface to the
2. edition the former director of the Sigmund-Freud-Archives und psychoanalyst
Jeffrey M. Masson (Berkeley/California) writes:
"I have learned more
from this book about the secret inner workings of psychiatry than I was able to
piece together in 10 years of analytic training. After a personal analysis and
various other psychotherapies the best therapy I ever had was reading this book."
Jeffrey
Masson got famous as editor and translator of the complete edition of the correspondence
between Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess. In his book "The Assault on Truth. Freud's
Supression of the Seduction Theory" (1984) he disproved Freud's theory of seduction,
which dismissed the sexual abuse of a lot of children as pure products of phantasy.
In the preface to "The Chemical Gag" again he supports the victims of supression,
now the victims of psychiatric treatment.
Information
in Phoenix Rising–The Voice of the Psychiatrized (Toronto),
Vol. 7 (1987), No. 2
Review in: Changes–An International Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy,
Vol. 8 (1990), No. 3, p. 223) · German
translation
Reading this book helped me to understand many things: the danger
of drugs, the collusion of German psychiatrists in the final solution
(the murder of mental patients) during the Second World War, the
hypocrisy of modern psychiatry, but most of all, it helped me
to understand my own self. When I finished reading it, it took
my breath away: "Why yes," I told myself, "this is really true.
I believe this. So I am not for the reform of psychiatry. I am
for its abolition just like slavery, or apartheid; if it is wrong,
morally wrong, don't concern yourself with fixing it, just walk
away from it."
I have learned more from
this book about the secret inner workings of psychiatry than I was able to piece
together in ten years of analytic training. After a personal analysis (five days
a week for five years) and various other psychotherapies (being done to and doing
to others) the best therapy I ever had was reading this book.
I have felt,
intuitively, that psychiatrists have committed crimes against humanity. But it
was hard to put this intuition into words. Now Lehmann takes away all the mystery
from psychiatry, so that when someone tells you that "psychiatrists mean well",
you can tell them, "No, what they mean is, what they do: their own business consists
of making healthy people ill, with poisons called medicine", as Lehmann
puts it so succinctly, and this is precisely what psychiatrists do best.
Read
this book, and it will be like coming out of a fog into the clear sunshine. Much
that was obscure and intuitively felt will become crystal clear. All of the worst
suspicions I had about psychiatry were confirmed and given voice by this book,
which speaks in plain language, humanely, with no pretensions or desire to obscure
or impress. It is a work of magisterial lucidity. Suddenly Lehmann makes it clear
with blinding insight that everybody reacts the same (badly) to psychiatric drugs,
so-called "normal" people, psychiatrists, so-called "schizophrenics", and even
spiders (who stop spinning webs; no doubt a triumph for psychiatry: witness the
German phrase, du spinnst). Nowhere else have the many serious dangers
of neuroleptics been so carefully catalogued. Read this book and throw away your
drugs, leave your therapist, and vow never to call another person crazy except
in affectionate jest.
Jeffrey M. Masson