Peter Lehmann
The chemical gag: Why psychiatrists administer neuroleptics
Reviews in Danish, Dutch, English & German
Jeffrey Massson: Review in Changes – An International Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy
Jeffrey Masson: Review in Asylum – A Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry
Jeffrey Masson: Den kemiske knebel. Review in amalie – Galebevægelsens blad
Reinhard Güss: Review in Clinical Psychological Forum
Luitsen Kotsier: Review in Bulletin van de Cliëntenbond
Benny Lihme: Den kemiske Spændetrøje. Review in amalie – Galebevægelsens blad
Phoenix Rising: Review in Asylum – A Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry
Review in: Changes – An International Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy, Vol. 8 (1990), No. 3, p. 223 · Danish translation / PDF
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
Jeffrey Masson: Review in Clinical Psychology Forum (United
Kingdom), No. 43 (November 2004), p. 40
Read about successful coming off psychiatric drugs, do not run away!
In the preface of the book Pirkko Lahti, Director of the Finnish Association for Mental Health and President of the World Federation for Mental Health, writes:
"Many of my colleagues in the mental health field spend much of their time developing criteria for the application of psychiatric drugs."
She continues:
"Diagnoses and indications often result in a treatment with psychotropic drugs that can last for a long time. ... What risks arise from the withdrawal of neuroleptics, antidepressants and lithium? What factors favor successful withdrawal-successful in the sense that patients do not immediately return to the doctor's exam room, but live free and healthy lives, as all of us would wish? Have we not heard about pharmacogenic withdrawal-problems, receptor-changes, supersensitivity-psychoses, withdrawal-psychoses? Who is able to distinguish relapses from hidden withdrawal problems? Do we not leave our patients alone with their sorrows and problems, when they-for whatever reasons-decide by themselves to come off their psychotropic drugs? Where can they find support, understanding and good examples, if they turn away from us disappointed (or we from them)?"
These questions are so striking that I can only assent to them.
Lehmann does not make a simplistic appeal for the tossing out of psychiatric drugs. He expressly repudiates panaceas. The book has a provocative message; life-experiences sometimes differ from scientific agreements. 28 authors, (ex-) users and survivors of psychiatry from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, England, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Serbia & Montenegro, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA, managed to come off psychiatric drugs sometimes well, sometimes with problems and sometimes after decades. What is striking is how rarely they received professional help in that process. The fact that the editor found additionally eight professionals, working in psychotherapy, medicine, social work, psychiatry, natural healing an even in a runaway-house, who report on how they helped in the withdrawal process, does not change the central argument that being-left-alone is often the very best remedy.
Learn a lesson from the courageous pioneers, who take responsibility and accompany the often necessarily slow withdrawal with help and advice. I especially recommend the story of Martin Urban's case: "'Am I really still disabled?' Psychotherapeutic support during withdrawal from psychiatric drugs". Urban, leader of the section "Clinical psychologists in psychiatry" in the occupational union of German psychologists, shows empathetically how to support people who were declared to have a chronic mental illness in their self-chosen withdrawal: without prejudice, but with respect and devotion-on the basis of an opinion independent of psychiatry. The results of his activity are impressive; he deserves the positive comment added to his story by his patient-read it for yourself in the book.
Regardless of how people working in the psychosocial field assess the motivation and risks of coming off psychiatric drugs, finally it is the users' decision, and they don't behave differently than the rest of society-up to 50% abandon the drugs they were prescribed. It is a good thing that there is this unique new book about a topic which has been badly neglected until now. Moreover, it is fun to read. Loren R. Mosher, the former Director of Soteria Associates and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, who tragically died at July 10, 2004 in Berlin, wrote in his preamble to Peter Lehmann's book:
"This book is a must read for anyone who might consider taking or no longer taking these mind altering legal drugs and perhaps even more so for those able to prescribe them."
Jeffrey M. Masson, New Zealand (former Director of the Sigmund-Freud-Archives
in Washington, D.C.) 