Dr. Benjamin Rush, the “father of American psychiatry,” purchased a toddler slave and solely freed him after he obtained “just compensation for my having paid for him the full price of a slave for life” – in different phrases, not till he obtained his cash’s price from his slave.
The award honored Benjamin Rush, whose theories the psychiatric group now admits are at the root of the structural racism in psychiatry.
— Dr. Benjamin Rush, the “father of American psychiatry”
WASHINGTON, DC, US, October 26, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ — The American Psychiatric Association (APA) not lists a Benjamin Rush Award amongst the awards it confers on member psychiatrists. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) had repeatedly known as on the group to disavow Dr. Benjamin Rush, the slave-owning “father of American psychiatry” who’s chargeable for instigating the “scientific racism” at the very root of the structural racism in psychiatry that the APA now admits.
In 2021, greater than 175 years after its founding, the APA issued a public apology for psychiatry’s “role in perpetrating structural racism.” However, the APA web site continued to record the Benjamin Rush Award amongst the awards the group introduced and solely extra not too long ago eliminated it.
The psychiatrist in whose honor this APA award was bestowed purchased a toddler slave, William Grubber, in the early- to mid-1770s, students consider, at roughly the identical time Rush printed a 1773 critique of slavery. While he promoted the abolition of slavery in his writings, Rush saved his personal slave for some twenty years, apparently unconcerned along with his hypocrisy.
Rush lastly launched Grubber from slavery in 1794, solely after receiving, in his phrases, “a just compensation for my having paid for him the full price of a slave for life.” In different phrases, Rush made certain he obtained his cash’s price from his slave earlier than setting him free.
However, Rush’s transgressions go far past the human rights abuse of enslaving one other human being.
In 1792, Rush declared that Blacks suffered from a illness he known as “negritude” that he theorized was attributable to a variant of leprosy. “Observations intended to favour a supposition that the Black Color (as it is called) of the Negroes is derived from the Leprosy,” he wrote.
The remedy was scrubbing the pores and skin with corrosive acid to show it white. He additionally believed Blacks mustn’t intermarry with different races as a result of this supposed illness might infect their youngsters.
With this view of “black leprosy,” Rush set the precedent for all the “scientific racism” that adopted, as much as current day, as psychiatrists and psychologists claimed to seek out organic justification for segregation and different discriminatory practices in opposition to Black Americans.
Rush set yet one more racist precedent by contemplating that African Americans had been in a position to simply endure surgical operations and ache, labeling this “pathological insensibility.” More than 200 years later, physicians are nonetheless extra prone to underestimate the ache of Black sufferers relative to nonblack sufferers and are much less prone to prescribe African Americans acceptable ache remedy.
Rush’s human rights abuses additionally included treating his sufferers with darkness, solitary confinement, and a particular method of forcing the affected person to face erect for 2 to a few days at a time, poking them with sharp pointed nails to maintain them from sleeping – a method borrowed from a British process for taming horses. “Terror acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and should be employed in the cure of madness,” he wrote. He additionally invented the “tranquilizer” chair, into which the affected person was strapped hand and foot, together with a tool to carry the head motionless.
The legacy of the “father of American psychiatry” is perpetually debased by his documented human rights abuses and his position in creating the “scientific racism” that has been used for generations by psychiatrists, psychologists, and the psychological well being practitioners educated by them – racism which has permeated American society and which the APA now admits continues to be “ingrained in the structure of psychiatric practice and continue[s] to harm BIPOC psychological well-being even today.” With the removing of the Benjamin Rush Award, the APA has very belatedly acknowledged Rush’s racist legacy.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) was co-founded in 1969 by members of the Church of Scientology and the late psychiatrist and humanitarian Thomas Szasz, M.D., acknowledged by many lecturers as fashionable psychiatry’s most authoritative critic, to eradicate abuses and restore human rights and dignity to the area of psychological well being. CCHR has been instrumental in acquiring 228 legal guidelines in opposition to psychiatric abuses and violations of human rights worldwide.
The CCHR National Affairs Office in Washington, DC, has advocated for psychological well being rights and protections at the state and federal degree. The CCHR touring exhibit, which has toured 441 main cities worldwide and educated over 800,000 folks on the historical past to the current day of abusive and racist psychiatric practices, has been displayed at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference in Washington, DC, and at different places.
Anne Goedeke
Citizens Commission on Human Rights, National Affairs Office
+1 202-349-9267
e mail us right here
CCHR Task Force Against Racism & Modern-Day Eugenics
