The mental health industry watchdog says a more meaningful apology and appropriate compensation are needed for psychiatric and eugenics policies that still impact the U.S.

By CCHR International
and its Task Force Against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics
October 25, 2024

CCHR International and its Task Force Against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics have called for a nationwide, meaningful apology and compensation from federal and state governments, as well as mental health professionals, for the abuse suffered by African, Native, Asian and Hispanic Americans who were targeted by eugenics and sterilization programs throughout the 1900s. The legacy of these programs is still evident today, with these groups disproportionately subjected to stigmatizing and potentially harmful mental health treatments. The demand comes in the wake of a recent New Zealand government apology to 200,000 children and vulnerable adults who were tortured in psychiatric and behavioral institutions steeped in eugenics. Many of the targeted individuals were members of the Indigenous Māori community.[1] Māori children were especially over-represented in one of the worst institutions for torture using electroshock treatment, the now-closed Lake Alice psychiatric hospital.[2]

On September 30, California’s governor signed a new law extending the deadline for sterilization survivors who were previously denied compensation under a 2021 reparations program. These survivors now have until January 1, 2025, to file an appeal. The California Victim Compensation Board will have an additional 15 months to review and process those appeals. To date, the board has approved far fewer payments than it has denied, with just 118 victims receiving a mere $35,000 compensation by October 4, 2024.[3] A 2016 study estimated that as many as 831 survivors of coercive eugenic sterilizations in California may still be alive. According to researchers, their experiences, along with the racial injustices perpetuated by these institutions, deserve long-overdue recognition and acknowledgment.[4]

The U.S. has a long history rooted in eugenics, the racist psychological theory of “inferiority,” and its impact continues to be felt today. Psychiatry Online reported, “Looking back almost 100 years, one finds that scattered reports have documented overrepresentation of black patients relative to white patients in psychiatric inpatient treatment facilities” in the U.S. Blacks receive inpatient treatment more often than non-Hispanic whites.[5]

In the early to mid-1900s, California’s eugenics programs were driven in part by anti-Asian and anti-Mexican prejudice, while Southern states employed sterilization as a means of controlling African American populations. The U.S. was an international leader in eugenics. Its sterilization laws influenced Nazi Germany. “There is today one state,” wrote Hitler, “in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”[6] The Third Reich’s 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” written by psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin[7], was modeled on laws in Indiana and California. The Nazis sterilized approximately 400,000 children and adults.[8]

Thousands of Native American women—an estimated one out of every four–were sterilized against their will by the Indian Health Service (IHS) in the 1960s and 1970s. The IHS “operated under historical assumptions that native people and people of color were morally, mentally, and socially defective long after it was founded in 1955.” This mentality led to forced sterilizations, as some IHS doctors believed “American Indian and other minority women had the intelligence to use other methods of birth control effectively and that there were already too many minority individuals causing problems in the nation,” writes historian Jane Lawrence.[9]

Even after legislation designed to protect women from forced sterilization was passed in 1974, the abusive sterilizations continued. Between 1970 and 1976 alone, between 25 and 50% of Native American women were sterilized.[10] And in the late 1990s, women of color were sterilized in CA prisons.[11]

Combined with the forced assimilation of Native American children of earlier generations in compulsory boarding schools and placing Native American children in foster care, “the forced sterilization of Native American women is another page in the long book of abuse wrought upon Native peoples by the United States,” journalist and author Erin Blakemore wrote.[12]

Organizations such as the Asiatic Exclusion League also advocated for the segregation of Asian children in public schools and fueled anti-Asian sentiment among the public[13] Increasing numbers of Asian immigrants sparked insidious and irrational fears of a “yellow peril,” while multitudes of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe caused growing concern among Anglo-Americans.[14] Re-defining racism in “mental health terms” justified oppressive policies.

A December 2023 study published in the journal Social Forces, notes, “‘Feeblemindedness’ was the most pervasive diagnostic label used by medical professionals, describing a patient’s perceived inability to engage in productive work or conform to normative behaviors….” Further, “Eugenicists theorized that these conditions were hereditary and used ‘feeblemindedness’ and mental deficiency as flexible concepts to mark a wide range of individuals for institutionalization and eugenic sterilization.”[15]

According to the study, California authorities blamed foreign-born populations for increased “insanity” in the state. Racism not only shaped the labeling of those considered ‘unfit’ but also the development and “application of disability labels indicating mental illness or cognitive impairment. This increased control of the nation’s borders to prevent inflows of allegedly diseased immigrants and became integral to the project to protect public health, resulting in the medicalization of U.S. international borders.” The authors point out that systemic biases remain inherent in many public health systems today.

For example, the use of outpatient services is higher among Asians than among Caucasians. Southeast Asians are labeled with the highest rate of major depression (37.6%), and East Asians with the highest rate of schizophrenia (25.8%). Diagnoses of bipolar disorder are most prevalent for Native Americans (11.4%). Racism is labeled as “mental illness,” leading to the justification of institutionalization and the use of psychotropic drugs with damaging side effects. Psychiatry Online reports the difficulty for prescribers of psychotropic drugs to the Asian population which have “a strong belief in spiritual medicine and alternative remedies,” noted Edmond Pi, M.D., a professor emeritus of clinical psychiatry at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. Supplements, which can be harmless. Especially when comparing them to the harm psychiatric drugs bring, could “interfere with psychiatric medications.” Astoundingly, as positioned by Geetha Jayaram, M.D., M.B.A., an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, “A good rule of thumb is to treat an Asian American like a geriatric patient: Start low and go slow.”[16]

The apologies and compensation given to date for the psychological and psychiatric movement of eugenics is appallingly inadequate. In December 2015, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to help surviving victims of forced sterilization. North Carolina has paid an unacceptable $35,000 to 220 surviving victims of its eugenics program. Virginia agreed to give surviving victims a paltry $25,000 each.[17]

In 2021, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) issued an apology for psychiatry’s “role in perpetrating structural racism” and “history of actions…that hurt Black, Indigenous, and People of Color” (BIPOC).[18] However, Rev. Fred Shaw, a spokesperson for CCHR’s Task Force Against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics rejected the apology as prompted by self-interests—the availability of research funds into the impact of racism and institutionalizing, drugging and electroshocking a new generation of minorities impacted by racism. He said, “As a member of the Black community, I don’t accept the apology, which seems steeped in the desire to profit from further abuse of Indigenous Americans, African, Hispanic and Asian Americans.”

CCHR and its Task Force are calling for a comprehensive and meaningful apology, along with adequate compensation, from federal and state governments, as well as mental health professionals, for the abuse inflicted on African, Native, Asian, and Hispanic Americans. The legacy of these practices continues to affect these communities, who are still subjected to stigmatizing and harmful mental health treatments today. The demand for justice is strengthened by recent actions, such as New Zealand’s apology to thousands of Indigenous Māori children who were tortured in psychiatric institutions. Similar recognition and reparations are long overdue in the U.S.

CCHR also advocates against starting psychotropic drug treatment altogether due to the debilitating side effects, combined with psychiatry’s own admission that it neither fully understands the causes of mental illnesses nor has definitive cures.

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References:

[1] https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/politics/royal-commission-of-inquiry-into-abuse-in-care-government-broadly-accepts-findings-of-landmark-report/; https://www.cchrint.org/2024/07/26/new-zealand-inquiry-findings-child-psychiatric-torture-prompt-us-reforms/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10466991/
[3] Cayla Mihalovich, “I Would Have Been a Great Mom’: California Finally Pays Reparations to Woman It Sterilized,” KQED PBS, 7 Oct. 2024, https://www.kqed.org/news/12008246/i-would-have-been-a-great-mom-california-finally-pays-reparations-to-woman-it-sterilized
[4] Marie Kaniecki, et al., “Racialization and Reproduction: Asian Immigrants and California’s Twentieth-Century Eugenic Sterilization Program,’” Social Forces, Vol. 102, Issue 2, Dec. 2023, pp. 706–729, https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/102/2/706/7147029?login=false
[5] Lonnie R. Snowden, Ph.D., et al., “Overrepresentation of Black Americans in Psychiatric Inpatient Care,” Psychiatry Online, 1 June 2009, https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ps.2009.60.6.779
[6] https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/
[7] https://www.cchrint.org/mock-trial-in-new-york-convicts-former-nazi-psychiatrist-ernst-rudin-of-crimes-against-humanity/
[8] Alexandra Minna Stern “Forced sterilization policies in the US targeted minorities and those with disabilities – and lasted into the 21st century, The Conversation, 26 Aug. 2020,
https://theconversation.com/forced-sterilization-policies-in-the-us-targeted-minorities-and-those-with-disabilities-and-lasted-into-the-21st-century-143144
[9] Erin Blakemore, “The Little-Known History of the Forced Sterilization of Native American Women,” JStor Daily, 25 Aug. 2016, https://daily.jstor.org/the-little-known-history-of-the-forced-sterilization-of-native-american-women/
[10] Erin Blakemore, JStor Daily, 25 Aug. 2016; https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/
[11] Cayla Mihalovich, KQED PBS, 7 Oct. 2024
[12] Erin Blakemore, JStor Daily, 25 Aug. 2016
[13] Marie Kaniecki, et al., Social Forces, Vol. 102, Issue 2, Dec. 2023, pp. 706–729
[14] Ashley R. Craig and Gregory D. Smithers, “How Virginia Used Segregation Law to Erase Native Americans,” TIME, 20 Mar. 2024, https://time.com/6952928/virginia-racial-integrity-act-history/
[15] Marie Kaniecki, et al., Social Forces, Vol. 102, Issue 2, Dec. 2023, pp. 706–729
[16] https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.7a20
[17] https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/
[18] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/01/26/american-psychiatric-associations-apology-for-harming-african-americans-rejected/, citing Megan Brooks, “APA Apologizes for Past Support of Racism in Psychiatry,” Medscape, 19 Jan 2019, https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/944352?src=wnl_edit_tpal&uac=345404PY&impID=3143084&faf=1