Since 1935, a branch of psychiatry specializing in hereditary illnesses and abnormalities known as “behavioral eugenics” has been warning of rampant mental illness. Dr. Franz J. Kallmann, who came to America in the mid-1930’s after having served under Ernst Rüdin, head of Hitler’s “racial hygiene” program, argued in favor of “psychiatric genetics” even after he arrived on American shores to escape the Third Reich’s henchmen. He claimed that, if something were not done soon, schizophrenics would outnumber normal individuals. He and several like-minded colleagues advised initiating a screening program to “counsel against” reproductive rights for those showing evidence of, or suspected of being at future risk of, any form of mental illness.
What is and is not symptomatic of “mental illness” is open to interpretation. According to Dr. Kallmann, for example, schizophrenics included “daydreamers, cranks, being cold-hearted or unsociable, persons showing sudden urges in temperament, emotional inadequacy, obstinacy, or superstition.” In just the past couple of years, however, television has been awash in advertisements for such drugs as Paxil and Zoloft, marketed for “social inadequacy,” a term eerily reminiscent of Kallmann’s terminology. Like most categories of mental afflictions listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the ever-expanding bible of the psychiatric profession, such symptoms are highly subjective.
Despite his outlandish pronouncements, accolades surrounded Kallmann in this country, even in such prestigious publications as the New York Times. As Nazi atrocities increasingly came to light after the war, however, wiser heads prevailed. Both “psychiatric genetics” and mass screening were quietly shelved until the 1960’s and early 70’s, when Kenneth Boulding, Carl Bajema, and Linda Erlenmeyer-Kimling (Kallmann’s protégé and a former president of the American Eugenics Society), among others, brought it up again.
By 1971, the American Eugenics Society (AES) had exchanged its name for the less-intimidating Society for the Study of Social Biology, and its flagship publication, Eugenics Quarterly, had adopted a new title, Social Biology. Erlenmeyer-Kimling secured large grants, mainly from the National Institute for Mental Health, to pursue her contention that certain “bio-behavioral markers” in “psychiatrically normal children” could be used to predict mental illness. She devised tests that could be used to identify youngsters supposedly predisposed to passing on aberrant traits, with a view to intervention and “counseling.” She secured some ten million dollars over the years to continue what was essentially the mission of the old AES: to launch “a program of negative genetics” by controlling who “should and should not have children.”
The same year, Carl Bajema, secretary of the old AES, proposed that couples be given a preliminary license to have exactly two children. He assumed that not everyone would want that many children anyway, and those who did could apply for a waiver based on “proof of genetic superiority” in the arts, mental ability, personality, athletics, or business. (How one might “prove” superiority in personality remains a mystery.) Referring to Bajema’s waiver concept, Kenneth Boulding lauded Roe v. Wade, writing in the Spring 1975 issue of Social Biology that it “makes the problem of enforcement much easier . . . since abortion provides a mechanism for prior elimination of many potential unlicensed babies.” However, he cautioned that, while Bajema’s waiver might make for “a marketable licensing system,” “the political acceptability of this compromise proposal is more questionable than that of a . . . system that does not attempt explicit eugenic control” (emphasis mine). He went on to propose the development of a mandatory, long-standing contraceptive implant that all females must accept at puberty. “[T]he reversal of the implant’s sterilizing effect would be obtainable upon surrendering of a childbearing license,” Boulding wrote.
Remember, this is coming from specialists in the United States for use on her own citizens, not from the Soviet Union, Germany, or China.
In 1972, Erlenmeyer-Kimling stated that “attending to the long-term quality of the gene pool was a long-term necessity,” and she decided that “society is more likely to tolerate an emphasis on a eugenic attitude that preserves the status quo of the gene pool or prevents it from deteriorating.” In other words, she thought that the American public would be more apt to buy into eugenics if it did not actually have to kill anybody but, rather, merely keep the nonconformists and oddballs from having children.
“Who’s minding the quality of the gene pool?” Erlenmeyer-Kimling asked.
The essence of evolution is natural selection; the essence of eugenics is the replacement of “natural” selection by conscious, premeditated, or artificial selection in the hope of speeding up the evolution of “desirable” characteristics and the elimination of “undesirable” ones.
To that end, she urged abandoning the “fixation on IQ as the trait to be maximized in our species in favor of an Index of Social Value (or ISV),” never stopping to consider, apparently, the short leap from “desirable characteristics” to “desirable opinions.” Given the hasty escape of her mentor, Franz Kallmann, from Nazi clutches, she should have known better.
In any case, Erlenmeyer-Kimling concentrated on attention-deficit disorder as the primary predictor of mental illness. Clarke J. Kestenbaum, describing Erlenmeyer-Kimling’s work in the American Handbook of Psychiatry, wrote in 1981 that “the children with early [attention-related] deficits . . . become increasingly deviant behaviorally as they get older [which] supports the hypothesis that attentional dysfunctions serve as early predictors of later pathology.” He concurred that “early intervention should include genetic counseling.”
Moreover, “negative eugenics” efforts continued under the umbrellas of population control, childcare, and mental health.
The timing of public statements to that effect still was not right in the 1970’s and 80’s. The emergence of the civil-rights movement meant that the notion of government controlling who should have children on such bases as “social handicap” or “deviance in thought” smacked too much of racial prejudice. Indeed, at the heart of the eugenics movement is the notion of black inferiority and criminality (i.e., “race-specific lifetime . . . rates of delinquency [and] unwed motherhood”), which, in turn, is based on something called “bad gene” theory. Sheldon Segal, former director both of the Population Council and the old AES, and Erlenmeyer-Kimling were among those calling loudest for “control” of “black fertility.”
The idea was deferred again.
The prominence during the 1990’s of such so-called mental-health issues as depression, road rage, school violence, high illegitimacy rates, child sex abuse, and postpartum suicides/murders had, by the year 2000, resulted in aggressive scrutiny of parents, not only by child protective service agencies but by university mental-health researchers marketing new psychiatric-screening instruments to school districts. These instruments increasingly found their way into the classroom, sometimes in conjunction with standardized academic tests, other times as stand-alone questionnaires disguised as health surveys and opinion polls. While some parents balked, most caved in, finding little or no support for their grievances either in their school districts or from the education establishment and fearing, correctly, that failure to acquiesce would blight their children’s records. Today, the controversial parent component of the New Freedom Initiative on Mental Health—a nationwide project to screen the entire U.S. population for mental illness and provide a cradle-to-grave continuum of quasimandatory therapeutic “services” for those identified as mentally ill or even at risk of becoming so—has added to these fears.
The latter legislative atrocity, which I reported on at length in Chronicles (“What? Are You Crazy?” Vital Signs, October 2004), makes the school the hub of a mass-screening process. (Other authors, such as Dr. Dennis L. Cuddy and Paul Walter on NewsWithViews.com and Dr. Karen Effrem of Minnesota’s EDWATCH, have discussed this legislation as well.) Assessment of parents and pregnant women is integral to the plan. Similar pieces of legislation, such as Illinois’s “Children’s Mental Health Plan/Partnership” and Pennsylvania’s “Ounce of Prevention,” have passed in various states, so that, when it comes time to implement the nationwide directive, most of the country will already be on board.
Now, two frightening documents have surfaced. The first articulates a convincing rationale by established psychologists and psychiatrists for resurrecting the concept of parent licensing. A November/December 1996 issue of the social-science journal Society is suddenly making the rounds—not only among professionals but in Congress. The issue covers a symposium on parent licensing that took place earlier that year. The gist of the proceedings was that increased psychopathy and sociopathy, along with accompanying crime waves, could be vastly reduced if parents were screened for markers of mental illness and counseled against, even prevented from, having children. Licensure would carry with it “sanctions,” according to several contributors, such as Robert A. Gordon, sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow of the American Psychological Association.
Sanctions, of course, entail the force of law.
Another notable contributor, child psychiatrist Jack C. Westman, M.D. (author of Licensing Parents: Can We Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect?), estimated that each sociopath costs society about three million dollars over the course of his lifetime. He called for a long-term solution to require would-be parents to “meet the kind of requirements that one expects of prospective adoptive parents.” He suggested that parent licensing “be handled through the channels of marriage licensing, prenatal care, and birth registration since it essentially would be a question of credentialing.” He further endorsed “parent competency testing,” describing it as “large-scale testing for signs of parental incompetence . . . to predict the parenting potential of pregnant women.”
A distinction should be made between people who are brain-injured, severely retarded, or otherwise unmistakably brain-damaged and those who are “mentally ill.” In the latter category, there exists no blood test, X-ray, or other examination that can prove a person is of unsound mind. That has left the field wide open to charlatans with ulterior motives for categorizing individuals as “crazy.” Indeed, the insanity defense has been criticized for years on the grounds that it is subjective and predisposed to deliberate misinterpretation.
Although Westman admitted that large-scale screening was not feasible in 1996, he defended the principle: “A parent license,” he wrote, “would validate parental rights and focus public policies on supporting competent parenting and on remedying or replacing incompetent parenting.” Westman, however, does not appear to place much stock in “remedying.”
“We cannot rely upon every irresponsible person becoming responsible through persuasion, education, or treatment,” Westman writes. He cites “the case with habitual criminals, [who] do not respond to education or persuasion.” Yet, it has been an article of liberal faith since the 1960’s that education, not punishment, is the answer to criminality. Is this liberal ideology, mere hypocrisy, or something more frightening?
On October 4, 2004, another staggering pronouncement from the mental-health community was made at a Texas Committee hearing on Psychotropic Drugs and Foster Care Children. Even some politically liberal human-rights advocates were stunned when psychiatrist Joe Burkett informed the committee, which was investigating allegations of mass drugging of children in foster care, that one of the main reasons so many foster kids need to be on psychotropic drugs is that they are from a bad gene pool. Another psychiatrist, Dr. John Sargent, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Baylor College of Medicine and former dean of the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and Mental Health Sciences, reiterated the “bad gene” claim, insisting that aggressive psychiatric care is imperative.
At about the same time (October 9-13, 2004), the 12th World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics was held in Dublin, Ireland. It featured world-renowned speakers and educational workshops, sponsored in large part by drug-manufacturing companies with a major interest in psychiatric pharmaceuticals. But there was a surprise from the Institute of German Genetics of Bonn, Germany. In its paper, the Institute backed away from conventional wisdom by stating:
Whereas complex traits in other fields of medicine are being successfully pinned down to the molecular level, psychiatric genetics still awaits a major breakthrough. It has to be analyzed why mental disorders are obviously harder to tackle.
So, while neurobiological and neuropsychiatric research, including drug treatment, continues unabated, it appears that the field of predictive psychiatry has a long way to go.
Which leaves us exactly where? Back in the 1930’s, with politicized psychiatry.
Author Tom Clancy brought the debate into focus in his 2003 work, Sea of Fire, by having his protagonist wonder aloud how a government can possibly stop somebody from, say, contaminating the money supply with botulism via an ATM machine or bringing water laced with acid onto a jetliner; he wonders whether such acts can be prevented by screening for potential psychopaths and sociopaths before they can act—indeed, before they are even born. The character’s counterpart in the story speculates that such an effort on a massive scale might trigger a “moral gag reflex” in the public at large.
The goal of parent licensing, Westman insists, is noble: It would acknowledge—by government fiat, if necessary—the United Nations tenet that “all persons, including children, should be free from abuse, oppression, and rejection.” Westman assures us that only “a small percentage of parents would not qualify.”
Many of his colleagues go further, however, arguing that “society must move beyond the notion that children are the property of their biological parents.”
Eugenics has come full circle, from seeking to eliminate the feebleminded, the criminally inclined, alcoholics, and schizophrenics to purging the more modern rejects—the hyperactive, the attention-challenged, the substance abuser, and a variety of so-called learning disabled—through “pro-active,” “reproductive counseling” in birth control, abortion, and sterilization.
Proponents of parent licensing such as David Lykken (whose 1995 book, The Antisocial Personalities, focuses on the biological susceptibility to sociopathy) admit a racial bias in the scheme to license parents in the 21st century. This, according to both Lykken and Gordon, is largely because of the high incidence of single parenthood (illegitimacy) among the black population. Lykken views single mothering as the primary exacerbating circumstance leading to full-blown sociopathy, which, he says, accounts for much of the difference in the crime rate between blacks and whites.
Most traditionalists would agree that illegitimacy has negative consequences for children, but Lykken’s analysis is misleading. The increase of single parenthood over the past 30 years has indeed made parent licensing an easier sell, but it is not an entirely natural development: society has positively condoned illegitimacy by removing the social stigma. Single blacks are a particularly easy target because their lower socioeconomic status makes them less able to fight parent licensing. Once the effort to target blacks for “parent malpractice” becomes pervasive, however, a backlash will occur among African-Americans who have made their way into the professional ranks and joined the upper-middle class. Once this outcry begins, the entire population will be caught up in the licensing web to avoid the taint of race. “Risk factors” will inevitably take on a political dimension, threatening freedom of thought.
Professor Gordon demonstrates experts’ awareness of this eventuality when he cautions his colleagues against overzealousness, correctly citing examples such as the
“One must,” he writes, “approach child protection as the goal of intervention with extreme caution,” lest it come under fire for being politically motivated:
Conservatives, recall, are already up in arms over sex education in schools, school questionnaires about home activities that ask about the contents of medicine cabinets, and other intrusions into family privacy that they have come to recognize, not without ample justification, as expanding beyond their original supposed intent.
With that statement, Gordon unwittingly nails the argument against parent licensing, whether he agrees with the conservative position or not. His observations above tell us, first, that school testing firms (staffed by behavioral psychologists) have always known full well that “test” questions and follow-up curricula significantly intrude into students’ beliefs, contrary to their public statements otherwise, and, second, that these “educators” always knew they were on thin legal ice.
Like Drs. Kallmann, Erlenmeyer-Kimling, Boulding, Lykken, Allen, Wender, and Westman, dozens of eugenicists still hold on, expressly or not, to the bold notion, first iterated by the serpent in Genesis, “Ye shall be as gods.” According to G.P. Smith,
Genetic planning and eugenic programming are more rational and humane alternatives to population regulation than death by famine and war. Genetic enhancement technologies and the scientific research undertaken to advance them should be viewed as . . . a tool for enhancing the health of a Nation’s citizens by engineering man’s genetic weaknesses out of the line of inheritance.
Such arrogance, coming down simultaneously with the new mass-mental-health-screening legislation euphemistically called the New Freedom Initiative, should activate Americans’ “moral gag reflex” if, indeed, anything, at this point, can do so.
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