[Historical aspects of ethics in psychiatry : From the end of humanitarianism up to the Human Rights Convention].

Abstract

The establishment of academic psychiatry was completed around 1900. Simultaneously, in view of the societal crisis phenomenon the professional self-concept of the psychiatrist was shifted to a self-image, according to which psychiatry had to place its expertise at the service of the people and the country. This was particularly expressed in World War I in the brutal dealing with the so-called war neurotics. In association with the so-called death by starvation of ca. 70,000 institution inmates, in the post-war period Karl Bonhoeffer debated a transformation of the term humanitarianism. The worst consequence of the rejection of humanitarian thoughts are the murders of invalids under National Socialism; however, legitimization of such crimes by alluding to collective ethics, as attempted by Karl Brandt, seems to be less than convincing. The reform of psychiatry initiated in the 1960s and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which came into force in 2008, have achieved prerequisites for a supportive psychiatry with reduced coercion, whereby many questions also in the legal and social systems must still be clarified.