What are the “Crimes” in the history of Psychiatry

Here are some of the major “crimes” in the history of Psychiatry — not in the juridical sense, but in the ethical, political, scientific, and clinical violence that institutions and practitioners have imposed. These events are well-known in critical psychiatry, Foucaultian genealogy, and Lacanian circles as moments where psychiatry aligned with domination and misrecognition of the subject.

Crimes in the History of Psychiatry

1. Pathologization of Difference

Turning non-pathological variations of existence into disorders.

Homosexuality classified as a mental illness until 1973/1990.
Transsexuality pathologized as gender identity disorder for decades.
Women diagnosed with “hysteria” for political or sexual non-conformity.
Slaves diagnosed with “drapetomania” (the “disease” of wanting to escape slavery).

Discursive crime: psychiatry as a tool of social discipline.

2. Forced Institutionalization

Asylums as places of segregation rather than care.

Confinement of the poor, disabled, “dangerous”, non-normative individuals.
The psychiatric hospital as a carceral apparatus (Foucault).
Electroshock, restraints, isolation cells used as punishment.

Structural crime: treating the subject as an object to be contained, not listened to.

3. Eugenics and the Alliance with Biopolitics

Sterilization of “undesirables” (people diagnosed with mental illness) in the U.S., Scandinavia, Germany, etc.
Psychiatry’s participation in Nazi Aktion T4 (murder of over 70,000 psychiatric patients).
IQ-based selection and elimination of the “unfit.”

Political crime: psychiatrists deciding who deserves life.

4. Prefrontal Lobotomy

The most infamous “treatment.”

Popularized by Walter Freeman, performed on tens of thousands of patients.
Used to control difficult women, children, “rebellious” patients, and LGBTQ+ people.
Left people disabled, apathetic, or dead.

Surgical crime: annihilating the subject in the name of therapeutic obedience.

5. Torture Disguised as Treatment

Insulin coma therapy
Electroshock without anesthesia
Cold water baths, spinning chairs, mechanical restraints
“Cure by punishment” logics that targeted behavior, not suffering.

Ethical crime: pain used to enforce normality.

6. Pharmaceutical Colonization

The “psychopharmacological revolution” as market-driven.

Overprescription of antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, opioids.
Big Pharma’s manipulation of research, suppression of side-effects, and expansion of diagnoses.
The DSM expansion as a market tool (from 60 disorders to ~400).

Economic crime: suffering turned into lifelong consumer dependency.

7. Exploitation of Marginalized Populations

Experimentation on Black, Indigenous, incarcerated, and poor groups.
Pathologization of political resistance (e.g., “oppositional defiant disorder”).
Diagnosing enslaved people who resisted with fictitious illnesses.

Racial crime: psychiatry reinforcing colonial order.

8. The Silencing of the Subject

The biggest Lacanian “crime.”

Ignoring speech in favor of behavior.
Treating hallucinations or delusions as stupid content instead of signifiers.
Reducing psychic pain to chemistry alone.

Epistemic crime: eliminating the unconscious.

9. The Psychiatry of Social Control

Use of diagnoses to regulate:
- Women (“hysteria,” “borderline” as moral judgment)
- Children (ADHD explosion)
- Users of drugs (from sinners to “brain-damaged addicts”)
- LGBTQ+ people (pathologized desire)

Normative crime: enforcing family, reproduction, obedience.

10. The Medicalization of Everyday Life

Grief → depressive disorder
Shyness → social anxiety disorder
Childhood energy → ADHD
Menopause → mood disorder

Ontological crime: transforming existence into pathology.

11. Coercive Care as a Mask for Violence

Involuntary medication
Forced injections
Court-ordered treatments
Psychiatric police interventions

Violent crime: care without consent = domination.

12. Erasure of Cultural and Indigenous Knowledges

Dismissing non-Western cosmologies as “delusional.”
Replacing communal healing practices with institutional control.

Colonial crime: destruction of alternative regimes of truth.

13. Anti-Blackness and the Invention of the “Insane Criminal”

The historical connection between psychiatry and criminology.
Construction of the “violent Black schizophrenic man” stereotype in the 1960s.

Sociopolitical crime: pathologizing racialized bodies.

In sum

The history of psychiatry is marked by repeated attempts to normalize, control, and silence the subject, often through violence—physical, symbolic, discursive.

From a Lacanian perspective, these “crimes” reveal psychiatry’s recurrent refusal to hear the truth of the subject, opting instead for the management of bodies and behaviors.