Workshop: Rethinking Mental Disease and the Birth of Bioethics in the Shadow of the Holocaust

The Nazi medical crimes during the Holocaust, which were followed by Nuremberg Doctors’ Trials and the Nuremberg Code were the conditions that enabled the emerging of modern bioethics. Although the first victims of the Nazi medical crimes were disabled and mentally ill, the Code focused on informed consent in human medical experimentation. Nevertheless, it was especially Mental health and disease, positioned at the intersection of the physical and cultural realms, which posed a complex set of bioethical issues. This resulted from various historical conditions: the philosophical issues regarding the conception of psychiatric illness and changing understanding of “minds”; the socially sensitivite position of psychiatric patients (i.e., stigma, marginalization, and legal status); the emergence of Anti-psychiatry and its broad public reception; and ethical challenges related to new developments in psychiatric research, e.g. genetics, neuro-technologies, and pharmaceutical interventions. Furthermore, emerging technologies for prevention and diagnosis as well as growing public sensitivity to patient autonomy is fueling new models of advanced care planning, such as Ulysses agreements (plans created by an individual living with a mental illness or addiction to be put in place if and when a person becomes unwell), and new debates on involuntary treatment and the participation of mental health service users in research, treatment decisions, and health policy.

To navigate these challenges and value conflicts, psychiatric bioethics and neuroethics are becoming more interdisciplinary, international, and historically informed. Yet the study of the development and evolution of bioethics in the light of the Holocaust still lacks a systematic and comparative perspective. This workshop aims to contribute to the comparative study of bioethics by reflecting on how the Holocaust both informed new perepctives on dealing with mental health and disease, and informs present moral claims, identifying patterns in contemporary discourse, and finding a common language for historically aware ethical argumentation.

The larger aim is to rethink the role of history for bioethics and to identify framework conditions and topics for future bioethical research and bioethical teaching. More specifically, the workshop aims to discuss what added value does historical reflection on the Holocaust and its impact on medical, philosophical and cultural issues in the second half of the 20^th century bring to academic, political, and clinical psychiatric bioethics; to address the discourse patterns of ethical governance of latest research areas in psychiatry and to understand underlying assumptions, cultural differences, and historical references inform new debates over informed consent procedures in research and treatment today.