Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
How can a deeper understanding of mental health help us see our world, and ourselves, differently? Hosted by therapist Kurt White and journalist Mary Wilson, each episode of Unravelling explores a complex mental health topic with insights from both professionals and people with lived experience. Whether you're trying to make sense of the world or just the slice of it inside of your head, Unravelling is here to foster a more compassionate and informed perspective on life.
The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Always consult with a qualified health care professional for any health concerns. Take care of yourself out there.
Mary:Welcome to Unravelling. This is
Kurt:a
Mary:podcast that sees the world through the lens of mental health. I'm Mary Wilson, a journalist.
Kurt:And I'm Curt White, a social worker and psychotherapist. In our last episode, Mary, we talked about some of the harmful practices that have existed under the field of psychotherapy. It's a sort of a history of conversion practices in the 1960s and movements away from that. And, you know, as we sort of crossed our two year birthday anniversary of the podcast, we wanted to take a little bit of a step back and look at some other practices like that to sort of get at this original intention that we have for this podcast about how does the field of mental health intersect with the world at large.
Mary:Yeah. Darker pasts that still have modern implications today, and that includes Eugenics and talking about efforts to control through really terrible practices, certain populations of people deemed mentally deficient.
Kurt:Yeah. It's one of the darker periods in the whole history of I I mean, really, the country. It was a particular historical moment, and it and it involved a lot of things, including the mental health field. And as it happens, I I encountered a person who is a real expert on this topic and did some of her schooling and training right in our our backyard at at Dartmouth College, and we're so lucky to have her on the podcast today.
Mary:Yes. Mercedes de Guardiola.
Kurt:Yes. She is a leading expert on Vermont's Eugenics history and authored the book Vermont for the Vermonters, the history of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State. She has testified before the Vermont legislature and the state's twenty twenty one apology hearings. The state eventually actually apologized for its own role in doing some of those practices we were just talking about, largely thanks to to those hearings, and continues to advise on policy responses and to do active work in this history field.
Mary:It's a fascinating conversation about something so disturbing, so let's get into it.
Kurt:Well, Mercedes, welcome to Unravelling. Thank you so much
Mercedes:for having me. I'm thrilled to be here today.
Kurt:Absolutely. This topic is one that I've hoped to talk about on the show for a long time, and I'm really glad to have someone with your expertise to talk about Eugenics, specifically the way that that intersects with the field of mental health. But for those that don't know, what do you mean by Eugenics?
Mercedes:Thank you. Eugenics is a term that gets thrown around a lot and especially with modern day connotations today. But the field originally is founded in the late eighteen hundreds over in Britain. It's founded by a cousin of Charles Darwin, actually, highly influenced by his cousin, named sir Francis Galton. And what he's really putting into practice is this idea of human breeding.
Mercedes:A lot of these ideas are not new or unique. You know, the idea that some people are better than others has existed throughout the history of humanity, I think we can say. But what he's really doing is this idea of scientific breeding. What he's arguing is that you can use new laws of science to control who breeds, how they breed, and improve the human race. Unfortunately, a lot of these ideas, what he's promising despite it sounding so wonderful and hope on the horizon, is really that what he's proclaiming is that certain people don't deserve to exist.
Mercedes:And we see these ideas come over to America very early on in the eighteen nineties and continue to dominate public policy throughout the twentieth century.
Kurt:It's a sort of upsetting term in a way to even use in the human context, breeding like you're trying to make a better version of a plant or breed a broccoli out of a brussels sprout or something like that. Right? But it's essentially the same kind of idea, isn't it? You go after desirable traits and you diminish things that are not desirable.
Mercedes:Exactly. And that's actually something that they seize upon very, very early on. So they know from the start that breeding a human is not as simplistic as, say, breeding a cow or breeding even a piece of corn. But what they are going into America and saying is that it actually is. And we know that that's absolutely not true.
Mercedes:They knew that absolutely wasn't true, but they are trying to get the public to believe in this rather horrific idea by comparing it to agriculture. And we actually see that a lot when it comes to Vermont, that they're saying, you know, you would breed your cow, you would breed your crops. Why aren't you applying those same principles to humans? And it becomes quite deadly.
Kurt:And you said scientific. I I think that maybe some people would be surprised by that, that some folks that you might associate these days with more progressive ways of looking at the world we're big into the Eugenics idea.
Mercedes:Eugenics was absolutely a progressive movement, and I do wanna make it clear that this is not science the way we think of it today. And it also fails the test of science back in the day. They knew that the data that they were looking at did not show the conclusions they purported to show. So there is always this debate, oh, is this science is it but they're a product of their times. And I I really wanna make that clear.
Mercedes:They saw the data. They knew what they were saying was wrong, and they went forth anyways. But they are essentially using this new field of science to bring legitimacy to rather horrific ideas.
Kurt:Was there a particular vision of what humanity was supposed to look like that was especially motivating to you Genesis?
Mercedes:Oh, absolutely. You know, you look back at the time period, a lot of these issues are the same that we're seeing today. Tenement housing. It's not dissimilar to what we're seeing with homelessness today. Huge rates of mental health, especially as the birth rate and the mortal well, the mortality rate decreases, so you have more successful births.
Mercedes:You have a lot of people who are coming to hospitals for the first time. And unfortunately, while they are getting care, many of the treatments of the day are not successful. So unfortunately, they're looking at this sort of crisis situation, which I think we'll get to in a bit, at the turn of the twentieth century, and everyone realizes that they need a solution. Eugenicists sweep in and they say, you know, this is the promise of science. We could have a better future.
Mercedes:No one has to suffer. No one has to live like this. We can solve humanity's ills, which really comes to the forefront. You really just have this unique moment in history where people are crowded in cities, especially over the twentieth century, you have two world wars. And especially when eugenics really comes forefront in America at the beginning of the twentieth century where you have World War I.
Mercedes:You have the Spanish flu. You have incredible intergenerational trauma that's gonna result from both of those. And this is the promise of Eugenics. We could make the world a better place. Why won't you support it?
Kurt:Mhmm. And that's the crisis that you're talking about in a way, this period of rapid social change leading to tremendous uncertainty.
Mercedes:It's so hard to think about looking back how fast the world changed even as you know, even over the past twenty or thirty years, we have seen rapid change ourselves. But, you know, the eighteen hundreds leading into the early nineteen hundreds, industrialization, the rise of cities, the rise unfortunately of very horrific conditions in a lot of cities, but also a lot of poverty comes to the forefront of people's minds. For the first time, you're seeing really the impact of what all these policies are resulting in. And so especially in Vermont, what we see at the turn of the century, so the late 1800s, the early 1900s, is state leaders begin to become very, very aware of how many people are struggling to survive with the rise of institutions like mental hospitals, juvenile facilities. For the first time, the state is really seeing how many people really need significant help.
Mercedes:And unfortunately, they begin to panic instead of addressing the root causes.
Kurt:And therein begins this intersection with the constructive mental illness and the eugenics impulse, I guess you could say, the eugenics movement. How was mental illness seen by these early eugenicists?
Mercedes:Well, even at this point, I would push us to go a little bit further back. What was treatment like prior to a mental hospital or a mental asylum as it was known back in the day? People were locked in cages. People were put out on these it was called poor farms. It was a form of the almshouse in Vermont and in the New England region.
Mercedes:But the treatment option was basically you would get locked in a basement or you would be locked in a cage if you had a serious illness and you were a disturbed individual. This would span dementia, what we know now as schizophrenia, a whole whole range of illnesses. So when you have the Brattleboro retreat be founded in the 1830s, that's a huge step forward, this idea that people deserve treatment, that people deserve care. And unfortunately, it also comes at a time where they're beginning to shift from saying, mental illness is not the result of sin. Unfortunately, what that leads to for Eugenics is that they say, it's not the result of sin, it's the result of your bad blood.
Mercedes:So even as this rise of we should treat people, we should care for people, that comes to the forefront, we are also concurrently seeing this idea that, yes, we could maybe treat them, but we should also be trying to eliminate that blood from the gene pool.
Kurt:And, you know, we're talking about it now. I I think, hopefully, for many people, it's a shocking idea. This was actually really quite mainstream for quite a time, wasn't it?
Mercedes:Oh my gosh.
Kurt:Major familiar names associated with championing these ideas.
Mercedes:And that's why I think it's so important, by the way, to understand why it was popular and what they were saying because the pitch was not let's go out and get rid of everyone. It was we can get rid of all these terrible evils. Don't you believe that all of these social ills are bad for people? Do you want people to suffer? And they also change their pitch depending on the audience.
Mercedes:It's also taught in schools without using the word eugenics. But you have from the very early ages, as you point out, some of the top families in the country funding this. You have the Carnegies, the Harrimans, the Kellogg fortune is going into it. There's a huge amount of money funding the research and to drive support at the grassroots level, at the local level, and at the national level.
Kurt:Stepping back for a minute, it feels that maybe we've talked around a little bit some of the ways that people actually tried to control breeding using their language among folks that they saw as less desirable, like folks committed to mental hospitals. Can you take us through that dark period in our history?
Mercedes:Oh, absolutely. It's, you know, this idea that certain people, again, just didn't deserve to exist. And the language that they're using, I'm sure Have you seen some of this of, they'll say, degeneracy, feeble mindedness? And it's difficult as a researcher because there is legitimate illness that they're trying to treat. And trying to separate out who they think is deserving of treatment and who is just more of a custodial case.
Mercedes:We're just gonna put them away so that they can't have children basically, and they can't be part of society. That's this idea of segregation. And we so often in this country, of course, refer to it as racial segregation. Under Eugenics, what it is, it's this idea that you segregate somebody away from society usually by locking them up in an institution until they age out of procreation or for the entirety of their life. And we see this at some of the state institutions that people are kept there for their entire natural life.
Mercedes:Now unfortunately, when you get into the casework, sometimes there are cases where somebody has such a significant disability or significant illness that would prohibit them from living in the community, especially by the standards of that day. But there are certainly cases where they look at them and they just say, well, you don't you don't really deserve to have a life. That's what they're saying at the end of the day. You don't deserve to live. And that's the very ugly part of it.
Kurt:Yeah. And and there was sometimes even a real explicit idea that, like, you they didn't want folks like that to have children, for example. Right?
Mercedes:Oh, and they're obsessed with this. It goes back actually to interracial marriage. They're also obsessed with this kind of idea that people would pass as normal, that you would go out into the community, that you would have children with some unsuspecting mate. They actually do use this terminology. It's it's very strange when you look at the records.
Mercedes:When we look at these records and they're saying, oh, this person doesn't deserve to have kids or they don't deserve to they're gonna pass on their bad blood, it's not quite what we think of in terms of significant mental disability today. Usually, what they're talking about actually is children from broken homes, children from very, very bad situ you know, families in crisis that unfortunately are swept up into the state institutional system, and we see this in some of the sterilization records, are sterilized as a matter of public policy rather than because of medical need, and go on to live lives that they're involved with the community. And it's also a reason why I try you know, really don't get into justifying whether Eugenics was correct or not. Because at the end of the day, these were policies that had no legitimate backing in the legal system, that they had to pass laws by tricking people. The famous court case Buck v Bell that had the Supreme Court in 1927 say that sterilization is justified for the good of the state was backed up by falsified information to the Supreme Court.
Mercedes:So all of this does not have a legitimate legal backing. So to go and say, oh, maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong. At the end of the day, you have policies that were put into place to eliminate bloodlines on very unconstitutional grounds.
Kurt:And that was the other big tool that the state used in these instances was forced sterilizations. And and how how prevalent was that?
Mercedes:That's something we're still trying to figure out. You know, sterilization in Vermont was put into place in 1931. It's also a very expensive surgery. So when you have a state that's already struggling to pay for quite a bit of things, is this gonna be the first tool they turn to? No.
Mercedes:And we actually see that in some of the background documents that the state is saying, hey, wait a second. We don't wanna pay for this surgery of so and so. Their family should be paying. No one really has the money for this. That does place a limit on the number of sterilizations.
Mercedes:More research is needed across the country to determine the range of sterilizations. We actually see quite a few sterilizations in the 1960s and 1970s under eugenical laws. In Vermont, we see indications that sterilization is probably used less than institutionalization. We also only have records until the early 1950s. We know that sterilization was in place until after, so we have to kind of presume that we don't have all the records.
Mercedes:There's also this question that was every sterilization reported? It's a bit of a longer conversation than we have time for here today, but the reporting process was very messy. There was no incentive to report. You only had to send in one certificate. There was no process for the state to check whether or not you had sent in that certificate.
Mercedes:This never went before a court. So there are records that suggest that sterilizations were done off the books, so to speak.
Kurt:And even with a voluntary statute, you might imagine that if this was seen as a part of a larger social good, people's family members might have thought that was the best thing to do for folks and signed off on it if they were asked, for example, or
Mercedes:Oh, absolutely. And you see this actually at a lot of the institutions, that technically you were supposed to ask the person. There were these guidelines in place that if this person was a minor, or if they could not, because you did have to be loosely qualified as disabled or mentally ill, that you couldn't give consent. By the way, this is one of the many illogical parts of the law, this idea that you should be able to consent, but the law is also saying you're either disabled or ill. And I'm grouping together the terms, that's the crux of it.
Mercedes:How on earth can you give consent? But absolutely, they do go to the parents. There are these communications. Now it does fall under this question, did the parents know what they were agreeing to? Was there pressure to agree to sterilization that your child or your family member would not come home?
Mercedes:And that's something that we're never gonna have an answer for. We can probably guess because people did go home after they were sterilized that there was probably some sort of implicit promise or something that was not recorded. But there are all these factors that, again, it raises this question of how coercive was this.
Kurt:I think there's a troubling parallel to this in some of the ways that data's being talked about, being gathered in contemporary society. Do you notice this also?
Mercedes:Oh my gosh. The data question. We are so free with giving out our data nowadays. As you've probably seen, so many people, because we have a lack of mental health resources in this country, are turning to AI tools, for example, to serve as their therapist. You are putting very sensitive data online, and if that ever gets hacked, if the data ever gets compromised, if it ever gets sold.
Mercedes:And besides mental health data, we actually just saw this with a DNA company. That 23andMe, when they went bankrupt, they were selling the company, and part of that is selling the data that they're sitting on. And while they they did permit people to restrict the use of that data, people need to understand when you go and put this out into the world, you lose control over where it goes. Yes. You hopefully, companies, you know, 23andMe did say that your data would be taken out of the database, if you requested it.
Mercedes:You're putting a lot of faith in them. You're putting a lot of faith in all these companies that they're gonna do the right thing. You may not know if they've done the wrong thing until it's too late.
Kurt:I think it might be worth remembering that sometimes when we worry about the loss of our data, we're worried about could somebody use it to financial advantage against us in a predatory way or could they deny us something that we might be otherwise entitled to, health insurance, life insurance, some work opportunity. But there was a time not that long ago in our history when much darker purposes were being gleaned from data sets that were much smaller about who gets to exist at all. And there's nothing fundamentally that is guarding against that, right, just our collective social will, I suppose.
Mercedes:Well, when you look at the Eugenics Record Office, which the one that was sending pamphlets to Vermont, what they were encouraging people to do down in was to send them flashcards on their own family. They collected, I think it was over 700,000 cards on American families, note cards, just reducing your family to the most basic of traits. But absolutely, we see in the it's we're still trying to understand how the data that was collected was used in Vermont. Early indications are pointing that absolutely the institutions did consider if these were family cases and deciding. Looking back now, we're seeing you're talking about a family in crisis who did not get the support it needs rather than a really simplistic answer of, oh, they have bad heredity.
Mercedes:Because when you're talking about bad heredity, what does that even mean? These are all very different traits. These are complex genetic cases, if they are genetic. There's a number of factors that go into it. One thing that I always like to point out is one of the traits they really were against was alcoholism.
Mercedes:Now alcoholism does have a genetic basis. But the thing about alcoholism is you're never gonna develop it if you don't touch alcohol. So there's a fundamental environmental cause for alcoholism, which has to be addressed, which will cause it.
Kurt:Yeah. It's the intersection of, of a number of risk factor. Absolutely. It's got a early environment and there's some interesting good research on that. That's kind of fascinating stuff.
Kurt:Genetics is not irrelevant. I think as someone who was in college in the nineties, we thought genetics was going to solve a lot more problems than it did, actually, Like that idea that like, hey, it's all under the hood here. We just have to sort of sequence the genome and we're gonna and we sequenced the genome and I mean, I don't know. We didn't figure out a whole hell of a lot. I mean, we did in a certain sense, but not really in a
Mercedes:There's so many factors.
Kurt:How do diseases develop? Interesting that
Mercedes:you say that because it is, again, the same argument that they in the early twentieth century, well, we've discovered what human heredity is. We can solve all these issues and Hey, wait a second. Breeding a human is not really that simple.
Kurt:Yeah. Yeah. What was the turning of the tide against the idea of Eugenics on a social level? How was it argued against?
Mercedes:Okay. So from the start, I want to just say there were people who were against it from the very beginning. This was not a product of the times argument. There were people who said, hey, wait a second. People don't deserve to be treated like this.
Mercedes:People deserve to have care. They deserve to have treatment. And there were also people who were eugenicists who were arguing they do deserve treatment, and this is the best way to treatment. So it's a very complicated topic. From the start of the legislative session, so the one in 1912 leading into the ones in the 1920s, you do see people say that this is morally repugnant, that you should not just be sterilizing people, that that is absolutely wrong.
Mercedes:In Vermont, there is a huge religious divide that's contributing to this between Protestantism and Catholicism, and the Catholic church comes down very heavily that this is wrong, that you should not sterilize people. They come out again in the 1930s. This is also tied into the rise of the KKK. The second iteration of the Klan is very pro Eugenics. They are prominent in Vermont.
Mercedes:And again, you see this religious tension come into being. In the 1920s, you see the scientific community really rebelling against the idea of eugenics. Maybe not as prominently as they could, but there are people who are saying, this is not what the science says. This is not what the data says. However, there is sort of still this gentlemanly quality to science, this reluctance of people in power to criticize people who they go and have dinner with.
Mercedes:And unfortunately, that unwillingness to stand up and say, this is wrong, does have an impact on how far eugenics spreads. Now during World War II is when we really begin to see a lot of social pushback. So previously, there had been a lot of investigations into the institutions. There had already been this awareness that significant overcrowding leads to abuses. It leads to people being put in very bad living conditions.
Mercedes:But there is also a limit to how far that's gonna spread. You know, there were newspapers at the time, but you have to be reading that newspaper article. You know? You have to have opened the newspaper that day. But during World War two, conscientious objectors are sent to go work at the mental asylums because the staff is being sent overseas.
Mercedes:And for the first time, you have staff who's coming in who have not worked there for decades. They're coming in with fresh eyes. Previously, staff had really been overworked. There were certainly people who thought that this was how people should be treated, but there were also a lot of staff who really genuinely wanted to help and who were just ground down of this is the way things are. The conscientious objectors go to Life magazine.
Mercedes:They go and there are so many exposes of what is going on at the mental asylums, and it's horrific. In 1946, they very specifically compare it to concentration camps. There's very strong language being used. At the same time in Vermont, there is growing public uproar. There are radio shows that are pointing out that the Waterbury Hospital is essentially a death trap because if a fire breaks out, nobody will be able to get out alive.
Mercedes:And there is actually a fire that breaks out at certain points alongside flooding. So there's this growing awareness that the mental asylums have very bad living conditions, that this is not the way we should be treating our friends and family. There is this pushback against the stigma because Eugenicists really do utilize that stigma that, hey, you should be ashamed to have family members related to you. You shouldn't wanna talk about it because then you're gonna fall under suspicion. And that's one of the tools they use to stop people from speaking out.
Mercedes:And we begin to see people saying, hey, wait a second. I don't believe that my cousins should be treated that way. I don't believe that my neighbors should be treated that way. This is wrong. And that does lead to a growing federal movement in the 1960s under JFK to shut down the mental asylums.
Mercedes:And that's a major tool of Eugenics. It's Again, there were many cases that were not about Eugenics that were sent there, but it is very much tied into the Eugenics movement, and that shuts down one of its massive tools. Unfortunately, as we know now today, it's not replaced by the care that is needed. So that's one of the main reasons that we have such significant and really heartbreaking rise in mental health cases today that aren't getting the care and treatment that they need.
Kurt:So we've we've noted some of the parallels to Eugenics, but you've said that there's actually a distinction here, that Eugenics is a thing that belongs in a certain context, and that this is not that. This is something else. Could you help us unpack that? What is the difference here? What is going on now when we see similar ideas crop up?
Kurt:And what would we what would we call that, and why is it important to think of it differently?
Mercedes:Well, it goes back to the founding of Eugenics itself. Eugenics was not a new or unique idea. It also was not particularly scientific as we've covered. So it really needs to be understood in the context of its day that you have these very specific tools being utilized such as the family study, that you have very specific laws and policies being advocated for, and specific methodology being put into place. Now what we're seeing today absolutely has drawn inspiration from the movement of Eugenics.
Mercedes:But that's the same way as Eugenics was inspired by what came before it, and it was influenced by what came before it. The technology we have today is so vastly different. Our understanding of human heredity is so, so much more advanced. You know, you're not seeing the family studies of this is how many people in a statistic are being rounded up to make the case that they don't deserve to exist. We're seeing similar language, but we're seeing different methodology as well.
Mercedes:Now as to what term it should be referred to as, that's a really complicated question, and it's a little bit harder to see today because we're still in the midst of it. As a historian, you know, this is a period that you can't quite study as history because the sheer fact of it is it's not history yet. So we're a little bit too close to understand what the differentiating point was. I do think the collapse of the mental asylum or mental institution system was a huge breaking point because you saw that tool being taken away from eugenicists. The fall of Nazi Germany absolutely was a breaking point as well.
Mercedes:But Eugenics did continue after that in America. It just changed its name, and Eugenicists very specifically hid it under programs that were meant to be for genetics, for example. So part of this is tied into the deliberate abandonment of the term eugenics. But beyond all these factors, I do think it's important to figure out that there is a breaking point. Maybe it's over a few decades, but there is this shift into a new more modern movement that is inspired by Eugenics.
Mercedes:It's inspired by the rhetoric that came before Eugenics, but it's taking different forms, and it's promoting different policies. So we do need to understand them as distinct movements because what's gonna apply to our understanding of Eugenics doesn't quite apply to what we're seeing today.
Kurt:It's really interesting. I I mean, I'm I'm struck by maybe a a parallel to the way that Ibram X. Kendi has described the difference between Nazism and neo Nazism. Actually, neo Nazism is not just Nazism happening right now. That could have those ideas, but mostly they don't.
Kurt:Actually, something else has happened, but that is similar and has built on it in some ways, but also has repudiated certain parts of it, but is sort of heading toward a similar end.
Mercedes:Well, and I I think the important part is these what they're promoting is not unique either. This idea of hatred, unfortunately, is not a particularly unique or even copyrightable, idea. So yes, there are it's absolutely you know, you do have different methodologies, but they are distinct in how it's being carried out. But the idea, again, that humans some humans don't deserve to exist, that's not a unique idea, unfortunately. But we don't label everything that's happened in history for that purpose as Eugenics.
Mercedes:So we shouldn't be doing that here.
Kurt:I've had a couple of instances in my career as a therapist and social worker where I have been struck by something that felt to me like a residue of some of these ways of thinking. I don't know that anyone would have championed Eugenics' ideas in that way. But one example would be a meeting I was at some years ago at a different hospital, a medical hospital, where I thought we were going to be talking about how to help women who had had exposure to opiates during the pregnancy period as a sort of technical matter of like how do you deal with the risk of neonatal withdrawal syndrome. But instead, the meeting turned to the real question of how to keep these people from having babies. And I was a little bit surprised at a meeting of doctors and medical professionals that that was just sort of said out loud in a normal way.
Kurt:And when I argued against it, people said, No, no. Clearly they shouldn't be having babies. And I sort of thought, Well, I don't know. If that isn't a, you know, residue of of Eugenics, I don't know.
Mercedes:Oh, I think it absolutely is a residue of Eugenics. Eugenicists did seek out the educational system to have it teach Eugenics, and that wasn't always called Eugenics. And it's so interesting that it rose up in America because that's so fundamentally un American, isn't it? That you should have your life and your liberty stripped away with no court case. And especially in Vermont, there was no court case, that you should just have your rights taken away from you on the basis of other people's determination.
Mercedes:And it's something that even after eugenics, the term disappears, that we continue to see pushed forward. In the nineteen sixties, there's a governor's commission that doesn't use the word eugenics at all. It's about, mental disability and what they're calling mental retardation at the time. And they go into treatment, they go into care, and then they put forward, and here's how we can prevent their procreation. And a newspaper article then looks at it is like, well, this is absolutely this is Buck v Bell, and it was a human I think the newspaper actually says it was a humane decision, but they don't use the word eugenics even though that's a eugenics case.
Mercedes:So everyone's kind of understanding it as eugenics, but they've forgotten that this movement existed. And I've had, you know, peers who worked in the mental health field who've said, well, you can just put them on birth control. You don't have to sterilize them anymore. I was like, wait a second. Why is this being considered as a treatment?
Mercedes:And it gets complicated because there absolutely are parts where if you do need institutional care and this comes up actually in a court case in Vermont where you if you do need institutional care and there's a risk that you may be not quite assaulted, but you have somebody who's not capable of giving consent maybe being in contact with members of the opposite sex, that they don't quite understand the sexual component of it. There is this risk. And how do you limit the risk so that they can seek the treatment and the care that they need and that they deserve? It's such a complicated moral question. Overall, I think it's just another factor of we do need more court oversight.
Mercedes:We need more legal protections for the people that are getting treatment and care that if sterilization or ways to prevent procreation are being used, that you're talking about medical need. That this is not about just preventing procreation because someone's decided you don't deserve to have the right to procreate.
Kurt:Having studied this now for a a decade or more, are are you hopeful about the future or cautious or a mix of the two with respect to the sort of continued thread of Eugenics as an idea that exists in our world?
Mercedes:I think the rise of data usage, I'm absolutely cautious about that, how it's being deployed, how we're talking about who deserves to get treatment, the collapse of healthcare access in America and elsewhere. It's not just an American problem. This arrogance that we can solve all of humanity's ills still continues today. We need to be a little bit more realistic of, hey, wait a second, technology isn't going to solve this. We need to come together as a community where I'm hopeful.
Mercedes:There has been so much pushback against the stigma of disability and illness. So many more people are stepping forward to talk about what they are facing, what their families are facing. There's a lot more willingness to say, hey, we can come together. This is not about locking someone away for their entire lives. There's a lot more willingness to go and volunteer with disabled people and people facing very significant, significant disabilities that may necessitate lifelong care.
Mercedes:To say that your worth to society is not judged by how much you give to society, that your worth is inherent to your humanity, that you deserve to feel love, that you deserve to be treated with care and compassion. And that's something that I am so excited to see growing support for today.
Kurt:Well, Mercedes, thank you so much for having joined us here for this conversation today. It's been really, really interesting and illuminating and heartening fundamentally, actually.
Mercedes:Thank you very much for having me. This has been a delight.
Kurt:Thank you again to Mercedes de Guardiola for that wonderful interview. And joining me again here is Mary. Hi, Mary.
Mary:Yeah. It was so fascinating. And just to learn that remnants and residue from this Eugenics movement is still here today. Wow. It was actually quite shocking.
Kurt:It is. And and I think and that this was not actually that long ago in in our history and that these, you know, ideas about who is it that gets to exist, who deserves to exist, it's a very disturbing road to go down. And it's one that I think in our history as a country, as a field, we've gone down a number of times, right? It's an echo even to our very last episode on the history of conversion practices in this country, right? What do people get to be like and what's okay and not okay, right?
Kurt:Therapy isn't supposed to be about that. Mental health isn't supposed to be about this. It's supposed to be about helping people to become more of who they are. With this idea that of course everybody deserves to exist just as they
Mercedes:are. Instead
Mary:of trying to change them, strip their liberties. Yeah. It's just so un American. As Mercedes said, it's against the fabric of our being to want to change part of ourselves like that.
Kurt:Yeah. It's an interesting thing that it's often when we move move away from trying to hold our ideals in mind that we sometimes go down very, very dark roads and really into some very unacceptable practices. And I'm very grateful to Mercedes for helping us to shine a light on those.
Mary:Yes. She's studying this and continues to and helps us put it all into context.
Kurt:If you would like to find out more about this topic, I really highly recommend you check out Mercedes' book, Vermont for the Vermonters. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well as a link to some of her other work and resources on this topic. Thank you, listeners, for joining us on this journey, and we look forward to seeing you again next time.
Mary:We'll see you then.
Kurt:Unravelling is brought to you by Brattleboro Retreat. Our producers at Charts and Leisure are Andrew Adkin, Hans Beuteau, and Jason Oberholzer.
Mary:And you can find us on social media by searching Brattleboro Retreat. Brattleboro Retreat is committed to exploring diverse perspectives on mental health. While we invite hosts and guests to share their insights, the views expressed are their own and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of the hospital or its staff.