During the primaries leading up to the dysfunctional 2016 election, Bernie Sanders often lauded the Danish welfare system. Compared to anything found in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada for example, he was, and is, on the money. But according to Humanity in Action Denmark, the socioeconomic trend from the Danish government in recent years has engendered an increase in stress factors that lead to tangible human suffering due to the growing chasm between the wealthy and the very poor: “Until prevailing social mores and public discourse openly acknowledge the new state of the ’welfare state’, there is the threat that an increasing number of poor and marginalized people in Denmark will be neglected.” This can be seen in the long queueing for surgeries and cancer treatment, waiting too long for an operation, and patients have died or lost limbs through unnecessary amputations, and nurses are frustrated by wages not keeping up with inflation and the private sector. Despite those issue, which are also prevalent throughout the world unless you’re wealthy, The Social Progress Index in 2017, ranked Denmark as number one in the world. Denmark also ranks number five in the world in its social welfare spending per person "as...percentage of GDP [gross domestic product]". Sanders' argument is even corroborated from a capitalistic point of view, as is briefly discussed at the end of this article.
But let’s look elsewhere from the free-, or not free-market myth many have of what’s fact and what's false in that particular social-democratic economic dialogue. Also, in reading this critique of a specific, science-driven aspect of the Danish system of public heatlh care, which must occur, keep in mind that in the United States, tens of millions are perhaps one paycheck away, one illness or accident away, from becoming homeless, and in too many cases, even criminalized, for not having the resources to manage any sort of traumatic issue in their lives.
Just like the often politically employed myth of a frog letting itself slowly boil to death if the temperature is slowly brought up to that cruel and lethal point, there are numerous myths in it. Myths from which everyone from sea to shining sea, and across the big pond can, and should, learn from.
Let’s examine a particular part of the Danish welfare system very few have looked at. And we begin with the film from 1975, which earned Jack Nicholson his first Oscar as Best Actor, a few years after being nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but failing to get it, for the 1970 classic, Easy Rider; not that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest(min. 5:22) wasn’t also a cinematic masterpiece. More than that, according to award winning psychiatrist, H. Steven Moffic, MD, the film, based on the 1962 book by the same name, “...written by Ken Kesey, who had worked in a VA Hospital's psychiatric unit...”, “We [USA] Are Still Flying Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” Vol 31 No 7, July, 2014, peer-reviewed, Psychiatric Times.
But what about Denmark? And lobotomies, as a first instance of the Kingdom's nest. Much more comes beyond that procedure, but for now, let’s explore a bit more about this part of the nest.
Has this tiny nation of 5.8 million, plus its extended, highly romanticized and somewhat PR-fabricated former Viking empire, still within the Kingdom of Denmark -- Greenland and the Faeroe Islands – been flying, or still flying, over the cuckoo's nest without much attention being paid to the underlying problem?
António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz
“Lobotomy’s inventor, the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his pains in 1949. Major medical centers in the United States—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania—regularly performed variations on the basic operation well into the 1950s...
“It has become fashionable in recent years among some medical historians to argue that the operation was not the medical horror story that popular culture portrays it as being. These scholars suggest that, when considered within the context of the times, lobotomy was perhaps a defensible response to massively overcrowded mental hospitals and the therapeutic impotence of the psychiatry of the time. That is not my view, and Luke Dittrich’s book Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets (2017) adds to evidence from elsewhere that Scoville (like Freeman) was a moral monster—ambitious, driven, self-centered, and willing to inflict grave and irreversible damage on his patients in his search for fame. He certainly had no time for the Hippocratic injunction: ‘First, do no harm.’...”
Excerpted from Psychiatry and Its Discontents by Andrew Scull, published by the University of California Press. © 2019 by the Regents of the University of California.
In Danish, it’s called det hvide snit, which literally translates to the white cut.
If you didn’t dare click on the Andrew Scull link above and fully absorb the facts, well, he is a highly respected critical thinker who is a “...Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego [UCSD]. He is past president of the Society for the Social History of Medicine and the author of numerous books, including Madness in Civilization, Hysteria, and others...”
And here’s what it’s all about. Clicking on the above image takes you directly to a 1942 film by the Department of Neurology at George Washington University, Washington DC, where Dr. Freeman is drilling with increasingly wider bores, to then hacking into both sides of the skull with a chisel of a fully conscious patient, to then insert an instrument into both sides to destroy parts of the brain, quite graphically, and without editorial bias. There’s a lot of contemporaneous to 1942 brain anatomical and physiological science introduced in the first 4.27 minutes. So if that’s boring, skip to minute 4.29 of the 12-1/2 minute film. Be warned: the film may be age-restricted in places. It can be an unpleasant experience to watch. You will hear the 1942 narrator explain how this can be done with local anesthesia, "...if the patient is cooperative."
Following that experience, you may now want to fully read the critical thinking of Professor Scull’s book-excerpt from the link above, where he deeply goes into an analysis of First, Do No Harm, directly into the context of the times.
Yes, the times. In the Kingdom’s Nest, this procedure, and similar others, some of which bore through the eye socket, continued long after the 1950’s.
Rigshospitalet, Hospital of the Realm, made famous not only
by Lars von Trier's et al, The Kingdom series, but also as the
site of Denmark's last "official" lobotomy in 1983
Mentally Handicapped Danes Lobotomized Until 1983 : Discovery News
[The following, from the above extracted title, is from 2010, and is based on Jesper Vaczy Kragh’s 2010 book, “Det Hvide Snit,” direct translation, as explained above, The White Cut, and is part of a series from the University of Southern Denmark’s “...studies in history and social sciences.” Here is a Danish synopsis of that book, by its publisher: Det Hvide Snit
Please excuse the poor translation below, which, at times, repeats itself with the facts. It is quoted directly from the source, linked via the above title]
Between 1947 and 1983, around 4,500 patients -- some as young as six years old -- underwent the operation. Mentally handicapped patients were routinely lobotomized by their doctors in Denmark between 1947 and 1983.
Conducting lobotomies was outlawed at the time.
Official figures show that around 4,500 Danes had the operation.
Many mentally handicapped Danes, including children, were lobotomized between 1947 and 1983, and many died from the operation, a historian behind a soon-to-be-published book on the topic told Danish media Thursday.
"Doctors did not count on curing them completely, but wanted to pacify them, perhaps to better their condition," Jesper Vaczy Kragh told the Christian daily Kristelig Dagbladet.
"The results of such operations generally were not good, and some 7.6 percent did not survive," said the medical historian, behind a book on lobotomies set to be published in October.
"What happened with people with mental handicaps is worse than what happened with psychiatric patients," he said, referring to many operations performed on children as young as six years of age, even though their brains were not yet completely developed.
Official figures show that between 1947 and 1983, when conducting lobotomies was outlawed in Denmark, around 4,500 Danes had the operation.
But it was previously unknown that many mentally handicapped people were subjected to the procedure.
Kragh estimates more than 300 mentally handicapped people were operated on during that period at Copenhagen's University Hospital and at a municipal hospital in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city.
The president of LEV, the national association of handicapped people, Sytter Kristensen, said she was deeply shocked by the revelation.
"Those were highly educated people (doctors) who were taking advantage of defenseless people without being sure of having the slightest positive result," she told Kristelig Dagbladet.
Health Minister Bertel Haarder said he thought it was good to shine the spotlight on the cases.
"The explanation is that, for a long time, mentally handicapped people were not regarded as equal. Their lives were considered to be without value," he said.
4500 human beings, 70% of them women and girls, may not sound like many in the USA, for example, with a current population of 331.9 million. But Denmark's population during that period ranged from 3.8 to 5.1 million. In a shocking revelation in 2023 by a reliable source within Denmark's public health service (Sundhedsvæsenet), in 1990, a doctor at Rigshospitalet (Hospital of the Realm) in Copenhagen had the power to prescribe and execute a lobotomy on a patient. This particular medical power that a chief psychiatrist can have will play a significant role in the 2nd part of this article, where a chief psychiatrist refused to get a new patient's previous medical records, diagnostics and treatments. He even refused to call or email this patient's previous psychatrist/psychotherapist, and got mad at the patient when he asked, "Isn't it basic medical science to first review a new patients medical history before treatment?" The long term result of Dr Henning Vang's abuse of his power, in what he subsequently wrote into the patient's medical file, resulted in a quarter of a century of suffering for that patient.
What’s quite interesting in all this is how Russia, or the USSR at that time, fully banned lobotomy procedures in 1950? But why?
Here’s the abstract on that from the US National Institute of Health (NIH), and may help shed some light on that surprising fact:
This article examines how lobotomy came to be banned in the Soviet Union in 1950. The author finds that Soviet psychiatrists viewed lobotomy as a treatment of "last resort," and justified its use on the grounds that it helped make patients more manageable in hospitals and allowed some to return to work. Lobotomy was challenged by psychiatrists who saw mental illness as a "whole body" process and believed that injuries caused by lobotomy were therefore more significant than changes to behavior. Between 1947 and 1949, these theoretical and ethical debates within Soviet psychiatry became politicized. Psychiatrists competing for institutional control attacked their rivals' ideas using slogans drawn from Communist Party ideological campaigns. Party authorities intervened in psychiatry in 1949 and 1950, persecuting Jewish psychiatrists and demanding adherence to Ivan Pavlov's theories. Psychiatrists' existing conflict over lobotomy was adopted as part of the party's own campaign against harmful Western influence in Soviet society.
The following, “Medically reviewed by Alana Biggers, M.D., MPH, and by By Daniel Yetman on April 28, 2022,” takes a look at how it came to an end in the USA, 17 years after it was banned in the USSR. For the full story, click on the Dr Freeman link within the abstract below.
Lobotomies are no longer performed in the United States. They began to fall out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s with the development of antipsychotic medications. The last recorded lobotomy in the United States was performed by Dr. Walter Freeman in 1967 and ended in the death of the person on whom it was performed...
Dr. Freeman, to the left
In one case, at Cherokee Mental Health Institute in Iowa, Freeman killed his patient by turning around for a photo oportunity, and the pick through the eye socket penetrated too deelply.
So what was going on, and, fewer with each passing year as old psychiatrists die off or retire, is still going on in Danish public health psychiatry? Part of the story sits up above with the lobotomy issue. “Competing to control institutions.” Danish patients with tough to manage psychiatric/psychological issues were not considered as an equal to other Danes. Some of that specific mental health ableism, which is discrimination and prejudices against those with disabilities, in that they are inferior to those who do the discriminating and hold those prejudices, is extant. In other words, it still exists, but is diminishing as fresh young psychiatrists, some with non-Danish ethnicities, and with critical thinking, international peer-reviewed, ajour neuroscience in their CVs.
Another feature to the specific Danish issue, in a small country of 5.8 million, and which can be found in other Scandinavian countries, is that public health psychiatry has been, and at times still is, managed by a sort of bubbled-in priesthood, often patriarchal, among confirmation-biased, chief psychiatrists, within what can be defined, through systems theory, as a closed social system. In other words, many of the chief psychiatrists, who managed psychiatric programs and hospital units, held themselves to a different standard than the scientific method requires, often failing, and according to some sources (as the lobotomy issue clarifies), willfully ignoring the international peer-previewed development of how psychiatry should be practiced according to the exponential growth of neuroscientific research. Danish universities currently rank high up in the list of institutions doing that research, but even well into 21st century, even today, it often is not incorporated into the public health system, called the Sundhedsvæsenet, in Danish, which is regulated by the 5 Regions of Denmark, with ultimate responsibility lying with the Danish Ministry of Health. (frequently changes names according to what coalition of parties form “the executive branch” after an election)
This short excerpt, from the 26-page 2021 Human Rights Report on Denmark, analyzes the tip of the iceberg:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of excessive use of
solitary confinement, including of children....
...Several committees in the country’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in the UN
Human Rights Council (UNHRC) expressed concern that coercive measures were
used in mental health institutions, and that coerced treatment and the use of
restraint in institutions remained legal. In February the Danish Institute against
Torture (DIGNITY) published a briefing note finding the country’s 2014 action
plan to reduce the use of coercion in psychiatric institutions by 50 percent by 2020,
including a 50 percent reduction in the use of mechanical restraints with belts, did
not meet its goals. According to a 2020 report released by the Health Authority,
the use of belt restraints decreased, but the prevalence of patients subjected to one
or several coercive methods increased in comparison to the pre-action plan
statistics during a 12-month study period between July 2019 and June 2020.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) concluded in September 2020 that
the government had violated the prohibition of inhuman treatment in a case where
belt restraints had been used on a patient for nearly 23 hours. On February 3, the
Supreme Court held that restraining with belts for 281 consecutive days was a
violation of the prohibition of inhuman treatment. The case related to a patient
who was detained at a psychiatric institution while awaiting a transfer to a more
specialized psychiatric hospital in 2015. The European Committee for the
Prevention of Torture (CPT), the Audit Office, and the ombudsman criticized the
use of belt restraints....
Now for the first of two recent case histories. Prior to his death, Mr. Graveson, the first case, gave full permission to have his story published on behalf of a better Denmark. But on behalf of some in his family, one tiny insignificant change has been made. The 2nd case, which can feel like a Stephen King horror story, according to a Dane who has read parts of it, will soon be published as Part 2 here at Idiot Free Zone.
CASE 1
Ole Graveson had worked much of his life as microscope finmekaniker, where he basically maintained and repaired the best in German-made microscopes used in hospitals and universities all over the world, including China. He loved his adventures to China.
Around 1972, after having learned the basics of being a mechanic of precision equipment from his required Danish military service, on his way home from a bar, where he’d enjoyed a couple of beers in the Vesterbro region of Copenhagen, not far from the Central Train Station (Hovedbannegård), he suddenly lost consciousness. When the police arrived, and an ambulance was called, he began regaining consciousness. Alcohol was noticed on his breath. Apparently, the police had assumed he’d fallen, hit his head, and may have judged him because of the shabby condition of his clothes, with the back of his pants ripped, and shirt dirty from whatever he’d fallen onto. He was not very coherent at the time.
Nor was he at the hospital ER, where it was again assumed he might be a bit of a bum who’d had a bit too much to drink. They didn’t really do much testing for alcohol blood levels at that time, unless critically essential. After discharging Ole, it began to briefly go downhill for him. His wallet was missing, which is likely why his back pocket had been ripped open down to his underwear. He had been assaulted and robbed. But he filed no charges, and assumed it would be easy for him to get his IDs back and such. But it wasn’t as easy as he thought, when he went to a nearby social services office for help. Further information was entered into what in Danish is called CPR (Det Centrale Personregister; The Central Registry of all of a person’s information: medical, police, economic, military, social services, etc.) The system is supposed to be very secure against unwanted intrusions, somewhat secure between governmental departments, but all too often, some people's personal information suddenly opens to someone who seeks it. In this case from 2020, 1.2 million Danes had their CPR numbers leaked for five years to Google and Adobe. That’s over 20% of the Danish population. In a letter from Google to the Danish government, they stated that no one’s personal information had been abused.
Consequential to the whole episode, and then the alcoholism suspicions that emerged from the police and medical staff, personnel were required to write down everything about the incident, eventually typed into a file, and today, digitized, into that CPR.
Many years passed, he’d put the incident behind him, and in the early 1990’s, Ole had now put together his own company to maintain the most expensive optical microscopes available. He loved his work and the international travels it often required. He’d gotten married to someone who loved expensive cars and much else that Ole wasn’t interested in, but he submitted since he was so often not at home. One night, while working in his “lab,” as he called it, which was next to his home, someone entered, and again assaulted him, very violently. Though no bones, including his skull, were broken, he sustained severe head and leg injuries from it. He barely had the ability to reach up for a phone to call 112 (911) for emergency services. During the hospitalization, he was in and out of cognitive coherence, but not unconscious. He was uncooperative with the police who wanted to know what had happened.
The assault had a severe impact on his family life and business, someone was arrested and a divorce ensued, where he lost most of his assets, including his home. Being raised in solidarity with the then more liberal Social-democrats and labor union movements in a free-market economy, he didn’t advocate for himself about losing so much, so instantly. However, Ole’s mood began to swing from being sad to feeling energized to get back to work. There was also the issue from 1972, when he’d been assaulted, but analyzed as a possible alcoholic, which he never was, according to several interviews with him and what had been observed objectively over the course of 3 years. A psychiatrist then diagnosed his behavior as a bipolar disorder, and Ole was offered lithium to manage it. When he noticed how one of his hands began to exhibit a tremor once in a while, various diagnoses were discussed, including the suspicion that he was an alcoholic. There had also been a discussion about Parkinson’s disease. This hypothetical confirmation bias continued until he retired early into what’s called Førtidspension (literally: ahead of time pension, which generally requires medical confirmation of a handicap)
In 2003 Ole met someone who listened to his life history, and who had deep insight into Danish psychiatry and its inherent ableism in places. In other words, a Dane such as Ole would never defend himself against anything a doctor would state with some force behind it. This individual, who wishes to remain anonymous, wondered if Ole hadn't suffered from brain lesions or bleeds due to the two assaults separated by a couple of decades, and that maybe lithium also had something to do with his ever growing hand tremors, now in both hands. Due to how Ole had described his childhood as having given him a sense that nothing could harm him in Denmark with a lifetime sense of safety and security, this individual helped take him to a nearby hospital to ask a neurologist to offer Ole an MRI brain scan to rule-in or rule-out the suspicions. The neurologist was irritated by this sudden intrusion by someone with no medical credentials, and rejected the scan. A few months later the tremors grew in intensity, becoming ever more unmanageable. His friend took him again to the neurologist, this time advocating more critically empowered on behalf of Ole to listen to a tiny bit of what he’d suffered all too passively in his life, from the two assaults and a set of major losses.
Ole then got the MRI, which confirmed untreated bleeds from long ago. He was later offered a comfortable beskyttet bolig, in this case, a full apartment with a living room in a wooded area with an elevator and a button to call for instant help from a nurse or a sosu assistent (social and health care assistant) from the nearby municipal-run office complex. Before he passed away, Ole told his friend that he so wanted a few more years to experience life.
To put everything into perspective, due to a coming election and fake news everywhere, ”[e]mulate Denmark, says Gerald F. (Jerry) Davis [Professor of Business Administration and of Management and Organizations at the Michigan Ross business school of the University of Michigan and] author of the 2016 book The Vanishing American Corporation: Navigating the Hazards of a New Economy, and a recent "...visiting scholar in the Corporations and Society Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business...
“...If we wanted to have a more vibrant business sector and more startups, then we should have a Danish-style social welfare system,” he says.
And he states this from the highest levels of economic knowledge. The "U.S. News & World Report, in its 2019 ranking of top MBA programs, placed Michigan Ross [as] seventh in its ranking of business schools in the United States."
In Part 2, soon to be published, we briefly first explore, in very simple terminology (deeper with the hyperlinked supporting evidence), what happens to a child’s brain, and its lifelong consequences, if abused in any way by parents and primary caregivers. The article then briefly goes into what the deceased parents of this next life history case had experienced during the Nazi Occupation of Denmark, where some myths are stripped of their PR cloth, including the pope’s (his mother was extreme Catholic) and the Indre (Inner) Mission biblical literalist sect of his father’s religion, within the Danish State Church (Evangelical Lutheran). Though that true story reveals extreme ritualized abuses, none of it is described inappropriately graphic in the text. And the story does end on a very healing note in Denmark.
RESOURCES
Below are scientific and therapeutic help links for further reading
Understanding the Effects of Maltreatment on Brain Development (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
Abstract: In recent years, there has been a surge of research into early brain development. Neuroimaging technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), provide increased insight about how the brain develops and how early experiences affect that development. One area that has been receiving increasing research attention involves the effects of abuse and neglect on the developing brain, especially during infancy and early childhood. Much of this research is providing biological explanations for what practitioners have long been describing in psychological, emotional, and behavioral terms. There is now scientific evidence of altered brain functioning as a result of early abuse and neglect. This emerging body of knowledge has many implications for the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect
Dissociation FAQ’s - International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation
Dissociation is a word that is used to describe the disconnection or lack of connection between things usually associated with each other. Dissociated experiences are not integrated into the usual sense of self, resulting in discontinuities in conscious awareness (Anderson & Alexander, 1996; Frey, 2001; International Society for the Study of Dissociation, 2002; Maldonado, Butler, & Spiegel, 2002; Pascuzzi & Weber, 1997; Rauschenberger & Lynn, 1995; Simeon et al., 2001; Spiegel & Cardeña, 1991; Steinberg et al., 1990, 1993). In severe forms of dissociation, disconnection occurs in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception. For example, someone may think about an event that was tremendously upsetting yet have no feelings about it. Clinically, this is termed emotional numbing, one of the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dissociation is a psychological process commonly found in persons seeking mental health treatment (Maldonado et al).
OUT OF THE FOG - Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD)
Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) is a condition that results from chronic or long-term exposure to emotional trauma over which a victim has little or no control and from which there is little or no hope of escape, such as in cases of domestic emotional, physical or sexual abuse; childhood emotional, physical or sexual abuse; entrapment or kidnapping; slavery or enforced labor; long term imprisonment and torture; repeated violations of personal boundaries; long-term objectification; exposure to gaslighting & false accusations; long-term exposure to inconsistent, push-pull,splitting or alternating raging & hooveringbehaviors; long-term taking care of mentally ill or chronically sick family members; long term exposure to crisis conditions...
Religion Exploits Normal Human Mental Processes
Because the child’s mind is uniquely susceptible to religious ideas, religious indoctrination particularly targets vulnerable young children. Cognitive development before age seven lacks abstract reasoning. Thinking is magical and primitive, black and white. Also, young humans are wired to obey authority because they are dependent on their caregivers just for survival. Much of their brain growth and development has to happen after birth, which means that children are extremely vulnerable to environmental influences in the first few years when neuronal pathways are formed...
Religiously-based psychological abuse of children can involve using teachings to subjugate children through fear, or indoctrinating the child in the beliefs of their particular religion whilst suppressing other perspectives. Psychologist Jill Mytton describes this as crushing the child's chance to form a personal morality and belief system; it makes them utterly reliant on their religion and/or parents, and they never learn to reflect critically on information they receive. Similarly, the use of fear and a judgmental environment (such as the concept of Hell) to control the child can be traumatic.
National Center for PTSD - Treating C-PTSD, a professional site
Many traumatic events (e.g., car accidents, natural disasters, etc.) are of time-limited duration. However, in some cases people experience chronic trauma that continues or repeats for months or years at a time. The current PTSD diagnosis often does not fully capture the severe psychological harm that occurs with prolonged, repeated trauma. People who experience chronic trauma often report additional symptoms alongside formal PTSD symptoms, such as changes in their self-concept and the way they adapt to stressful events.
Traumatic Stress Education & Advocacy- Sidran Institute
One of the primary roles of Sidran Institute’s Help Desk is to assist people who have been traumatized in finding various kinds of help. “Treatment” is usually sought when the behavioral adaptations (usually called “symptoms”) typical of trauma survivors become disabling, interfering with work, home life, recreation, sleep, parenting, and other aspects of daily function. Our aim is not only to help people feel better and function better, but also to help them learn to be informed and empowered consumers in general and consumers of mental health services, in particular. We hope trauma survivors find that taking appropriate and well-considered action to improve one’s life is made a little easier by the information on this page.
If you are currently in crisis: The process of choosing a helpful therapist takes some time, thought, and focus. If you are currently in a crisis, or are worried that you might hurt or kill yourself or someone else, please contact your community’s mental health center, hospital emergency room, or a hotline. Here are some hotline numbers that might be useful:National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK
National Domestic Violence/Child Abuse/Sexual Abuse: 1-800-799-SAFE
National Youth Crisis Hotline: 800-442-HOPE
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