Anyone who is under psychiatric care, or loves someone who is, may want to read the book The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today, by Susanne Paola Antonetta. If you care about history, particularly the history of eugenics, you may be interested as well. The book may offer us more respect for the mind and its diversity.

What psychiatric history do you discuss in The Devil’s Castle?

I describe a euthanasia program in Germany that began in the late 1930s, in which the Nazis targeted people with mental diagnoses and built gas chambers into asylums to exterminate them. Nazi euthanasia targeted different disabilities, but the large majority of victims were adults with psychiatric disorders, like schizophrenia.

Euthanasia in Germany demonstrated how easily a group of people can be othered and targeted through the lens of disease. Jews became coded as ill, psychopathic vectors for bringing disease into the population—the language that condemned the neurodivergent would be extended to condemn others as well.

And how does psychiatry’s troubled history reverberate today?

It’s time to reconsider the influence of Emil Kraepelin on psychiatry, the German psychiatrist who promoted eugenic theories and trained some of the worst in the Nazi medical profession. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, was created by a group of U.S. psychiatrists, many of whom called themselves........

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