Psychiatry and torture

I would like to add to Julio Arboleda- Flórez's excellent discussion of the problem of psychiatric participation in interrogations. There is considerable international support for asking psychiatrists and other physicians not only to decline to participate in torture and related practices, but also to speak out vigorously against its use by governments.

While medical ethics surely disapproves such practices, they are also widely condemned in other quarters. For example, in its aspirational "Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment", the United Nations General Assembly, after asserting that "no person under any form of detention or imprisonment shall be subject to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment", adds in a note: "The term 'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment' should be interpreted so as to extend the widest possible protection against abuses, whether physical or mental, including the holding of a detained or imprisoned person in conditions which deprive him, temporarily or permanently, of the use of any of his natural senses, such as sight or hearing, or of his awareness of place and the passing of time" (1).

In addition, the Body of Principles requires that "no detained person while being interrogated shall be subject to violence, threats or methods of interrogation which impair his capacity of decision or his judgement" (1).

Psychiatrists are in a unique position to understand and communicate the importance of these principles and should denounce torture strongly in every possible venue. As Sagan and Jonsen (2) observed, because the medical skills used for healing can be maliciously perverted "with devastating effects on the spirit and the body", it is "incumbent upon the medical profession and upon all of its practitioners to protest in effective ways against torture as an instrument of political control". This is even more urgently true today than when it was written thirty years ago.