Doctor Evil: A study of caregiver as lifetaker

See the link for the full interview. From the Toronto Star

At least seven suspects in last week's failed bomb attacks in Britain and Scotland were members of the medical profession. They weren't the first physicians to be implicated in high-profile acts of violence – the list is as long and varied as the motives behind the aggression.

Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele carried out sadistic experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz during World War II; Britain's most prolific convicted serial killer was a GP named Harold Shipman who is believed to have murdered more than 200 people before he was sentenced to life in prison in 2000; a doctor brewed the cyanide, Valium, and grape-flavoured drink mix that 900 men, women and children drank at Jonestown, Guyana in a mass murder-suicide in 1978.

Jack the Ripper may have been a surgeon. Evil doctors abound in fiction – The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde haunts us still, more than 100 years after it was published, perhaps because it taps into our secret fears. We are rarely so vulnerable as when we're sitting in a doctor's office with our bare bums slipping out of a paper dress.

So what is it then that leads members of the profession we most need to trust to kill and maim instead of heal? It's a question Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist and author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, has pondered for decades. A lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, Lifton has often addressed the susceptibility of physicians to engage in harmful behaviours, both historically and in recent times.

In an article called Doctors and Torture that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004, Lifton described how and why U.S. doctors, nurses and medics became complicit in torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

The Star asked him to comment on the participation of physicians in the recent British attacks.

While the discussion focuses on medical professionals in general, we are concerned about psychiatrists precisely because theyare suppose to be expert on the human mind, and you would think the profession would has less wackos in it, not more, as seen in other statistics.