Originally published in Synapse on April 12, 1974.
Dr. Louis Jolyon West, Director of the Neuropsychiatry Institute at UCLA and head of the university’s proposed Center for the Study of the Reduction of Violence, debated the merits of the controversial project on April 8 with Dr. Lee Coleman, a psychiatrist in private practice who is strongly opposed to it.
Coleman described the project as a “domestic search and destroy operation,” involving psychosurgery and other frightening kinds of behavior control, which completely disregards the use of violence by those in power, and the social inequalities that often lead to violence on the part of the oppressed.
West maintained that psychosurgery on experimental subjects was never planned by the center, and that by focusing on the medical and psychological causes of individual violence, the research would help society treat offenders less punitively and with more understanding.
The session was marked by hostile remarks directed towards West from some members of the audience and sharp disagreement between the debaters. It appeared to be nearly as turbulent as the brief but stormy history of the violence center itself.
The UCLA Center for the Study of the Reduction of Violence was created in the fall of 1972 and was to be funded by the State Department of Health with matching funds from the California Council on Criminal Justice (an agency that receives extensive federal monies).
However, when plans for the center were publicized, it became “a political hot potato,” in West’s words, and the state legislature refused to fund it.
The project is now seeking other sources of funding, and its status is currently in limbo, although Coleman said that it is not the “dead issue that West claims it is.” The controversy was reminiscent of a similar dispute which occurred at UCSF in 1971.
At that time, the California Department of Corrections (DOC) approached several UCSF administrators with a request that Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute perform psychosurgery on a number of prison inmates who displayed “aggressive” and “violent” behavior.
Preliminary arrangements were made to perform the surgery until the plans leaked to the press and public reaction forced the DOC to shelve the idea. The focus of the center (recently re-named the Project on Life-Threatening Behavior) is on violent behavior by individuals or small groups rather than mass or collective violence.
West said that the researchers chose this emphasis because they felt mass violence had been extensively studied elsewhere. Quoting from the printed statement by the project which was distributed to the audience, West stated that participating researchers intend “to study a variety of pathologically violent behaviors; their cause and precursors; conditions that foster or aggravate them; acceptable methods of preventing or diminishing (them); and techniques of treating or mitigating the harmful consequences.”
The precise ways in which the project originally planned and now intends to study violence were frequently disputed by West and Coleman. West did not reject, however, Coleman’s statement that the center originally planned to use prisoners and involuntarily hospitalized mental patients as some of the experimental subjects.
Coleman, who is affiliated with an organization called the Committee Opposing the Abuse of Psychiatry, said that “the prominent mention” of these groups in the center’s preliminary paper of September 1972 aroused the organization’s concern.
“We felt that (prisoners and mental patients) inherently can’t give informed consent for human experimentation, because they’re in such a coercive and controlled environment,” he said.
West said that in light of the controversy over the center, “there’s nobody in our group who would go within ten miles of any prison to do a study now.” He stated emphatically that “there will be no studies of any kind on prisoners or people confined against their will.
Besides his objections to the use of involuntarily confined experimental subjects, Coleman said he was disturbed about the nature of the proposed studies.
“There were plans for experimentation involving brain implantation,” he said.
Coleman also spoke of the project researchers’ intent to study what he termed “mythological syndromes” such as “hidden brain disease” and the “XYY chromosome syndrome” in people who were thought to have a “low threshold” for violence, although they had not yet evidenced violent behavior.
“There was a recommendation to conduct mass screening of (male) children to find out who had an extra V chromosome, so they could ‘follow them up.’ We call that surveillance,” Coleman said.
He asserted that the “core and philosophy” of the proposed center is that of UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ervin, co-author of the book, Violence and the Brain, and that Ervin was one of the founders of the center.
West flatly refuted Coleman’s assertion that the center planned to perform psychosurgery on experimental subjects.
“It was never our intent to do any kind of surgery in these studies — to plant electrodes in anybody’s head,” he said.
When a member of the audience charged that plans for brain implantations appeared in the center’s preliminary proposal, West replied that this was “an early paper which reviewed the literature for the purpose of people in Sacramento who weren’t familiar with it ... a great deal had been taken out of content and widely misinterpreted.”
West stated that preliminary studies have shown a relation between violent behavior and the XYY chromosome pattern in men, and that it is therefore a plausible hypothesis. He denied that Frank Ervin was ever involved with the center.
“I hoped he would be, but he had other fish to fry,” West said.
Among the more vocal people in the audience were members of Students for a Democratic Society and the Committee Against Racism, two organizations which are not affiliated with UCSF. Members of these groups, as well as some people from the campus community, passed out literature after the debate which opposed the center.
Coleman said that the creation of the violence center “is typical of the abuse of the medical model for social problem solving. We choose to define problems as medical if there’s some aberrant individual around. It’s in the liberal progressive spirit, and the dominant social order. loves it. If we really looked at political institutions, we would shake up the political system. So they give money for the kind of research they want done.”
Coleman described West as a “naive” and “liberal” physician “who won’t tune into the social and political realities of the state and the use to which it will put his research.”
He charged that by doing such research “we make the system of punishment worse and get away with it because we label it as therapy.”
West said that although he has been described by some opponents of the project as “a fascist butcher or Nazi Dr. Scum,” he shares Coleman’s concern about social inequalities.
