Never mind the trope of lunatics running the asylum; history proves the true crazies have always been the ones wearing the white coats. From grotesque human‑experimenters to outright genocidal maniacs, here are the ten most outlandish psychiatrists, psychologists and neurologists ever unleashed on the world. This is the 10 history 8217 roster of twisted minds.
10 history 8217 Overview
10 George Rekers
Southern Baptist minister and UCLA‑trained psychologist George Rekers burst onto the public scene in 2000 when the state of Florida hired him to buttress its ban on gay adoption. His testimony was deemed so “useful” that Arkansas recruited him in 2004 for a similar purpose, and Florida called him back again in 2007. It later emerged that Rekers was more of an “expert” witness than anyone realized – but not in any credible sense. Despite his outspoken anti‑gay stance, a 2010 photo surfaced showing him returning from Europe alongside a male prostitute he had hired via Rentboy.com.
His double‑standard was staggering. While testifying for Arkansas and Florida, Rekers asserted, among other things, that gay parents posed a higher risk of molesting their children or transmitting AIDS. He spent much of his career urging straight parents to reject their gay offspring, and his early doctoral work at UCLA – an attempt to “cure” homosexuality – was linked directly to a man’s suicide.
When the rent‑boy scandal broke, Rekers claimed he had hired the young man merely to “help with his luggage”. He later insisted that, once he realized his error, he spent the entire ten‑day trip across London and Madrid converting the youngster to Christianity.
9 Colin Bouwer
Serving as Head of Psychiatry at the University of Otago in New Zealand, Colin Bouwer possessed the perfect position to murder his wife using glucose‑lowering drugs. By forging prescriptions, he obtained the medication and covertly administered it, inducing severe hypoglycemia that mimicked a pancreatic tumor. His wife was repeatedly hospitalized, and physicians, relying on Bouwer’s fabricated data, subjected her to unnecessary invasive procedures. It was only after her death that toxicology revealed the hidden drugs in her system. Investigators also uncovered emails where Bouwer, using an alias, queried experts about hypoglycemia. His motive? He was carrying on an affair with a colleague.
In a chilling twist of fate, Bouwer’s son later killed his own wife in South Africa. With his mother’s assistance, he staged the scene to look like a break‑in and violent rape, echoing his father’s macabre penchant for manipulation.
8 Aubrey Levin
Stationed at the infamous Ward 22 in apartheid‑era Pretoria, Colonel Aubrey Levin earned the nickname “Dr Shock” for his brutal electroshock campaigns against gay soldiers. Early in his career, he penned a letter to a parliamentary committee urging them not to legalise homosexuality, arguing he could simply zap it out of people. As chief psychiatrist for the military, his method was chillingly simple: patients were shown photographs of naked men and encouraged to fantasise, then punished with increasingly powerful electric shocks. He applied similar tactics to drug users and pacifists, and those who failed to respond were dumped into a labour camp called Greefswald.
Levin’s background adds a bizarre layer – raised Jewish by parents who survived World War II, yet he fervently supported South Africa’s openly antisemitic National Party.
After the fall of apartheid, Levin fled to Canada to escape retribution. There, he sexually assaulted numerous male patients referred to him from prison. It wasn’t until one victim recorded Levin’s advances that authorities finally believed the complaints, prompting thirty other men to come forward. Although he managed to silence the media, Levin was convicted in 2013 alongside his wife, who attempted to bribe a juror. He received a five‑year sentence, served one and a half years, and was forced to undergo a comprehensive psychiatric evaluation.
7 Andrei Snezhnevsky
“Sluggish schizophrenia” was a convenient, fabricated diagnosis concoced by Soviet psychiatrists. It gave the state a pretext to imprison anyone they chose, as the condition was deliberately vague. Purportedly slow‑onset, its symptoms could erupt at any moment, allowing authorities to round up perfectly healthy individuals.
One of the chief architects of this scheme was Andrei Snezhnevsky. A diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia” from him meant immediate confinement in a maximum‑security psychiatric facility, the loss of civil rights and future employability.
6 Harry Bailey
Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey was a zealous proponent of “deep sleep therapy”, a method that used barbiturates to plunge patients into comas lasting days or weeks as a purported treatment for mental illness. Between 1962 and 1979, Bailey was directly responsible for the deaths of 24 unsuspecting patients. Of the remaining 24 who survived his therapy, 19 later committed suicide, many bearing permanent brain damage.
The technique had always been controversial, typically employed to bypass patient resistance when administering electroconvulsive therapy. Its dangers were evident.
Authorities took time to catch up with Bailey’s grim tally, but when they did, public outrage was fierce. The Church of Scientology was especially vocal in its condemnation. Ultimately, the Chelmsford Royal Commission was convened to investigate, and the pressure proved too much: Bailey took his own life with barbiturates. His suicide note read, “Let it be known that the Scientologists and the forces of madness have won.” The scandal spurred long‑overdue reforms in Australia’s psychiatric care standards.
5 Werner Villinger
Werner Villinger was a German psychiatrist active during the Nazi era. Though he never formally joined the Nazi Party, he was an unapologetic eugenicist and fully embraced Nazi ideology. While working at the Bethel Institution, he participated in some of the most heinous war crimes – notably Aktion T4, which involved gassing, asphyxiating and poisoning disabled individuals, all of whom he first experimented on before killing.
After the war, Villinger showed no remorse. He vehemently opposed any compensation for Holocaust victims, arguing it might give them “neurotic ailments”. Scandalously, he continued to practice psychiatry in West Germany and was never prosecuted for his atrocities.
4 Walter Freeman
Neurologist Walter Freeman performed America’s first lobotomy, following the invention by Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz. Enamoured with what the New York Times later dubbed the “surgery of the soul,” Freeman sought to streamline the procedure. He invented the trans‑orbital lobotomy – a brutal technique that involved hammering an ice‑pick‑like instrument through the eye sockets into the brain. He cut costs wherever possible; for instance, instead of anesthetising patients, he electro‑shocked them with a portable machine.
Freeman promoted lobotomies – once a last‑resort option – as a first‑line cure for everything from schizophrenia and depression to OCD, chronic pain, headaches and even indigestion. His victims included Rosemary Freeman, sister of President John F. Kennedy, who was left incontinent and mute after a lobotomy at age 23. In total, Freeman lobotomised roughly 3,500 patients, including 19 children as young as four. He boasted a success rate of 85 %, yet his fatality rate hovered around 15 %, meaning his definition of “success” was anything short of murder.
3 Radovan Karadzic
The flamboyant Radovan Karadzic trained as a psychiatrist in Sarajevo, Denmark and New York before becoming infamous as the “Butcher of Bosnia” for his role in the 1990s war. His plan, as Bosnian Serb leader, was to permanently purge Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from territory claimed by the Serbs. The most horrific manifestation of his scheme was the Srebrenica massacre, which claimed the lives of over 7,000 Muslim men and boys.
After the war, Karadzic evaded capture for more than a decade by masquerading as a New‑Age healer, monk or priest. He grew a long, bushy beard, wore robes and roamed from monastery to monastery, protected by locals. The disguise was so effective that he reportedly attended his mother’s funeral without raising suspicion. He also published a poetry collection that sold out at the Belgrade International Book Fair. Shockingly, he even attempted to revive his medical career. It was not until 2016 that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia finally convicted him, sentencing him to 40 years in prison.
2 Donald Ewen Cameron
Scottish‑American psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron was a key figure in the CIA’s MK‑Ultra mind‑control program. His bizarrely unethical work in the 1930s caught the agency’s eye. One early study forced epileptics to sit for an hour in a room heated to 40 °C. Another limited their water intake to a mere 600 ml per day, ostensibly to test dehydration effects on seizures. In reality, the low‑water group resorted to drinking from vases, eating snow from windowsills, and stealing food, leading to weight loss, acidosis and even a death.
Curiously, similar experiments were carried out at the Dachau concentration camp, yet Cameron publicly denounced them, even branding the German race as inherently cruel. He also drew a stark line between “weak” races (e.g., German) and “strong” ones (e.g., American), arguing the weak should be prevented from reproducing. Despite these Nazi‑flavoured views, he was summoned to Nuremberg after the war to evaluate Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess – a man Hitler deemed insane – declaring Hess fit to stand trial.
One of Cameron’s MK‑Ultra sub‑projects involved drugs and hypnosis to induce a “clinical coma” for what he called “psychic driving”: patients were forced to listen to a recorded statement for up to 20 hours a day, fifteen days straight – a technique still employed in modern torture. Another venture, “depatterning”, aimed to erase a person’s mind like a blank slate, allowing Cameron to rebuild it from scratch. He applied this on schizophrenics, subjecting them to repeated electro‑shock “therapy” when symptoms resurfaced. Despite the ethical abyss, Cameron remained untouchable, serving as president of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, the American Psychopathological Association, and, from 1961‑1966, the World Psychiatric Association.
1 Henry Cotton
American psychiatrist Henry Cotton believed that “madness” stemmed from bacterial infection. He based this theory on a 1913 finding that the bacterium causing syphilis could also produce psychotic symptoms via brain lesions. Armed with this hypothesis, Cotton embarked on a gruesome crusade: he began by extracting the teeth of fifty patients, a procedure that proved ineffective. Undeterred, he moved on to removing tonsils, then gallbladders, testicles, ovaries, uteruses, stomachs and colons.
By 1923, Cotton claimed an 85 % cure rate for his patients’ mental‑health problems. However, his methods carried a death rate of roughly 30 % – higher still for those who underwent colon removal. He justified the fatalities by asserting that the patients were “psychotics in whom the infection had been [too] long‑standing”.
Cotton’s tactics were performed without consent. Patients and families vocally condemned his practices, but he ignored their pleas, convinced that only the most ruthless approach could eradicate insanity. He proudly toured the world, publishing numerous papers touting his methods. In total, he removed more than 11,000 teeth – even extracting the teeth of his own wife and children as a preventative measure. When he feared his own sanity was waning, he even pulled out some of his own teeth. Cotton died of a heart attack in 1933.