#83. Dark Chapters in Psychiatry - Jack El-Hai

Jack El-Hai, acclaimed journalist and author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist and The Lobotomist, takes us inside Dr. Douglas Kelly's psychological examination of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials. From the lobotomy era to the chilling conclusions about "ordinary" evil, this conversation explores what psychiatry revealed about history's most notorious figures—and what it means for us today.

Key Topics Covered:

🧠 The Lobotomist: How a 1968 lobotomy case in Minnesota led Jack down a 20-year rabbit hole into the history of psychiatric surgery and Walter Freeman's controversial legacy.

⚖️ Douglas Kelly & The Nuremberg Trials The young US Army psychiatrist who had sole access to 22 Nazi defendants—including Hermann Göring—and what he discovered about their psychological profiles.

💡 The Disturbing Conclusions and warnings Kelly's finding that the Nazi leaders were psychologically "normal"—and why that revelation was far more terrifying than finding them insane.

🎬 From Book to Film The 12-year journey from The Nazi and the Psychiatrist to the 2025 film Nuremberg starring Rami Malek—and what changed in adaptation.

Check out Jack El-Hai's work: https://www.el-hai.com/

Transcript

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Hello, hello. Welcome to the Smooth Brain Society. Today we're thrilled to welcome Jack El-Hai an acclaimed journalist, author, and storyteller, and also producer, whose work brings together history, medicine, science, and crime. Jack has written multiple books and hundreds of articles for major publications, including The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Wired, GQ, and The Washington Post. His nonfiction spans remarkable true stories, and his works on the history of psychiatry will be focused on today. From the Lobotomist, which chronicles this dark era in psychiatry, to the psychological saga behind the Nuremberg trials in The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the latter having inspired the major motion picture Nuremberg from 2025. Jack is also a veteran writing teacher and speaker, having led workshops and talks at institutions like the Mayo Clinic and Yale University. Join us for a powerful conversation about these key moments in the history of psychiatry. what these extraordinary true stories reveal about the human mind and what lessons can we take from them moving forward. So welcome to the Smooth Brain Society, Thanks so much for having me here. I'm delighted to be with you. Jack, it's great to have you on. Now we'll start with our usual question. Could you give us a little bit of an origin story to where you got to where you are now? I began writing as a fiction writer. My first published works were short stories in small literary magazines. But then a friend who had joined the editorial staff of a regional magazine in the US convinced me to start writing non-fiction or journalism, magazine journalism. And I did that for many years. uh Until about 20 or so years ago, I began writing books. uh Many of my books are about medicine, history of medicine, particularly psychiatry. And also I like writing about crime and law and history in general. uh Books oh appeal to me because they can allow me to research in depth and write in depth. And uh one thing that has always appealed to me about this kind of work is the ability through writing books. to answer questions that dog me, or I should say that differently, to pursue questions that dog me, because I don't always arrive at the answers. So my background, even though I have written on psychiatry, history of psychiatry, medicine, law, et cetera, is not in any of those areas. I'm a journalist. I don't have an academic background in medicine. And I approach these stories as stories that need to be told. Medicine is especially appealing because many of those stories are life and death stories, high stakes. And I like that. Was there a particular, I guess you said you liked that, but was there a particular reason for moving into looking, writing about sort of psychiatry and medicine? the particular things which stuck to you, which is why you went down that path? It happened accidentally, I have to confess, because about 30 years ago, in my local newspaper, I read a letter to the editor that a woman had written complaining about the treatment of her uncle in psychiatric hospitals in the upper Midwest of the U.S., where I live. And she mentioned just in passing in that letter, that her uncle had undergone a lobotomy as part of the, through his time in the Minnesota State Hospital system. And that caught my attention. oh This man's lobotomy had happened in 1968. And I didn't know that lobotomies were still happening that late. oh especially in the area where I was living. And so I contacted her and heard her uncle's story. As it turned out, this poor man was not even psychiatrically ill. He was confined to a hospital for severe epilepsy and was a difficult patient for the hospital staff because he uh was uh very intelligent. uh fully intact emotionally and psychologically and didn't think he belonged there and by today's standards he certainly did not and so he was the in many years of studying and writing about lobotomy he was the only patient I ever encountered the first who I encountered uh who had a lobotomy for the reasons given in the book and movie, one flew over the cuckoo's nest, that he was a difficult patient and he needed to be tamped down. So that's how it began. I wrote The Lobotomist, first an article in the Washington Post. about Walter Freeman, the main American advocate and developer of psychiatric surgery to treat uh mental disorders, and um wrote the book. And the lobotomist led me to the Nazi and the psychiatrist. And there I was. Oh, that's that's incredible. Like you just said, like 1960s seems really late for, you know, I guess just very quickly taking a step back could for if somebody does not know what a lobotomy is, because it's not very it's not used these days. Can you just tell us what it is? Yes, a lobotomy is uh the term for a type of psychiatric surgery. There were many varieties of lobotomies, but they were used primarily from the 1930s into maybe the early 1960s to treat a wide variety of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, uh bipolar disorder, we would call bipolar disorder now, uh obsessive compulsion, many other things, including alcoholism, uh sexual deviation or what was considered sexual deviation at the time. uh criminal behavior. He tried on all kinds of things. during the 1950s when psychoactive medications first became available, that spelled the end of lobotomy and it declined after that. But for a while, especially in the 1940s, uh lobotomy was going full tilt. And one of its European creators, a uh Portuguese uh neurologist named Egas Monis uh received the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology in the late 1940s for his work on lobotomy. So it was a mainstream treatment for a while, but then fortunately became superseded by other treatments. And I say fortunately because many lobotomy patients did not recover. Sometimes the operation made their symptoms worse or added new symptoms on top of the old ones. There was a small segment of patients who did improve. And that was one of the aspects of the surgery that interested me. But what interested me the most was the person, the figure, Walter Freeman. who spent almost his entire professional life advocating for lobotomy and bringing it to different parts of the world and uh performing demonstrations and speaking out on its behalf. And of course, he ran into a lot of opposition, which he loved. He was a combative man. And uh it was mainly this man's personality that drew me into the story. Interesting. mean, just to say like how popular they were in the 40s, Rosemary Kennedy, not Kennedy, sorry, Roosevelt, Rosemary Roosevelt was, course, was 20. Rosemary Kennedy, yeah, when she was 23, was lobotomized in 1941. was one of Freeman's patients. I mean you know when it's that well spread I guess it just seems seems the norm doesn't it? was shocking really but fascinating. It is shocking. So how does a procedure move from uh building in popularity, becoming part of mainstream medical treatment to some decades later, being shocking, seeming shocking to uh modern oh people. And that's such an interesting evolution. And as you said, that was the segue into the Nazi and the psychiatrist. It was another shocking bit of history within psychiatry. Yes, my book, Nazi and the Psychiatrist is about a US psychiatrist named Douglas Kelly. And Dr. Kelly was during World War II a uh US Army officer. And he was brought in to examine the top. level German defendants once trials, war crimes trials began in Nuremberg. And I got onto this story through my research on Dr. Freeman, because in some of his notes that I went through while researching the lobotomist, Dr. Freeman wrote about meeting Dr. Kelly in 1938 at a conference of the American Psychiatric Association. And Freeman was very struck by this new acquaintance because Dr. Kelly was at the conference not to present a paper or to give a talk, but to give a magic show for his colleagues. Dr. Kelly, his entire life was interested in stage magic. from the time he was a boy and not just in the phenomenon of not just tricking the eye but also tricking the brain. And oh he even used magic with his patients as a kind of occupational therapy to build their confidence and to give them some mastery in manipulating others, leading others to believe they were seeing something they really weren't seeing. And Kelly believed that some of his patients lacked this kind of confidence and a feeling of mastery over others. So once I read about Dr. Kelly's magic show at the psychiatric conference, he stuck in my head too, just as he did in Walter Freeman's. And I began trying to find out more about him. And it was only later that I learned that he had worked with the German defendants at Nuremberg, which of course was very interesting as well. And In uh a lucky break, I was able to track down Dr. Kelly's oldest son. I knew that Dr. Kelly himself had died in 1958, but his son, Doug, was still alive, living in Northern California. And I wrote to Doug uh telling him of my interest in his father's career. And I asked him, do you have anything? And he wrote that he did, and he invited me to come look. So I came and looked and was astonished to find that Doug had brought up from the basement of his home 15 boxes of materials that Dr. Kelly had brought back to the states from Nuremberg. And it was an incredible, very rich treasure trove of material, Kelly's notes, the medical records of the defendants, and even some artifacts. For instance, there was a glass vial included among the materials full of little red pills. And the vial was labeled Herman Göring's paracodin And that is how I learned that Herman Göring had been a narcotic addict at the time of his arrest. He was addicted to paracodin And those materials became the foundation of the Nazi and the psychiatrist and I have Walter Freeman to thank for that. That's such a fantastic kind of like build of this being interested, know, the rigid, just being interested in something you read, the little kind of news clipping to writing, you know, Nazi and psychiatrist. So a lot of it is about this relationship, am I correct, between Douglas Kelly and Herman Göring? What was so unique and fascinating about that relationship? or so many things were unusual about that moment and that relationship. So Kelly was brought in by the court to work among the defendants because the court wanted to know whether these 22 men were mentally fit in a legal sense to stand trial. So that meant, they understand the charges against them? Could they? participate in their own defense. And that was a pretty simple task for someone like Dr. Kelly to accomplish. He determined that all of them, except one, were mentally fit to stand trial. And so he realized that being with these men was an incredible opportunity. They were regarded after all. as the arch criminals of the 20th century. And he had sole access to them, a position that probably dozens or scores of other psychiatrists would have loved to have had at the time. And so he developed for himself another task, which initially was under the radar. He didn't at first share this project with others. And it was to try and determine whether these men shared a psychiatric disorder that could account for their crimes and behaviors. so Kelly used several psychiatric assessment tools, including the Rorschach inkblot test. And he also relied heavily on hundreds of hours that he spent interviewing the men. right away, The most interesting of these defendants to Kelly was Herman Göring. He was the highest ranking of the men who had been arrested and charged with war crimes. And he was such an intriguing person. He was highly intelligent. When Kelly tested Göring's IQ, the result was an IQ of 138, which is very high. And he had a, he was charming. He had a sense of humor to many of the guards in the prison. He was their favorite prisoner. And, and he was articulate. On the other hand, Kelly never lost sight of the dark and very dangerous aspects of Gurning's personality. He, he, he felt no remorse for what had happened during the war. He lacked a conscience. and he was highly manipulative and narcissistic. But that was no problem for Kelly. Kelly himself was highly manipulative. And so when I have talked with Doug the son about these encounters in Göring's prison cell between Kelly and Göring, we've often referred to them as King Kong versus Godzilla. They were these gigantic personalities duking it out. in this confines of this small room. And uh so what developed between them, I think, I would never call it a friendship because of Kelly's awareness of uh Göring's dangerousness. But... uh I think a sense of mutual admiration of a kind arose between them. They recognized their similarities. Kelly, too, was highly intelligent, charming, and had a sense of humor. and manipulative, as I said. And they spent lots of time together talking about not only things that Kelly needed to hear to develop a psychiatric assessment of Göring, but also what happened during the war. Why did the Germans break this treaty? Why did they bomb that city? What did Göring think about Hitler and Hitler's charisma as a leader? All of that. very, very wide ranging conversations. And in that sense, they drew close. I guess in the grand scheme of things, this might not be very important, but I'm interested to know why was Kelly picked as the psychiatrist to do this? assume because it wasn't just America, it was the Soviet Union, France, the UK, all involved. How did he end up being the one picked for these assessments? He was close by in the final period of the war. Dr. Kelly had worked in a series of field hospitals in Western Europe treating soldiers who suffered from what we would today call PTSD. And he and his colleagues had some success in treating those patients. And he was of relatively high rank in the military. But he was also young. He was only 33 when this happened. And all of the Germans that he was mingling with, the defendants, were older than him, except one. And I think he was chanced in large part. He was nearby, and he was available, and he was considered qualified. Yep, fair enough. place for the sound of it, but also a fantastic psychiatrist as well. So I've got a couple of questions here talking about back to the relationship and also the methods used. So with the methods used, how effective do you think these were on Guru in considering his IQ and possible kind of like mutual understanding of one another? And the question after that is how would those methods stand up today? uh If by effective you mean effective in understanding, um well, the IQ gave a uh very vague picture. uh Kelly also used the Rorschach inkblot test, which at that time today no longer was used as a diagnostic tool for psychiatric illness. uh And Kelly was considered a very skilled interpreter of Rorschach results because he, so for listeners who don't know the test all that well, it involves the uh subject being shown a series of cards and on those cards are inkblot images. They're abstract images. They don't show anything representational. And the subject is asked to say what What do you see there? And they give an answer. And because the images are abstract, the idea was that anything that the subject says is a projection of something going on inside of them. But Kelly, uh as a skilled interpreter of these results, not only paid attention to what the subjects said, he also paid attention to what they were doing as they said it, whether they were fiddling with a pencil or uh doing some kind of nervous mannerism, what their voice sounded like, and uh how much time they took to give their answer or the time that elapsed of silence between answers. So he used all of that to come up with his picture. And so an example, uh of how Kelly might interpret an answer was with Herman Göring. He showed oh Göring one of the Rorschach cards and Göring replied that he saw a demon with a fat belly. so Kelly, since he believed any answer was a projection, uh thought that this would kid that Göring was referring to himself. He was a large man. He had a big belly himself. And uh because of that response and others that Göring gave, Kelly came to believe that Göring was highly concerned with himself and saw the world through largely his own concerns and ambitions, a kind of narcissism. um And so that was one of the labels that Kelly applied to Göring. And then uh Kelly did use some other uh assessments. He an assessment called the thematic apperception test that might still be used today, similar to the Rorschach, except the images that are shown to the subject are representational. And They show a picture of people doing something and the subject is asked to tell a story from that. And uh in addition to those tests, I said, Kelly relied heavily on uh interviews, his conversations to form a picture of the subjects. you said multiple hours. You said hundreds and thousands of hours. How how long was Kelly with the because all the 22 defendants? yet hundreds of hours and it was over a period from June of 1945 through the end of Kelly's time in Nuremberg which came to an end in January 1946. So what is that? It's about eight months something like that. Right, that's right. Yes. So, so I mean, there's multiple questions to ask here. I guess, I guess the your point was very interesting about the the Rorschach test, because if somebody suppose told me and I'm and I'm assessing somebody and they said, they see a devil with a fat belly, I would be my first perception would not. necessarily be that they seeing them could be seeing somebody threatening them or something like that as well. So it already shows how the work a test like that is very subjective on who is interviewing as well as doesn't it? Yes, and Kelly himself said that interpreting Rorschach results was as much art as science. And this is probably what has led to the decline in the use of this test over the years, maybe too much art and not enough science. Yeah. OK, so I guess the next question I have to I have to ask is. He what were the sort of big conclusions which he came to from all this? think that's the key question, isn't it? Because everybody thought there is a quote unquote, like Nazi disease or something which is linked to all these people. But what were. Kelly's findings. That was his hypothesis going into it, that there was what he called a Nazi virus, not a real virus, but some shared disorder. But through all of his time with them and testing, et cetera, he found not only no shared virus, but no virus that these men, he believed, were essentially normal in their personalities. And that was... very upsetting to him because what it told him two very frightening things. One was that psychiatry uh could not explain them, could not explain their behaviors. If so, was there a way to explain them? But it also uh showed to Dr. Kelly that if these men were essentially in the normal range of human behavior, that must mean there are others like them all around us. Of course, not that everybody is like that and capable of crimes like that, but that there are those around us who are. And if that's the case, then it meant that Defeating Germany and Italy in World War II would not put an end to fascism and other forms of authoritarianism that these kinds of people produce. That even the trials meant to punish the wrongdoers would not put an end to any of that. That humanity is engaged in a constant struggle. against these people who are opportunists wanting to exert power over the rest of us. And oh Kelly surmised that these people are not only working in government and politics and the military, they also work in all areas of human endeavor. uh Academia, oh the law, book authors, podcasters, everyone. And all this was really, it turned Kelly's professional world upside down, so much so that when he returned to the States in 1946, he began working on a book which he eventually published the next year. It's titled 22 Cells in Nuremberg, Laying This Out. warning uh not just Americans, but everybody living in a democracy that this isn't gone, oh that authoritarianism may be weak right now because of the end of the war, but it's coming back and that we need to be prepared for it. And Kelly even laid out a plan for preparing for it and perhaps preventing its rise in the U.S. um It's probably worth mentioning here that Kelly, um that others disagreed with Kelly on this. There was a psychologist named Gustav Gilbert, who was also working among the German defendants at the same time Kelly was. And he came to different conclusions, even using some of the same testing results and interviewing the same defendants. He believed that some of the defendants did have serious psychiatric disorders and that that itself could account for their behavior. But I like Kelly's conclusions better for two reasons. One, I think history has borne out a lot of what he predicted or said could happen. We're seeing it now. And also, when you think of perpetrators like this as monsters or as insane men, uh it feels to me like you're absolving them of responsibility. Monsters will be monsters. Monsters can't be angels. uh But people who make choices and choose to do evil things can be held responsible and should be. And that was the point of the trial. Yeah, it's fascinating because I think also scientifically that's been proving you with a new hit of Milgram's experiments Zimbardo the prison experiment where just for people who don't know, very briefly say just to say this can happen and this kind of authoritarian authoritarianism can happen not it's been shown just not just happen in Germany, but a man called Milgram did a study where he brought people in and they had to administer electric shocks to people. They couldn't see them. They could hear them screaming if they got the answers, they had to answer questions if they got them wrong, they got electric shocks and it went all the way up to like a level that could have possibly killed them. And I think it was 70 % went all the way just because they were told to do it. That was a very brief explanation of that, but Milgram and Zimbabwe examples, just to back up what Kelly was saying there. Can I add one funny note to this because it's always stuck out in my head from undergrad. So in undergraduate psychology, they obviously teach you these kind of key seminal experiments and they were talking about Milgram's experiment and it being replicated in different countries. And apparently the least obedient, the least likely people from the studies which they did in various countries were actually Australians, which is quite funny. it is. with the criminal past, maybe they just don't like. But. Yeah, I mean, I guess I guess it was being taught in New Zealand lecture, so maybe it's not even true. Maybe they're just doing it to get a laugh out of us. But it was quite funny. hadn't heard that before, but that is interesting, if true. After but yeah, the Zombardo experiment the Stanford Prison study that that's a very good example they had to cancel that study because what they had done is they had split And I Jack you can correct me if I'm wrong here But they had basically split people into two groups being prisoners and being prison guards and I think by the fifth or sixth day they had to stop the experiment because of the the violations or the torture being committed by the prison guards on the prisoners. know there's a little bit of, well, definitely ethical issues with the study, but there's a little bit of questions around how robust the study is with arguments that like some of the prison guards, people being prison guards, weren't taking it seriously or they didn't mean it or whatever. overall, the study had to be stopped because just a basic grouping. can within five, six days cause uh massive divisions. And there have been attempts also to apply that kind of study directly to World War II and what happened. There was a book published some years ago called Hitler's Willing Executioners by Goldhagen. And it was about the people who carried out orders willingly, without argument. uh orders that resulted in the deaths of uncountable number of people. And uh the difference between Kelly and oh that kind of study is that Kelly, because of who he was presented with, he was working with the leaders, the people who were issuing the orders, not the people who were following the orders. And so, Kelly was interested in that motivation and among these men, the opportunism, the false patriotism that they professed to justify what they were doing and uh loyalty to Hitler, et cetera. But he believed that much of it was about personal gain. rise to the top personally. Ideology, the Nazi ideology, was the ladder they climbed, but they could have climbed any number of different ladders to get there if it would help them. Yeah, so on top it's personal gain below it's more kind of some of the expert like the um authoritarians, terriers and authoritarians. I will get, I will get the the, my mouth isn't working today, authority and fear I guess fear as well kind of really driving it. m But it's you're saying about Kelly coming back and writing his books I know he was as you said he was quite disturbed from what happened to him and you know and his experiences in Germany. em And you said that he wrote almost like a manual, did you say, if this happens again? Could you maybe chat about that a little bit and how that kind of maybe brings back to more contemporary and modern day? Yes, it's a section of the book. And I covered in chapter eight of the Nazi and the psychiatrist, my book. And um Kelly uh came back to the US with changed eyes. Having spent so much time among those defendants, he saw politics and uh and the social workings of the United States differently. So for instance, he came back and he saw what was happening in the American South. This was a time of uh law enforced segregation, Jim Crow laws, restrictions on black voting, all of that. And it looked to him, like an extension of Nazism. And not just the laws, but also the people, the politicians, the uh Southern governors, senators, members of Congress who were enforcing this and issuing propaganda that was playing upon the emotions of their constituents. And so there were three parts to the plan that Kelly laid out. One had to do with education. And this is a very ambitious thing to propose. But he believed that in the US, the educational system did not enough emphasize critical thinking and the development of critical thinking. That means coming to conclusions, forming opinions on the basis of evidence from a wide field of credible sources. And when people don't do that, they allow their emotions to rule their decision making and also things like perceived grievances that they feel. And that makes them ripe for the efforts of propagandists. So that was one part of Kelly's proposed plan. The other had to do with voting. uh Kelly was seeing restrictions that were widespread in the South on Black voters. He believed that voting should be made easier, not more difficult for, in order for eligible voters to cast their ballots. And this is something that in the U.S. anyway, we are seeing happen again. There are a number of American states and also proposals in, up before U.S. Congress right now on the federal level that make it more difficult to vote. For everyone, yes, it may weed out unqualified voters, but also it makes it harder for qualified voters to vote. And Kelly believed that an electorate that included the widest possible group of eligible voters was oh a way to prevent authoritarians from gaining power. And then the third leg of his proposal, I'm not sure how I feel about this, but he believed that it should be mandatory for candidates for political office to undergo psychiatric examinations before running for office. and that the results of those examinations could disqualify them from office. um I have very mixed feelings about that for a lot of reasons. I don't think necessarily that having a psychiatric disorder should disqualify somebody from holding office. But also who conducts the examination, who makes the judgment seems fraught with a lot of problems to me. I mean, with the third one, it also doesn't necessarily make sense if your conclusions of your work at Nuremberg suggest that there's no real difference in these people than how is it all of a sudden? Psychiatric illness is regarded. It feels like I've forgotten the name of the other psychiatrist who you said was there who had a different opinion. I feel like something Gilbert might write if you if the theory is that there is a Nazi or fascist disorder which people have. It's inconsistent thinking. ah You mentioned about the second one that uh with voting laws, you're seeing this in the US, I can say in New Zealand as well. There are certain changes which have been proposed at the moment, which have similar effects, which sort of lead to voter disenfranchisement, just making it hard to vote in general. But I wanted to question the first point, which is what do you think about the critical thinking in education? um Have education standards changed since oh Douglas was proposing these in the US? Do you think any countries do it better than others? Have you even looked at such a thing? uh I'm not uh an expert on uh education, educational systems around the world. uh I believe that uh in the US, uh schools and colleges and universities are inconsistent oh in how they teach critical thinking. Some emphasize it. And I think that comes along with it's part of emphasizing the liberal arts, wide range of fields of study instead of instant specialization once you enroll in a college or university, and then in public education, so kindergarten through 12th grade. I think there are many students, unfortunately, who don't receive any exposure to critical thinking at all. And so they're vulnerable to propaganda as a result. Yeah, that's a more critical thinking needed maybe. So you've kind of spoken about the lobotomies in like the kind of the 30s to 60s and the Neuremburg trials. Is there anything else you're working on maybe a little bit more recent or any other kind of interesting history, psychiatry, or non-monums you've not had chance to maybe delve into much? oh Yes, oh there's oh a couple of books I've worked on since The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, which was published in 2013. oh One is called The Lost Brothers, and it's a book about the disappearance of three young brothers. oh a disappearance that happened long ago in 1951 in Minneapolis, the city where I live. And this case was interesting to me because there's a mystery of what happened to the boys. Even now, no one knows. But it's also the case that more than 70 years later now, 75, I guess, the family is still searching for these boys. So the younger siblings who came after are searching for their older brothers who would be uh pushing 80 years old now. And so I was intrigued by that. phenomenon in the family that so many years after the boys disappeared, you know, between the ages of four and eight, that the family members are still looking. So the book is, oh does treat what happened to the boys, but it also treats what is happening in this family that makes them want a particular kind of closure. which is the closure of uh discovering what the brother's fate was. There are other kinds of closure that they could pursue, but haven't. So that's one book. And then I just finished uh my manuscript for another book that'll be published in October, 2026. That book is called The Case of the Autographed Corpse. And it's a book that examines injustices that happened on a couple of Apache Indian reservations in the southwest of the US in the middle decades of the 20th century, focusing on one man, Silas John Edwards, an Apache medicine man who was wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife on one of the reservations in 1933 and spent 20 years in prison seeking relief. Finally, he wrote to a very famous mystery author of the time, Earl Stanley Gardner, who wrote all the Perry Mason mystery books and was one of the bestselling authors in the world then. And together, they reinvestigated Silas John's case uh and got him out. uh so some of the book is about why do wrongful convictions happen? what leads juries and judges to convict someone like Silas John on the flimsiest and I have to say stupidest of evidence, convict him of a very serious crime. And so there is a long history, long interesting history of wrongful convictions and attempts to understand them. And the book goes into that as well as directly following Silas John's Lots of lots going on and it's all yeah law and justice it's fantastic. Sorry, gone you see you. Yeah, yeah, no, um the book, the book just remind me we I mean, it's been about a year now, but we had a guest up. We had a guest on who spoke about wrongful convictions from a psychology perspective, particularly false memories and leading to false testimony within wrongful convictions and the work that she's doing. Faye Skelton from Edinburgh Napier University over here in the UK said she does a lot of work in the US as well around this with current cases. So. Very interesting. we also interviewed another PhD researcher who was looking at autism and test and interrogation and how some of the signs of... Do you remember this, Beth, if I'm saying it wrong? Yeah, some of the signs of evasion are also seen in sort of general autistic behavior. So you end up getting these sort of false... You uh not just confessions, but sort of like these acts of looking like guilty when you're not, which take, yeah, can take, would you say, investigations down a different path. Yeah, and just give like a general wrong vibe almost. m So it seems like obviously you work a lot of kind of things with like ethical dilemmas, psychiatry kind of history. m Do you think we're better equipped today to recognize dangerous group dynamics and moral disengagement maybe? Or do we think we're repeating patterns or have repeated patterns at any point? Well, in one respect, I think we are much better equipped now. If you look at Dr. Kelly's case, he, as it happens, was one of the first or maybe the first military psychiatrist to be placed to work among suspected war criminals. And because of that, he had no antecedents to refer to in how he should conduct himself. Who was he responsible to? oh It was often a mystery to him. he to regard these men, the German defendants, as his patients? oh He certainly treated them, oh not for any oh psychiatric disorders, but he, as a physician, treated them for other uh illnesses and things that came up that were harming their health. So was he responsible to them and bound by the limits of doctor-patient? uh confidentiality, all of that. But at the same time, he was an officer in the US Army. He had responsibilities to the military. He had been brought to the scene by the International Military Tribunal. uh So he was there at their behest. And on top of all of that, he also was providing information from the defendants to the prosecution in the case. So he felt a responsibility to them as well. And I think if this situation were happening now, instead of in 1945, 46, Kelly would have or should have behaved very differently. he should not have provided information to the prosecution. He should have clarified at the beginning who he was responsible to and whether the prisoners were his patients or not. If they were his patients, he should make their interest paramount. uh So it's hard for me to imagine that kind of uh scenario playing out now. And so to me, it means that we must be better equipped now. Yeah, just think the next question was going to be, how do you think psychology approached differently? But correct, very difficult to say. But this is very interesting. So you mentioned that he was working for the defendants, but also feeding information to the prosecution. If this was information which really helped the prosecution in their case, that becomes a big sort of validity of the trials, if you know what I mean, right? Like, regardless of the activity, I'm just thinking in general. um Yes, so I think it did help the prosecution in the case. In the movie Nuremberg, which was adapted from my book, um a big part of the story hinges upon the information that Kelly gave to the prosecution and viewers of the movie are given the impression that it was a turning point in a way that Kelly provided this information. I think in historical fact, it had less influence than the movie allows people to assume, but it did help. I just don't think it was huge. help and Kelly clearly felt conflicted about doing that yet he still did it and it shows uh how great the boundaries were. Yeah, I'd to talk about the movie for a little bit now, because how was that experience? mean, you did all this research, I mean, on Kelly, his book as well. And then you write yours and then you try to adapt it into a movie. What was that process like? Oh, your book's more documentary and more nonfiction. But like you mentioned, there's a bit of fiction added to the movie. Yeah, how do these lines cross? Yeah. It's uh complicated. um I, um the prospect of a movie first came before me, even before I wrote the book. uh I before I wrote the Nazi and the psychiatrist, I wrote an article on the same story in a magazine called Scientific American Mind. And uh And the man who would go on to direct and write Nuremberg saw that article and then later saw my proposal for the book I wanted to write and was very strongly interested in it and in adapting it. so the firstly article, then the book were optioned. And over a period of many years, took a long time for this movie to happen. I commented upon different drafts of the screenplay, four of them, I think, over the years. And I had to do a lot of thinking about what's my role as someone commenting on this. Am I the history police? Am I to try and enforce fact? I decided I didn't want that role and that it wouldn't help make Nuremberg a better movie if I took that role. Because movies, stories and movies are told differently than they are in nonfiction books. The movies are intended mainly to entertain and to emotionally move the audience. uh whereas my book, I had to make it 100 % factual. And yes, sure, I want to entertain and I want to tell a story, but I feel an obligation to my readers that what I tell them will be accurate. And uh so what I decided as the commenter was that I should limit my comments uh to... comments that I think will help make Nuremberg a better movie. And I certainly could not tell James Vanderbilt how to write a screenplay. I don't know how, and he really does. So it was a more limited parameters that I set for myself than you might assume. But I think my comments were of help. And it wasn't until 2023 that James finally got things together enough. meaning financing, casting and all that to get a production going with a new production company. And seeing, I didn't see the movie until uh September 2025 at its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. And that was an otherworldly experience, I have to say. uh Seeing some scenes play out. much as I had imagined them and that as fact said they should happen and then seeing other seasons go in uh scenes go in a different direction. So um when people ask me is it factually accurate I say it's I think it's accurate enough to deliver the messages that are that I think are important and to entertain and to move people. There are some maybe not too important deviations from fact, but I feel good about the movie and I am relieved that I can recommend it to my friends. Yes, because you did write it and it's important for you to be happy with it as well. It's almost like an extension, of course, of health and not so tired, but extension of like, almost like a baby that you've kind of grown and it's getting wings and flying away. But it sounds like they stuck to it mostly faithfully with a couple of creative kind of changes, which, as you said, is very important for a film. Otherwise people are going to watch it, which is, you and it's informing them about something that happened horrifically and that, you know, if it's not entertaining. you're not going to learn about it. it's playing off a bit. and it's important for me to understand that many, many more people will see this movie than will ever pick up my book. And so if I want the, you know, not just the story, but the ideas that are contained in the book to reach a wider audience, then this book is, or excuse me, this movie is an incredible way to do it. Yeah, it's quite emotive. Did you get much pushback or was it was the feedback quite positive when it came out? Well, there's two kinds of feedback that comes in. Initially, there's quite a bit from film critics and uh they've been overall positive about the movie. I've never read so many film reviews in my life. And they have... hobby horses, they like to ride things about filmmaking that are important to them, uh that they look for in any film. And then there are those who just average theater goers who have seen the film and they've been overwhelmingly positive about it. So I think there's a little bit of that divide that has happened. But what I'm most pleased about is that many of the people in the audiences have been younger people. And these are uh viewers who didn't know much about the trial, didn't know much about the German high command and the crimes they were charged with, didn't know much about the Holocaust. And now they know something. That's important. I'm sure Douglas Kelly's search on Wikipedia has gone up by 500%, 1000 % after all. Yeah, resurgence for him, he sounds like an incredibly interesting character who wanted to do good by what you're saying, but realised that we're all maybe just a very difficult situation. Right, his life went into a downward spiral after he returned from Nuremberg for many reasons. The professional crisis that I mentioned earlier, but also oh he drank too much, he had problems in his marriage, he was really difficult as a father to his children. He felt professionally ignored due to the flop that his book became. and he even moved in his specialty. When he died in 1958, he committed suicide. He was at that time a professor, not of psychiatry, but of criminology. So that was part of his search to find a discipline that could help explain people like the German war criminals. mean, uh it's the book flopping is very interesting to me, but it links back to, I guess, the point which you meant what you said about the Lost Brothers when you're talking about them about closure. And it's not very good closure when you say that these are just normal people. want somebody to give a good explanation and close the chapter that these are monsters for these reasons. And a book going. That's exactly what happened, I think. That this book came out in 1947, World War II was still fresh in everyone's memory. had been a long, historically murderous, bloody war. uh Trials were going on and nobody wanted to hear that these people could reappear again. It was just an unwelcome message. A slightly funnier question for you. What was the strangest or funniest critique you received? Because you've been reading a lot of reviews about the movie. Is there anything that sticks out being like, Well, the uh most interesting review to me, not by a professional film critic, came from Doug the son uh Before he watched the film, before he had a chance to see it, I called him. I had seen it and warned him about a couple of things in there that might distress him. One was the movie suggests that Dr. Kelly had a flirtation or some kind of romance with a reporter who's in Nuremberg to cover the trial. That did not happen. And in fact, uh Kelly was a happily married man when all this happened. And so I had to tell Doug, in this movie, your mother doesn't exist. And then the second thing was the impression that the movie gives that uh Dr. Kelly was drummed out. for giving up some information to this reporter that made the headlines and that that led to his dismissal from his work in Nuremberg. But that was not what happened. Kelly did get a scolding for doing that, but he continued afterwards. and left on his own decision and received an honorable discharge from the military and in fact a promotion in rank before he left the military. So I had to tell Doug about those and when he saw the movie his review was that he liked it, he thought it was well made, but that the man, this was Rami Malek who played Dr. Kelly in the movie, that the man shown in the film just didn't seem like his father. And I had talked earlier with Rami Malek about some of the adjustments he wanted to make and did make in the character for purposes of making the movie better. And so his Dr. Kelly was overall less confident and self-assured than the real Dr. Kelly was. And that's what Doug did not see in the film that he had, I guess, hoped to see. Yeah, that's interesting. Bring quite a bit together. If, let's say, if Dr Kelly was back here, what question would you ask him? I would ask him specifically, what can we do, you know, speaking as an American, would say, what can we do in the United States to, we can't prevent the rise of Donald Trump now, it's happened. So what can we do to bring about the downfall of Donald Trump? and the authoritarian movement and political environment that he has created. That's what I would ask him now. Do you you'd be disappointed seeing it happen? uh disappointed but not surprised at all because he said we should expect it. If you talk about the confidence and slightly narcissistic personality of his, you can also say that he would say, I told you so you didn't listen. He would, he would. And Dr. Kelly was the kind of person who would say, told you so many, many times over. Jack do you have a certain hot take you'd like to share? I think Dr. Kelly's work in Nuremberg is a great example of how trends and fashions and evolution produces changes in the practice of medicine, not just in psychiatry, but in all specialties. So Dr. Kelly was relying on this Rorschach inkblot assessment to diagnose uh patients. And now we know it's not reliable at all for that kind of diagnosis. So Dr. Kelly was no quack. He was doing what was the reached this, he was doing a standard thing for his era, but things change over time. And the same was true of Dr. Walter Freeman in his work on lobotomies. That was more controversial. but he believed that the way to treat some, if not most, serious psychiatric disorders was to produce changes in the brain. And uh most psychiatrists still believe that now, continue to believe it, using pharmaceuticals to make those changes, not surgery. uh But uh things change and uh things that look primitive from the past and things that we would not consider now. It's commonplace and medical practices that are traditional and common now will look barbaric in the future. That's very well said and put . I guess we asked about if you had a question for one famous person you wrote about, how about a question for the other? What about Freeman? If you had a question for what, if you were alive today, the father of lobotomy may be alive today. What would you ask him? One uh very strong characteristic of Walter Freeman was that he stuck with lobotomy to the very end, um even past the point when drugs came out that were more effective in helping patients with serious psychiatric illnesses and past the point when uh when many fellow psychiatrists turned against him. So uh I came to believe that lobotomy defined him. It came to define him as a physician. But I would want to ask him if that was really true. I would want to ask Walter Freeman, without lobotomies, What kind of physician would you be? What would you stand for? And what would you want to present to your patients? Because that's a question that I tried to address in my book, The Lobotomist, came to some ideas about it, but really, I don't know for sure. And when you're speaking about him, it reminds me more recently of the case with Andrew Wakefield m and the MMR vaccine. He's still absolutely not changing his opinion that these vaccines are dangerous. m So we see it happen again and again. it's, yeah, just stuck in, stuck in believing it. And in Freeman's time and in maybe in Wakefield's circle, there should have been more people monitoring this and if not trying to convince these doctors otherwise, then trying to protect patients against it. And that certainly didn't happen much with Freeman. He was never sued for malpractice or anything like that. So part of that is, these guys are behaving badly, but also what about the rest of us? What are we doing to stop it? We need to speak out more as basically what I think absolutely a really big kind of point of this is what if somebody had said, do we really think, you know, damaging part of the brain is going to actually, you know, change things or, you know, are we sure that, you know, the sample size of what 10 is definitely correct and is okay to publish? Yes, but so their colleagues like questioning these things more. It's very, very, very valid. Yes. Awesome. uh But do you have any final questions? No, I think I asked all my questions. I'm glad I got to ask the one about what you would say to Dr. Kelly. was a nice one. uh right, so then there's just one final thing from me, and this is more looking towards the future. If you have any from your learnings, if you have any advice to give us and our listeners before you leave, what would it be? Exercise critical thinking. That has become my mantra following Dr. Kelly's lead. And if you have a child who's not getting it in school, for instance, maybe that child can get it at home. But it is so important to prevent us. from becoming malleable and uh subject to the whims of authoritarians. Only when we can think for ourselves and draw evidence from a wide variety of sources and learn what is a credible source and what isn't, uh can we fight this off in our world. Incredible. Awesome. So. brings that to the end perfectly. Awesome. So thank you so much, Jack. It was an absolute pleasure. It's been honestly so incredibly interesting to hear all about this. Thank you for taking the time to chat to us. It's history, psychiatry, it's all fascinating. Thanks for inviting me. It's been wonderful being here with you. Awesome. Take care and thank you everybody for listening. Until next time.