Some interesting history to remind you that psychiatry is a joke science that comes up with new insane shit to do to people every decade. Article is written by a whiny merchant who makes it about nazis somehow but the details are fascinating. There's just so much here but I'll try to narrow down the juiciest bits.

Basically this crazy b-word had a few miscarriages then decided that you could cure schizophrenia by forcing people to do adult baby stuff with diapers and breastfeeding. She'd beat and abuse them if they didn't follow her orders and call her mommy. Despite her treatments being batshit insane, psychiatrists protected her and defended her from any legal consequences even after one of her patients died. Some psychiatrists STILL use her methods even now.

Summary:

The height of Schiff’s popularity coincided with the heyday of transactional analysis, or TA, a theory and methodology of psychotherapy that analyzes transactions between people by dividing the personality into Parent, Adult, and Child ego states. TA was popularized in the mid- to late 60s by a couple of best-selling books, first Berne’s Games People Play and then Thomas Harris’s I’m OK–You’re OK.

Most TA therapists used TA to treat people who were seeking personal growth. Schiff used it to treat people with schizophrenia. In 1969 she made an extraordinary claim: that she had cured 14 patients. Berne invited her back to the seminar as a guest lecturer and enthusiastically introduced her by saying, “She takes people into her house that are very confused and unconfuses them, which confuses some people in the profession because it isn’t supposed to work.”

Back then, little was known about what caused schizophrenia. While some researchers contended that the disease had biochemical origins, a common view, and the one to which Schiff subscribed, associated it with faulty parenting. Schiff considered “sick feelings” and psychotic anger “relics of a sick infancy and childhood” and believed that if a patient regressed to infancy or childhood–to a period that predated the pathology–the therapist could eliminate the “negative messages” instilled by the parents and substitute healthy ones as the patient progressed through each developmental stage. Schiff called the process reparenting, and described it to her TA colleagues as “de-cathecting” the patient’s Parent ego state and then re-creating it from scratch.

Reparenting required an enormous commitment from the therapist. Schiff’s patients moved into her six-bedroom house in Fredericksburg, Virginia; severed ties with their biological parents; and began calling her “mom” and her husband, Moe (also a psychiatric social worker), “dad.” Schiff identified each patient’s regressed age as the age at which the patient seemed to function and then treated him as if he were actually that age–which meant she wound up diapering, bottle-feeding, bathing, and disciplining adult patients. Only she didn’t refer to them as adults or patients, even when speaking about them to her colleagues. She always called them her children or her “schizophrenic babies.”

Schiff relished the role of mother. Out of seven pregnancies, she’d been blessed with only three children. Her first baby died in infancy, and she suffered three miscarriages. The reparented child’s new mother “is the most important thing in the entire world,” Schiff wrote in a 1969 article that introduced reparenting to her colleagues. “Nothing must be allowed to threaten his relationship with her.” By then, the 35-year-old Schiff had made herself “the most important thing” to a lot of people. When the New York Times published a feature about her that year, she was mothering 18 “children” whose real ages ranged from 9 to 29. “Between bottles,” the reporter observed, “some of them smoke cigarettes.”

She legally adopted some of her “children,” credited them with helping her develop her ideas, and sometimes deferred to them for comment when speaking to groups.

Neither the press nor Schiff’s colleagues seemed concerned that she’d written of administering corporal punishments, such as spankings and belt whippings. Although regression was controversial in traditional therapy and touching patients taboo–whether hugging or spanking–Schiff’s peers generally lauded her efforts. When questioned about her methods, Schiff said, simply, that they worked.

On October 23, Schiff selected her first reparented and adopted son, Aaron, as the Person in Charge of the 20 or so people in the house that day. Aaron was perhaps Schiff’s greatest success story. He had come to her for treatment seven years earlier in Virginia, a 19-year-old fright of a man with long, matted, dandruff-caked hair and a ratty beard. He smelled bad and drooled, according to Schiff’s book; his clothes “were literally rotting off him.” He was delusional, paranoid, and, she figured, homicidal. He curled up in her lap one day and spontaneously regressed, attempting to nurse. Schiff moved him into her house. He remained in an infantile state for months, and while “growing up” he sometimes struck Schiff about the face. He was often able to articulate what he was experiencing, however, and it was while working with him that Schiff developed her theories on reparenting.

Schiff collected more and more “babies,” almost compulsively it seemed. Her husband Moe later said that fame had gone to her head, that she’d developed grandiose ideas about her capacity to handle patients. When Schiff, over his protests, returned from a workshop in LA with their 36th schizophrenic baby, Moe left her. A few months later, Schiff and about 25 of her “children” caravanned out to California trailing U-Hauls. They settled in Alamo, a small city 28 miles west of San Francisco. A little more than a year later, a new patient in her care met an untimely death.

In the fall of 1972, a paranoid schizophrenic named John Hartwell moved into the cottage behind Schiff’s two-story house in Alamo. Schiff ran the house and cottage with the help of a psychiatric consultant, a few staff members, and a designated Person in Charge, who made sure that everything ran smoothly when she wasn’t around.

That morning Aaron decided to give John Hartwell a bath. He helped the boy undress, bound his hands and feet with rope, and let him soak in a tub for about five minutes. The water was too hot. Hartwell emerged from the bath severely scalded. He died in a hospital three weeks later, just after his 18th birthday. Third-degree burns covered more than 65 percent of his body. Jacqui Schiff called the death an unfortunate accident and defended Aaron against criticism: Aaron had bound Hartwell’s limbs because the boy was impulsively violent; Aaron had tested the water temperature with his hand; Hartwell had made no outcry.

Schiff blamed Hartwell’s death on a new water heater and unsuccessfully sued the companies that had manufactured, sold, and installed it.

In the days following the scalding incident, the state Department of Mental Hygiene denied Schiff’s pending application for an operating license for the Alamo home and ordered her to cease operations there. A few weeks later, a fire destroyed the house. Schiff quickly rebounded. She reparented patients in other houses and continued training therapists.

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One morning toward the end of the week, Schiff sent Jacobs’s group outside for a marathon therapy session, instructing everyone to “get little.” Jacobs found the order to regress a bit odd–there wasn’t a schizophrenic among them–but he went along with it. He even attempted to settle a grievance by throwing a rubber ball at someone, and then stood there shamefaced as he got hollered at for it. After a kid’s lunch–cheeseburgers, french fries, Kool-Aid, and ice cream–Jacobs was wearing down. “At about three o’clock,” he recalls, “I was like fricking bored.” Schiff had disappeared inside with a few women from the group, so Jacobs told one of her minions that he’d had it with the kid stuff. He was informed that he needed Schiff’s permission to be an adult again. He went to find her and came across a bizarre scene: the three women she’d taken inside lay on the floor in diapers.

Schiff motioned for Jacobs to sit down, and he watched in astonishment as she berated one of the women for failing to defecate, calling her “stubborn and resistant.” Then, as if the scene wasn’t weird enough, two of Schiff’s sons–one reparented, one biological–burst into the room scuffling with a young female patient they were dragging toward a corner. Schiff often made patients stand in corners. She considered “corner contracts” a form of “passivity confrontation,” as they afforded patients the opportunity to contemplate their behavior or issues of importance to them. The young woman getting hauled off to the corner, however, resisted adamantly and at one point tried to knee the reparented son, Shea. When Jacobs intervened, Schiff told him to mind his own business, that they knew what they were doing. Jacobs says that Shea slammed the woman into the corner, and that when Jacobs again protested, Schiff said that if he didn’t back off she would kick him out of the workshop and send a letter to his ITAA file that might ruin his chance of ever becoming a teaching member.

Despite the peculiar scalding death in 1972, the ITAA didn’t closely scrutinize Schiff’s methods until almost five years later, after a patient filed a complaint with the association’s ethics committee.

Schiff, it turned out, had left Virginia in disrepute. A patient at the Schiff Rehabilitation Project in Fredericksburg had charged her with assault and battery, saying he’d been forcibly gagged, diapered, tied to a bed, and beaten, on more than one occasion to the point of blacking out.

Another patient echoed his claims of abuse. She gave a deposition in the case describing an atmosphere of terror in which the cardinal sin was failing to call Schiff “mom.” For that, patients could expect a severe beating. She said that one patient was forced to drink dish-washing detergent every time he mentioned his natural parents. She said that she once witnessed Schiff suckling a patient and that she had been offered Schiff’s breast as well, with the caveat not to be too disappointed if mom failed to produce milk. The patient also said that Schiff had promised not to kill her unless it was “absolutely necessary” and that Schiff once had beaten her bloody with a riding crop. A municipal court judge convicted Schiff and a reparented son named Eric of assault and battery, but the conviction was overturned six days later after someone pointed out that Fredericksburg didn’t actually have laws against assault and battery. They had been omitted from the books a few years earlier, when the city code was rewritten. Schiff and Eric escaped reprosecution in state court (they had moved to California earlier in the year), but the judge issued an injunction prohibiting Schiff from operating the Schiff Rehabilitation Project or “any similar or related establishment” in the state of Virginia. She hadn’t simply left Virginia, Jacobs reasoned. She’d been banished.