Gustav Thiel speaks to the psychiatrist accused of electrocuting gay soldiers
T HE psychiatrist accused this week of using electric shocks to reprogramme gay soldiers has bitten back, claiming he only used drugs and a “battery-operated device” on his patients.
Speaking from Canada, Dr Aubrey Levine said he flashed pornographic pictures in front of the soldiers as part of the treatment, but his five-year efforts were not restricted to “treating” the military’s homosexuals.
Levine, who left South Africa six years ago to escape the growing crime wave, said the treatment – reciprocal inhibition aversion therapy – was “widely accepted at the time … it was always done with the full permission of the patients, even if they were under severe stress”.
He said he has no regrets because he did nothing wrong, and the allegations against him were “preposterous”.
Levine (57) was fingered earlier this week ahead of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings into abuses by the medical profession. According to the Health and Human Rights Project, he electrocuted gay soldiers when he was chief psychiatrist at the Voortrekkerhoogte military hospital near Pretoria during the 1970s.
The project, a joint effort of the department of community health at the University of Cape Town and Cape Town’s trauma centre for victims of violence and torture, claimed Levine would then show the patients Playboy centrefolds and “verbally describe the women portrayed in glowing and positive terms”.
Such treatment has previously been more closely associated with Tom Sharpe’s book Indecent Exposure, a parody on old South Africa in which police were given electric shock therapy to deter them from sexual relations with black women.
In the book, the patients emerged from the shock treatment as homosexuals. Levine said he had never met Sharpe; the author was unavailable for comment.
Levine worked at the hospital from 1969 to 1974, and held the rank of colonel. He said the therapy he used was given across the board to about 450 patients, only nine of them gay.
The patients were given adomorphine, a pain-reducing substance, with the help of a “battery-operated device” widely used by physiotherapists.
“We never used electrical shocks, although the therapy could have lead to anxiety attacks and nausea,” he said.
Patients were shown pictures of naked men and women and encouraged to fantasize about them, but Levine denied Playboy centrefolds were involved. The normal fare came from Scope magazine, he said.
“We had a collection of slides of both naked men and women which were shown to patients under treatment, but they received therapy at the time, not electrical shocks. It was one of the few behavioral treatments available, and although it isn’t used anymore, it was certainly widely accepted at the time.”
Levine said the Health and Human Rights Project’s submission was “based on distortions of the facts, and raises doubts about not only my credibility but also about several other doctors who worked with me”.
The project – which based its submission on an article in the December 1986 issue of the War Register, a publication of the Committee of South African War Registers – also accused Levine of devising brutal methods to treat military drug users.
Levine spent some time at Mapungubwe on the South African border between Zimbabwe and Botswana, at a special infantry unit established in 1971 to treat drug abusers.
Levine said although it was known that more than a third of recruits used drugs, he never devised any method for them, “except for accepted methods of therapy. When I left the camp in 1974, the situation there deteriorated and drug abuse in the camp became rife.
“At my time the camp had a very sound reputation, but unfortunately this was not true after I left and there certainly were soldiers who were abused after I left.”
Though the accusations were released on Monday, Levine was not actually named in the formal truth commission hearings because he only received a letter about the accusations against him last week.
“I think the work of the commission is very important because the truth must somehow come out,” he said. “I would also like to face the person who gave out the information about what allegedly happened at the hospital.
“The Health and Human Rights Project calls me a bad apple, but it does not name any other people specifically. In addition, I have already, it seems, been tried and convicted by the media.”