'Capitalism makes you ill': the radical 70s 'anti-therapists' who turned to terrorism

The theories behind Germany's Socialist Patients Collective turned medical treatment on its head - but led some of them to the Red Army Faction

"Turn illness into a weapon," proclaimed the manifesto of the SPK, or Socialist Patients' Collective. "The kidney stone that makes you suffer," it declared, was the same as "the stone thrown into the control room of capitalism." Published in 1972 by a group of students at Heidelberg University - with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre, who said he was "extremely impressed" by its ideas - the SPK's manifesto stated that mental illnesses were the result of wider ills in capitalist societies. To heal the patient, the patient had to heal the system first - by violent means, if necessary.