Dorothea Buck-Zerchin, aged 90 and who this year presented a key-note speech at the World Psychiatric Association’s congress in Dresden, Germany, calls upon psychiatry to be an “empirical science based on the experiences of patients.”

Buck-Zerchin’s account is in a chapter in a new book claiming to document “proven alternatives to psychiatry” from around the world. She writes that the sterilisation, given after she was admitted for psychosis, was hidden from her.

"Even after the operation, it was not a doctor or a nurse who told me what had been done to me, but a fellow female patient,” she writes. “I was distraught”

Buck-Zerchin’s chapter - today published exclusively in full at psychminded.co.uk - includes other incidents of inhumane treatment.

"Rest was given [to patients] with wet packs and with sedating injections of paraldehyde. A wet pack was made of cold, wet sheets bound so tightly that one could no longer move. From our body temperature, the sheets would become first warm and then hot. I would cry out in rage at this senseless restraint in these hot sheets.”

Buck-Zerchin writes that, during the Nazi eugenics "euthanasia” policy, 300,000 asylum and nursing care home patients were gassed, poisoned or starved to death.

Buck-Zerchin, a mental health campaigner in Germany for more than 30 years, is opposed to biological psychiatry.

"The decades of backwardness of this kind of psychiatry have not been overcome despite considerable efforts in recent years.

"It remains devoid of conversation and uses medication even under coercion and restraint just to fight the symptoms, rather than aim for understanding," she writes.