Host of VH1’s Couples Therapy Blasts Maternal-Deprivation Government Experiments on Baby Monkeys

Dr. Jenn Berman Joins PETA in Protesting NIH-Funded Terrorizing of Infant Monkeys

For Immediate Release:
November 21, 2014

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

As the host of VH1’s Couples Therapy, celebrity psychotherapist Dr. Jenn Berman has seen it all—but as she writes in an op-ed available on TheHill.com, she was still shocked to see video footage released by PETA that reveals how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) breeds hundreds of monkeys to suffer from mental illness, tears the babies away from their mothers at birth and subjects them to years of taxpayer-funded experiments designed to cause, worsen, and measure their severe fear, depression, and anxiety.

As Dr. Berman writes in her op-ed, NIH experimenters were caught on camera callously laughing and joking about the infant monkeys’ distress—something she calls “tremendously unsettling” and a possible indication of antisocial personality disorder.

“In one video clip released by PETA, NIH staff members can be heard laughing while a mother monkey they sedated struggles to stay awake to comfort her increasingly frantic baby . . . . Just because this abusive behavior is occurring in a laboratory and cloaked in ‘science’ is no reason to discount its gravity,” writes Dr. Berman. “NIH experimenters say that they are studying psychopathic behavior in monkeys, but it’s clear that they—and the people who keep giving them millions to do it—are the ones who need to have their heads examined.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on … or abuse in any other way”—is calling for an immediate end to the experiments, which have gone on for 30 years and received $30 million from tax funds in just the past seven years.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.

Dr. Berman’s op-ed is available here.