Nils Bejerot - Career Highlights

Career Highlights

He is best known for several things:

• His role as a psychiatric adviser during the 1973 Norrmalmstorg robbery, and his coinage of the term Stockholm Syndrome to refer to the way in which the hostages become grateful to the hostage-takers . The term 'Stockholm Syndrome' has been used on millions of Internet pages.

• His strong opposition to legalization or prescription programs for narcotic drugs. He advocated zero tolerance for illegal use and possession of drugs, including all drugs not covered by prescription, something that today is law in Sweden. In the early 1980s, he became one of the "Top 10 opinion molders" in Sweden for this. Bejerot is by UNODC and many others recognized as founder of the Swedish strategy against recreational use of drugs. His demand for zero tolerance as a drug policy was for a long time seen as extreme, but during the late 1970s opinion changed. He is without doubt the person most responsible for changing the Swedish drug policy in a restrictive direction something that made him a controversial person, both before and after his death. Many people considered Bejerot as a good humanist advocating a viable policy against narcotics and Robert DuPont considers him "the hero of the Swedish drug abuse story." Others view this as a reactionary hindering of new treatment practices against drug abuse.

• His strong opposition against violence in comic books, which was the subject of his 1954 book Barn, serie, samhälle (Children, Comics, Society), itself largely an adaptation of Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent, also published in 1954.