[3] Due to this fact, it is acknowledged that functions of psychiatry are not limited to identifying and removing biological anomalies that cause "mental illnesses", caring for patients and alleviating their sufferings, but they also apply to the scope of their civil rights.
Psychiatrists were expected to deal with general medical issues and problems relating to epidemic and infectious diseases, witness corporal punishment, and to attend executions.
These were prepared by lawyer Alexander Rudyakov, who was the legal adviser to the chief psychiatrist of the Moscow Oblast, and read that the grounds for urgent hospitalization was when an ill person was of social danger.
[9] Only in the beginning of 1988, the USSR adopted the Statute on Conditions and Procedures for the Provision of Psychiatric Assistance, which has been the first legal act in this field and has certainly played a positive role for Soviet psychiatry.
[9] In 1992, in Russia, the enactment of the law took place under dramatic circumstances, even with the consideration that there was an 80-year delay for any mental health legislation and given the fact that political abuse of psychiatry was unprecedentedly widespread and denied for two decades from 1968 to 1988.
[1] When Soviet rule was coming to an end, the decision to develop a law on mental health was made by senior officials and under the threat of economic sanctions from the United States.
[1] That is a major post-Soviet achievement of Russian psychiatry and the foundation for a basically new attitude to the mentally ill as persons reserving all their civil and political rights and freedoms.
[24] In 1989, the World Psychiatric Association issued a statement that includes the following phrase: "Involuntary intervention is a great infringement of the human rights and the fundamental freedom of a patient.
[34] Psychologist-criminalist Nataliya Varskaya says that neuroleptics that are applied to serious patients make them "vegetables", but the ill stop posing a danger to citizens; alas, but there are no other ways to secure surrounding people against them.
[43] Despite the 1992 Russian Mental Health Law, coercive psychiatry in Russia remains generally unregulated and fashioned by the same trends toward hyperdiagnosis and overreliance on institutional care characteristic of the Soviet period.
[54] As Robert van Voren, the chief executive of the Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry, supposes, the Russians want to have their compatriots with mental disorders locked up outside the city and do not want to have them in community.
Forensic psychiatric expert examination has deteriorated because of the lack of competition, and courts implicitly fulfill wishes of the hierarchy of executive authority affected by corruption.
[38] Discrediting the citizens by instituting farfetched proceedings to obtain a ground for examination is a favorite tactic of officials whose interests are hurt by the active members of public.
You see, human rights activists are people who, due to their mental pathology, are unable to restrain themselves within the standards of society, and the West encourages their inability to do so.
[83] The application of violence must be based on the mental health law, must be as much as possible transparent and monitored by representatives of the interests of persons who are in need of involuntary examination and treatment.
[82] Only later, after the appropriate legal measures for social protection have been taken, the psychiatrist must respond to the queries of law enforcement and judicial authorities by solving the issues of involuntary hospitalization, sanity, etc.
[82] In Russia, the psychiatrist is vested with punitive functions, is involved in involuntary hospitalization and, according to Gushansky, the state machine hides behind his back, actually manipulating the doctor.
), she says, is, in fact, used by doctors in accordance with the Hippocratic Oath to do everything to save the patient's life, the listed criteria should be generally valid, i.e. applied also to somatic diseases.
[84] According to Romek, the restriction of civil rights of a person to the extent of his forced isolation based on the possibility alone of his committing illegal acts, which is defined through the notions about it in psychiatry—a discipline very far not only from jurisprudence but from socio-humanitarian knowledge in general, clearly violates the fundamental principle of the democratic justice—presumption of innocence.
as potential causes of criminal insanity and, on the other hand, the diagnostics of mental disorders is based on very vague descriptions of abnormal behavior, almost anyone can be subjected to involuntary hospitalization by the criterion of social danger and in strict accordance with the Law.
In addition to the constitution and general international law, the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) asserts that current legislation does not comply with the European practice of mental health care.
MHG legal programs head, Natalia Kravchuk, commented on the case of Rakevich v. Russia considered in the European Court of Human Rights: … Russian legislation in this area is featureless and vague.
"[37] Nikolay Suatbaev expressed a similar opinion, stating that unlawful behavior should be dealt with by police, a public prosecutor's office, a court, even if an offender is mentally ill; after all, only if he is not deprived of his legal capacity, he has rights and obligations equal to those of the healthy.
[32] The refusal to institute criminal proceedings is Illegal if based on the fact alone that the offender is on the psychiatrist's registry and all the more so if accompanied by the delivery of the materials "for taking measures" to the dispensary, which by definition is not a punitive organ.
[32] New York City, for example, has no dispensaries at all, and if a person broke the law, it is a problem of the police; only later psychiatrists investigate if there is concern of a mental health issue, Vladimir Pshizov writes.
[87] In Fomin's words, no one disputes that only a specialist can make a diagnosis but vesting a psychiatrist with the unlimited power to decide the fate of a person is an extreme legislative innovation peculiar at present only to Russia.
[87] In 2008, during a scientific and practical conference held by the Advocacy Chamber of the Moscow Oblast, 200 leading legal scholars and human rights defenders noted the same trend when a tool for "relatively honest" encroachment upon property more and more often became the Mental Health Law.
[90] Russian psychiatrists Valery Krasnov, Isaak Gurovich and Alexey Bobrov suppose the Law works successfully enough,[51] though the results of monitorings show that the violations of the rights of patients in psychiatric hospitals are massive.
[91] According to former Radio Liberty commentator Eugene Novozhilov, who was persecuted by psychiatrists, human rights of a person registered in a psychiatric dispensary in Russia exist only on paper.
[94] Individual cases can be solved by litigation at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, however it does not change the attitudes of both mental health professionals and government officials.