Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union
[4][5] The term "philosophical intoxication", for instance, was widely applied to the mental disorders diagnosed when people disagreed with the country's Communist leaders and, by referring to the writings of the Founding Fathers of Marxism–Leninism—Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin—made them the target of criticism.
[9] The psychiatric incarceration of certain individuals was prompted by their attempts to emigrate, to distribute or possess prohibited documents or books, to participate in civil rights protests and demonstrations, and become involved in forbidden religious activities.
"[22] Punitive psychiatry is neither a discrete subject nor a psychiatric specialty but, rather, it is an emergency arising within many applied sciences in totalitarian countries where members of a profession may feel themselves compelled to serve the diktats of power.
The event was dedicated, supposedly, to the great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, and alleged that several of the USSR's leading neuroscientists and psychiatrists of the time (among them Grunya Sukhareva, Vasily Gilyarovsky, Raisa Golant, Aleksandr Shmaryan, and Mikhail Gurevich) were guilty of practicing "anti-Pavlovian, anti-Marxist, idealistic [and] reactionary" science, and this was damaging to Soviet psychiatry.
In the closing speech, Andrei Snezhnevsky, the lead author of the Session's policy report, stated that the accused psychiatrists "have not disarmed themselves and continue to remain in the old anti-Pavlovian positions", thereby causing "grave damage to the Soviet psychiatric research and practice".
[53] Sluggish schizophrenia as one of the new diagnostic categories was created to facilitate the stifling of dissidents and was a root of self-deception among psychiatrists to placate their consciences when the doctors acted as a tool of oppression in the name of a political system.
[55] The weight of scholarly opinion holds that the psychiatrists who played the primary role in the development of this diagnostic concept were following directives from the Communist Party and the Soviet secret service, or KGB, and were well aware of the political uses to which it would be put.
Nevertheless, for many Soviet psychiatrists "sluggish schizophrenia" appeared to be a logical explanation to apply to the behavior of critics of the regime who, in their opposition, seemed willing to jeopardize their happiness, family, and career for a reformist conviction or ideal that was so apparently divergent from the prevailing social and political orthodoxy.
[59] On the covert orders of the KGB, thousands of social and political reformers—Soviet "dissidents"—were incarcerated in mental hospitals after being labelled with diagnoses of "sluggish schizophrenia", a disease fabricated by Snezhnevsky and "Moscow school" of psychiatry.
[66] According to several available documents and a message by a former general of the Fifth (dissident) Directorate of the Ukrainian KGB to Robert van Voren, political abuse of psychiatry as a systematic method of repression was developed by Yuri Andropov along with a selected group of associates.
[9] In almost every case, dissidents were examined at the Serbsky Central Research Institute for Forensic Psychiatry[86] in Moscow, where persons being prosecuted in court for committing political crimes were subjected to a forensic-psychiatric expert evaluation.
[96] The figure of fifteen or twenty thousand political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals run by the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs was first put forward by Prokopenko in the 1997 book Mad Psychiatry ("Безумная психиатрия"),[97] which was republished in 2005.
[98] An indication of the extent of the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR is provided by Semyon Gluzman's calculation that the percentage of "the mentally ill" among those accused of so-called anti-Soviet activities proved many times higher than among criminal offenders.
[108] The report on political abuse of psychiatry prepared at the request of the commission by Gushansky with the aid of Prokopenko lay unclaimed and even the Independent Psychiatric Journal (Nezavisimiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal)[102] would not publish it.
The Moscow Research Center for Human Rights headed by Boris Altshuler and Alexey Smirnov and the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia whose president is Yuri Savenko were asked by Gushansky to publish the materials and archival documents on punitive psychiatry but showed no interest in doing so.
All of that made the abuse of psychiatry possible to suppress those who opposed the political regime, and that created the vicious practice of ignoring the rights of the mentally ill.[117] According to Yuri Savenko, the president of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia (the IPA), punitive psychiatry arises on the basis of the interference of three main factors:[118] Their interaction system is principally sociological: the presence of the Penal Code article on slandering the state system inevitably results in sending a certain percentage of citizens to forensic psychiatric examination.
[122] Darrel Regier, vice-chair of the DSM-5 task force, has a similar opinion that the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR was sustained by the existence of a classification developed in the Soviet Union and used to organize psychiatric treatment and care.
[136] After reading the book Institute of Fools by Viktor Nekipelov, Pekhterev concluded that allegations against the psychiatrists sounded from the lips of a negligible but vociferous part of inmates who when surfeiting themselves with cakes pretended to be sufferers.
[138] According to Fedor Kondratev, an expert of the Serbsky Center and supporter of Snezhnevsky and his colleagues who developed the concept of sluggish schizophrenia in the 1960s,[139] those arrested by the KGB under RSFSR Criminal Code Article 70 ("anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda"), 190-1 ("dissemination of knowingly false fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system") made up, in those years, the main group targeted by the period of using psychiatry for political purposes.
[154] Thus suicide, unconventional religious beliefs, racial bigotry, unhappiness, anxiety, shyness, sexual promiscuity, shoplifting, gambling, overeating, smoking, and illegal drug use are all considered symptoms or illnesses that need to be cured.
[102] Vilnius psychologist Oleg Lapin has the same point that politicians and the press attach psychological, psychiatric and medical labels; he adds that psychiatry has acquired the new status of normalizing life that was previously possessed by religion.
"[188] In the early 1990s, she spoke the required words of repentance for political abuse of psychiatry[189] which had had unprecedented dimensions in the Soviet Union for discrediting, intimidation and suppression of the human rights movement carried out primarily in this institution.
Stone, who as a member of team had examined Pyotr Grigorenko and found him mentally healthy in 1979,[196] disregarded the findings of the World Psychiatric Association and the later avowal of Soviet psychiatrists themselves and put forward the academically revisionist theory that there was no political abuse of psychiatry as a tool against pacific dissidence in the former USSR.
[198] According to St Petersburg psychiatrist Vladimir Pshizov, a disastrous factor for domestic psychiatry is that those who had committed the crime against humanity were allowed to stay on their positions until they can leave this world in a natural way.
[204] In 2007, Mikhail Vinogradov, one of the leading staff members of the Serbsky Center, strongly degraded the human rights movement of the Soviet era in every possible way and tried to convince that all political dissidents who had been to his institution were indeed mentally ill.[205] In his opinion, "now it is clear that all of them are deeply affected people.
[220] As Russian sociologist Alexander Tarasov notes, you will be treated in a hospital so that you and all your acquaintances get to learn forever that only such people as Anatoly Chubais or German Gref can be occupied with reforming in our country; and you are suffering from "syndrome of litigiousness" if in addition you wrote to the capital city complaints, which can be written only by a reviewing authority or lawyer.
[223] In 2002, Ukrainian psychiatrist Ada Korotenko stated that today the question was raised about the use of psychiatry to settle political accounts and establish psychiatric control over people competing for power in the country.
"[262] In 1983, Evgeny Nikolaev's book Predavshie Gippokrata (Betrayers of Hippocrates), when translated from Russian into German under the title Gehirnwäsche in Moskau (Brainwashing in Moscow), first came out in München and told about psychiatric detention of its author for political reasons.
[270] In 1996, Vladimir Bukovsky published his book Moskovsky Protsess (Moscow trial) containing an account of developing the punitive psychiatry based on documents that were being submitted to and considered by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
[282] In 1968, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky wrote Gorbunov and Gorchakov, a forty-page long poem in thirteen cantos consisting of lengthy conversations between two patients in a Soviet psychiatric prison as well as between each of them separately and the interrogating psychiatrists.
