[3] Psychiatrists have been implicated in human rights abuses worldwide, particularly in states where diagnostic criteria for mental illness are expanded to include political disobedience.
[4]: 6 Scholars have long observed that government and medical institutions tend to label threats to authority as mentally ill during periods of political unrest.
[8]: 65 This can be exploited to circumvent standard legal procedures for determining guilt or innocence, effectively incarcerating political dissidents while avoiding public scrutiny.
[8]: 65 The use of psychiatric hospitals instead of prisons also prevents the victims from receiving legal aid, makes indefinite incarceration possible, and discredits the individual and their ideas.
[10][11] From the 1960s to 1986, systematic psychiatric abuse for political and ideological purposes was reported in the Soviet Union, with occasional occurrences in other Eastern European countries like Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
[citation needed] Donald Ewen Cameron's operation was running from what is today known as the Allen Memorial Institute (AMI), part of the Royal Victoria Hospital, and not to be confused with the non-governmental organization based in Montreal, AMI-Québec Agir contre la maladie mentale.
In 2002, Human Rights Watch published the book Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and its Origins in the Mao Era written by Robin Munro and based on the documents obtained by him.
[18]: 242 This literature even included historical analyses which were published during the Cultural Revolution and it concerned articles and reports on the number of people who were taken to mental hospitals because they complained about a series of issues.
[18]: 242 During the period of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, the political abuse of psychiatry reached its apogee in China, which was then under the rule of Mao Zedong and the Gang of Four, who established a very repressive and harsh regime.
[19] The documents described the massive abuses of psychiatry that were committed for political purposes during the rule of Mao Zedong, when millions of people were declared mentally sick.
[18]: 243 In the hospitals which belong to the Ministry of Health, psychiatrists do not have any contact with the Ankang institutions, and they have no idea of what occurred there, which means they can sincerely state that they were not informed about the political abuse of psychiatry in China.
[20] Psychiatrists are frequently caught involved in such cases, unable and unwilling to challenge the police, according to psychiatry professor at the Peking University Yu Xin.
[21] As Liu's database suggests, today's most frequent victims of psychiatric abuse are political dissidents, petitioners, and Falun Gong members.
[22] In the beginning of the 2000s, Human Rights Watch accused China of locking up Falun Gong members and dissidents in a number of Chinese mental hospitals managed by the Public Security Bureau.
[18]: 252 After the 2002 World Congress, the WPA Executive Committee's half-hearted attitude in Yokohama came to light: it was an omen of a longstanding policy of diversion and postponement.
[8]: 75 It presents grave allegations that prisoners end up in the forensic ward of mental hospitals in Santiago de Cuba and Havana where they undergo ill-treatment including electroconvulsive therapy without muscle relaxants or anaesthesia.
[8]: 75 In August 1981, the Marxist historian Ariel Hidalgo was apprehended and accused of 'incitement against the social order, international solidarity and the Socialist State' and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment.
[25] Psychiatrists were instrumental in establishing a system of identifying, notifying, transporting, and killing hundreds of thousands of "racially and cognitively compromised" persons and the mentally ill in settings that ranged from centralized mental-hospitals to jails and death camps.
[28] It was reported in June, 2012, that the Indian Government has approached NIMHANS, a well known mental health establishment in South India, to assist in suppressing anti-nuclear protests regards to building of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant.
The government was in talks with NIMHANS representatives to chalk up a plan to dispatch psychiatrists to Kudankulam, for counselling protesters opposed to the building of the plant.
Japanese psychiatric hospitals during the country's imperial era reported an abnormally large number of patient deaths, peaking in 1945 after the surrender of Japan to Allied forces.
The Ministry of Justice tried several times to amend the law, but was met with opposition from those who believed the legal system should not interfere with medical science.
Four months later, Grech had his bail revoked on the false testimony of Psychiatrist David Cassar who maliciously labeled him of suffering from delusions to make it difficult for him to uncover the abuses and be that easily believed and indirectly to save Magistrate Peralta's the career.
[38] Reports on particular cases continue to come from Russia where the worsening political climate appears to create an atmosphere in which local authorities feel able, once again to use psychiatry as a means of intimidation.
[39] These showed that the periodic use of incarceration in psychiatric institutions during the 1960s (see the biography of Vladimir Bukovsky) had started to become a systematic way of dealing with dissent, political or religious.
[40] They responded [41] and over the next 13 years activists inside the USSR and support groups in Britain, Europe and North America conducted a sustained campaign to expose psychiatric abuses.
[7] During this period reports of continuous repression multiplied, but Soviet psychiatric officials refused to allow international bodies to see the hospitals and patients in question.
[8]: 70 Among the 12 discharged patients examined, the US delegation found that nine had no evidence of any current or past mental disorder; the remaining three had comparatively slight symptoms which would not usually warrant involuntary commitment in Western countries.
[18]: 125 The American report and other pressures, domestic and external, led the Politburo to pass a resolution (15 November 1989) "On improvements in Soviet law concerning procedures for the treatment of psychiatric patients".
[49]:453 On 9 July 2020 Tiwagorn Withiton, a Facebook user who went viral after posting a picture of himself wearing a t-shirt printed with the message "I lost faith in the monarchy" was forcibly detained by police officers and admitted to Rajanagarindra Psychiatric Hospital in Khon Kaen.