Sluggish schizophrenia
[2] It was developed in the 1960s by Soviet psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky and his colleagues,[3][4] and was used exclusively in the USSR and several Eastern Bloc countries, until the fall of Communism starting in 1989.
[20] Sluggish schizophrenia as a diagnostic category 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.
[21] American psychiatrist Peter Breggin points out that the term "sluggish schizophrenia" was created to justify involuntary treatment of political dissidents with drugs normally used for psychiatric patients.
[23] St. Petersburg academic psychiatrist professor Yuri Nuller notes that the concept of Snezhnevsky's school allowed psychiatrists to consider, for example, schizoid psychopathy and even schizoid character traits as early, delayed in their development, stages of the inevitable progredient process, rather than as personality traits inherent to the individual, the dynamics of which might depend on various external factors.
[24] Despite a number of its controversial premises, but in line with the traditions of then Soviet science, Snezhnevsky's hypothesis immediately acquired the status of dogma, which was later overcome in other disciplines but firmly stuck in psychiatry.
[25] 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.
[28] Revaz Korinteli, a professor of the Grigol Robakidze University, says that Snezhnevsky broadened the borders of schizophrenia, and in this connection there was legal and theoretical justification for employing compulsory, involuntary treatment of dissenters in mental hospitals.
[39] The prevalence of Snezhnevsky's theories has particularly led to a broadening of the boundaries of disease such that even the mildest behavioral change is interpreted as indication of mental disorder.
[16] According to Snezhnevsky, patients with sluggish schizophrenia could present as seemingly sane but manifest minimal (and clinically relevant) personality changes which could remain unnoticed by the untrained eye.
"[46] A few months later the same newspaper listed "an exceptional interest in philosophical systems, religion and art" among symptoms of sluggish schizophrenia from a Manual on Psychiatry of Snezhnevsky's Moscow school.
[11] Convinced of the immortality of the totalitarian USSR, Soviet psychiatrists, especially in Moscow, did not hesitate to form "scientific" articles and defend dissertations by using the cases of dissidents.
[49] In their papers and dissertations on treatment for litigiousness and reformism, Kosachyov and other Soviet psychiatrists recommended compulsory treatment for persons with litigiousness and reformism, in the same psychiatric hospitals used for murderers:[52] Compulsory treatment in psychiatric hospitals of special type is to be recommended in cases of brutal murders committed on delusional grounds as well as in cases of persistent litigiousness and reformism with an inclination to induce surrounding persons and with a tendency to repetition of the illegal acts.Westerners first became aware of sluggish schizophrenia and its political uses in the mid-1970s, as a result of the high reported incidence of schizophrenia in the Russian population.
Stone stated that Western criticism of Soviet psychiatry focused on Snezhnevsky personally because he was responsible for the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia for "reformism" and other such symptoms.
[54] In their joint book Sociodinamicheskaya Psikhiatriya (Sociodynamic Psychiatry), Doctor of Medical Sciences professor of psychiatry Caesar Korolenko and Doctor of Psychological Sciences Nina Dmitrieva note that Smulevich's clinical description of sluggish schizophrenia is extremely elusive and includes almost all possible changes in mental status and conditions that occur in a person without psychopathology: euphoria, hyperactivity, unfounded optimism, irritability, explosiveness, sensitivity, inadequacy and emotional deficit, hysterical reactions with conversive and dissociative symptoms, infantilism, obsessive-phobic states and stubbornness.
[55] At present, the hyperdiagnosis of schizophrenia becomes especially negative due to a large number of schizophreniform psychoses caused by the increasing popularity of various esoteric sects.
They practice meditation, sensory deprivation, special exercises with rhythmic movements which directly stimulate the deep subconscious and, by doing so, lead to the development of psychoses with mainly reversible course.
[61] Zurab Kekelidze (ru), who heads the Serbsky Center and is the chief psychiatrist of the Ministry of Health and Social Development of the Russian Federation,[62] confirmed that Kosenko was diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia.
[66] As Russian sociologist Alexander Tarasov wrote, "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.
"[67] According to Raimonds Krumgolds, a former member of the political party The Other Russia, he was examined because of his "delusion of reformism", which gave rise to an assumption of slow progressive schizophrenia.
