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127-479: There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union , based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called "psychopathological mechanisms" of dissent. During the leadership of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev , psychiatry was used to disable and remove from society political opponents ("dissidents") who openly expressed beliefs that contradicted

254-656: A 'refuge' against being dispatched to the Gulag . Now that policy altered. The first reports of dissenters being hospitalized on non-medical grounds date from the early 1960s, not long after Georgy Morozov was appointed director of the Serbsky Institute. Both Morozov and Lunts were personally involved in numerous well-known cases and were notorious abusers of psychiatry for political purposes. Most prisoners, in Viktor Nekipelov 's words, characterized Daniil Lunts as "no better than

381-401: A Communist society? Evidently yes. If that is so, then there will also be offences, which are characteristic of people with abnormal minds. Of those who might start calling for opposition to Communism on this basis, we can say that clearly their mental state is not normal. The now available evidence supports the conclusion that the system of political abuse of psychiatry was carefully designed by

508-500: A class society, especially during the most severe class struggle, psychiatry was incapable of not being repressive. A system of political abuse of psychiatry was developed at the end of Joseph Stalin 's regime. Punitive psychiatry was not simply an inheritance from the Stalin era, however, according to Alexander Etkind . The Gulag , or Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps, was an effective instrument of political repression. There

635-462: A commission decision on legal insanity of mentally healthy dissidents including Vladimir Bukovsky , Natalya Gorbanevskaya , Leonid Plyushch , Mikola Plakhotnyuk , and Pyotr Grigorenko . The campaign to declare political opponents mentally sick and to commit dissenters to mental hospitals began in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As Vladimir Bukovsky commented on the emergence of the political abuse of psychiatry, Nikita Khrushchev reckoned that it

762-585: A consequence, schizophrenia was diagnosed much more often in Moscow than in cities of other countries, as the World Health Organization Pilot Study on Schizophrenia reported in 1973. The city with the highest prevalence of schizophrenia in the world was Moscow. In particular, the scope was widened by sluggish schizophrenia because according to Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, patients with this diagnosis were capable of functioning almost normally in

889-753: A crucial role in developments leading to the Holocaust . 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

1016-539: A departmental order "On the tasks of State security agencies in combating the ideological sabotage by the adversary", calling for the KGB to struggle against dissidents and their imperialist masters. His aim was "the destruction of dissent in all its forms" and he insisted that the positions of the capitalist countries on human rights, and their criticisms of the Soviet Union and its own politics of human rights from these positions,

1143-472: A disease fabricated by Snezhnevsky and "Moscow school" of psychiatry. American psychiatrist Alan A. Stone stated that Western criticism of Soviet psychiatry aimed at Snezhnevsky personally, because he was essentially responsible for the Soviet concept of schizophrenia with a "sluggish type" manifestation by "reformerism" including other symptoms. One can readily apply this diagnostic scheme to dissenters. Snezhnevsky

1270-649: A forensic-psychiatric expert evaluation. Once certified, the accused and convicted were sent for involuntary treatment to the Special Psychiatric Hospitals controlled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic . The accused had no right of appeal. The right was given to their relatives or other interested persons but they were not allowed to nominate psychiatrists to take part in

1397-542: A form of mental disease. In many countries, political prisoners are still sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions. In the Soviet Union, dissidents were often confined in psychiatric wards commonly called psikhushkas . Psikhushka is the Russian ironic diminutive for "psychiatric hospital". One of the first penal psikhushkas was the Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the city of Kazan . In 1939, it

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1524-490: A framework within which non-standard beliefs could easily be defined as a criminal offence and the basis, subsequently, for a psychiatric diagnosis. The "anti-Soviet" political behavior of some individuals – being outspoken in their opposition to the authorities, demonstrating for reform, and writing critical books – were defined simultaneously as criminal acts (e.g., a violation of Articles 70 or 190–1), symptoms of mental illness (e.g., "delusion of reformism"), and susceptible to

1651-588: A long sojourn in China, had traveled to China several times to survey libraries in provincial towns and while he was there, he had gathered a large amount of literature which bore the stamp 'secret' but at the same time, it was openly available. 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

1778-428: A long time and its most important tool for suppressing opposition was the concept of psychiatric dangerousness. Despite international criticism, China seems to be continuing its political abuse of psychiatry. Political abuse of psychiatry in China is high on the agenda and it has produced recurring disputes in the international psychiatric community. The abuses there appear to be even more widespread than they were in

1905-548: A longstanding concept further developed by the Moscow School of Psychiatry and particularly by its chief Snezhnevsky, furnished a very handy framework for explaining this behavior. 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

2032-668: A period due to this loss of personnel. The Joint Session ravaged productive research in neurosciences and psychiatry for years to come. Pseudo-science took control. Following a previous joint session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (28 June–4 July 1950) and the 10-15 October 1951 joint session of the Presidium of the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Board of

2159-509: A political system. According to the Global Initiative on Psychiatry chief executive Robert van Voren , the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR arose from the conception that people who opposed the Soviet regime were mentally sick since there was no other logical rationale why one would oppose the sociopolitical system considered the best in the world. The diagnosis "sluggish schizophrenia",

2286-573: A practice that some argue continues to this day. The Duplessis Orphans were several thousand orphaned children that were falsely certified as mentally ill by the government of the province of Quebec , Canada , and confined to psychiatric institutions. 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

2413-421: A protesting schoolchild, Nattanan Warintawaret, were mentally disturbed. In addition, the military junta introduced a systematic process of 'attitude adjustment', whereby hundreds of dissidents were subjected to forcible detention and propaganda until they reformed their views of the junta; the majority did not and were subsequently charged with crimes. While psychiatrists were not employed, a team of psychologists

2540-468: A psychiatric problem." The diagnosis of mental disease can give the state license to detain persons against their will and insist upon therapy both in the interest of the detainee and in the broader interests of society. In addition, receiving a psychiatric diagnosis can itself be regarded as oppressive. In a monolithic state, psychiatry can be used to bypass standard legal procedures for establishing guilt or innocence and allow political incarceration without

2667-556: A ready-made diagnosis (e.g., " sluggish schizophrenia "). Within the boundaries of the diagnostic category, the symptoms of pessimism, poor social adaptation and conflict with authorities were themselves sufficient for a formal diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia". 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. In accordance with

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2794-503: A reformation delusion for every case when a patient "develops a new principle of human knowledge, drafts an academy of human happiness, and many other projects for the benefit of mankind". In the 1960s and 1970s, theories, which contained ideas about reforming society and struggling for truth, and religious convictions were not referred to delusional paranoid disorders in practically all foreign classifications, but Soviet psychiatry, proceeding from ideological conceptions, referred critique of

2921-492: A series of issues. It was found, according to Munro, that the involuntary confinement of religious groups, political dissidents, and whistleblowers had a long history in China. The abuses began in the 1950s and 1960s, and they became extremely widespread throughout the Cultural Revolution. During the period of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, the political abuse of psychiatry reached its apogee in China, which

3048-850: A single archive. They are scattered between the State Archive of the Russian Federation , the archive of the Russian Federation State Statistical Committee ( Goskomstat ), the archives of the RF Ministry of Internal Affairs ( MVD of Russia ), the FSB of Russia , the RF General Prosecutor's Office, and the Russian Military and Historical Archive. Further documents are held in the archives of 83 constituent entities of

3175-491: A so-called "latent schizophrenia" according to a concept of Eugen Bleuler . Such forms would allegedly make the sufferer prone to criminal acts. Returning home after a visit of more than two weeks, the delegation members wrote a report which was highly damaging to the Soviet authorities. The delegation established that there had been systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the past and that it had not yet come to an end. Victims continued to be held in mental hospitals, while

3302-555: Is camouflaged with "concern" for freedom, democracy, and human rights, it is directed in fact against the socialist essence of Soviet society... On 29 April 1969, Andropov submitted an elaborate plan to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to set up a network of mental hospitals that would defend the "Soviet Government and the socialist order" from dissenters. To persuade his fellow Politburo members of

3429-445: Is spiritual murder, it is a variation of the gas chamber, even more cruel; the torture of the people being killed is more malicious and more prolonged. Like the gas chambers, these crimes will never be forgotten and those involved in them will be condemned for all time during their life and after their death." ( Alexander Solzhenitsyn ) Psychiatric diagnoses such as the diagnosis of " sluggish schizophrenia " in political dissidents in

3556-554: Is uniquely vulnerable to being used for abusive purposes compared to other specialties of medicine . The power to diagnose mental illness allows the state to detain individuals against their will and administer unnecessary treatments under the guise of serving both individual and societal interests. This can be exploited to circumvent standard legal procedures for determining guilt or innocence, effectively incarcerating political dissidents while avoiding public scrutiny. The use of psychiatric hospitals instead of prisons also prevents

3683-542: Is unresearched and inaccessible to researchers. Political abuse of psychiatry Psychiatrists have been implicated in human rights abuses worldwide, particularly in states where diagnostic criteria for mental illness are expanded to include political disobedience. Scholars have long observed that government and medical institutions tend to label threats to authority as mentally ill during periods of political unrest. In many countries, political prisoners are confined and abused in psychiatric hospitals . Psychiatry

3810-586: The Ankang institutions of the MSS; those which belong to the police; those which fall under the authority of the Ministry of Social Affairs; those which belong to the Ministry of Health . The sectors which belong to the police and the MSS are all closed to the public, and, consequently, information about them hardly ever leaks out. In the hospitals which belong to the Ministry of Health, psychiatrists do not have any contact with

3937-540: 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. In China, the structure of forensic psychiatry was to a great extent identical to that which existed in the Soviet Union. On its own, it is not so strange, since psychiatrists from the Moscow Serbsky Institute visited Beijing in 1957 in order to help their Chinese 'brethren',

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4064-595: The Central Bureau of Investigation relating to some interrogation techniques. 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 patients of these institutions were mistreated mainly because they were considered a hindrance to society. Under the Imperial Japanese government, citizens were expected to contribute in one way or another to

4191-527: The Thai monarchy to be abolished but 'loss of faith' may imply lèse-majesté , a serious crime in Thailand. Tiwagorn is quoted as saying, "I well understand that it is political to have to make people think I'm insane. I won't hold it against the officials if there is a diagnosis that I'm insane, because I take it that they have to follow orders." Subsequent to protests by civil rights groups and media stories, Tiwagorn

4318-543: The dissolution of the Soviet Union confirm that the authorities consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent. According to the "Commentary" to the post-Soviet Russian Federation Law on Psychiatric Care , individuals forced to undergo treatment in Soviet psychiatric medical institutions were entitled to rehabilitation in accordance with the established procedure and could claim compensation. The Russian Federation acknowledged that before 1991 psychiatry had been used for political purposes and took responsibility for

4445-537: The "negative axis" included pessimism , poor social adaptation , and conflict with authorities, and were themselves sufficient for a formal diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia with scanty symptoms". According to Snezhnevsky, patients with sluggish schizophrenia could present as quasi sane yet manifest minimal but clinically relevant personality changes which could remain unnoticed to the untrained eye. Thereby patients with non-psychotic mental disorders, or even persons who were not mentally sick, could be easily labelled with

4572-470: The 1,500 "open" psychiatric hospitals remains unknown because parts of the archives of the prison psychiatric hospitals and hospitals in general are classified and inaccessible. 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"), which

4699-486: The 1940s, the abuse of psychiatry involved the abuse of the "duty to care" on an enormous scale: 300,000 individuals were involuntarily sterilized and 77,000 murdered in Germany alone and many thousands further afield, mainly in eastern Europe . Psychiatrists were instrumental in establishing a system of identifying, notifying, transporting, and killing hundreds of thousands of "racially and cognitively compromised" persons and

4826-430: The 1960s to 1980s remain under-researched: the contents of the main archives are still classified and inaccessible. Hundreds of files on people who underwent forensic psychiatric examinations at the Serbsky Institute during Stalin's time are on the shelves of the highly classified archive in its basement where Gluzman saw them in 1989. All are marked by numbers without names or surnames, and any biographical data they contain

4953-459: 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 . The practice of incarcerating religious and political dissidents in psychiatric hospitals in the Eastern Bloc and the former USSR severely damaged

5080-671: The 1960s, a vigorous movement grew up protesting against abuse of psychiatry in the USSR. Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union was denounced in the course of the Congresses of the World Psychiatric Association in Mexico City (1971), Hawaii (1977), Vienna (1983) and Athens (1989). The campaign to terminate political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR was a key episode in the Cold War , inflicting irretrievable damage on

5207-428: The 1982 International University Sports 'Olympiad' , over 600 dissidents were detained and kept out of public view in mental hospitals. Like in the Soviet Union , on the eve of Communist holidays, potential "troublemakers" were sent to mental hospitals by busloads and discharged when the holidays had passed. The People's Republic of Romania held to a doctrine of state atheism . Many Christians, including those from

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5334-621: The All-Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists, Snezhnevky's school was given the leading role. The 1950 decision to give monopoly over psychiatry to the Pavlovian school of Snezhnevsky was one of the crucial factors in the rise of political psychiatry. The Soviet doctors, under the incentive of Snezhnevsky, devised a "Pavlovian theory of schizophrenia" and increasingly applied this diagnostic category to political dissidents. The incarceration of free thinking healthy people in madhouses

5461-712: The Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in May of the same year. 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. The 2003 investigative mission never took place, and when finally a visit to China did take place, this visit was more of scientific exchange. In

5588-598: The Baptist Church and Lord's Army wing of the Orthodox Church, were forced into psychiatric hospitals where they died. 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. In 1971 detailed reports about the inmates of Soviet psychiatric hospitals who had been detained for political reasons began to reach

5715-880: The Gustavo Machin hospital in Santiago de Cuba in the southeast of the country and the major mental hospital in Havana . In 1977, a report on alleged abuse of psychiatry in Cuba presenting cases of ill-treatment in mental hospitals going back to the 1970s came out in the United States. 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 . The reported application of ECT in

5842-534: The KGB to rid the USSR of undesirable elements. 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. Andropov was in charge of the wide-ranging deployment of psychiatric repression from

5969-697: 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. In September 1981, he was transported from State Security Headquarters to the Carbó-Serviá (forensic) ward of Havana Psychiatric Hospital where he stayed for several weeks. By 1936, killing of the "physically and socially unfit" became accepted practice in Nazi Germany . In

6096-497: The Russian Federation, in urban and regional archives, as well as in the archives of the former Soviet Republics , now the 11 independent countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States or the three Baltic States ( Baltics ). According to Russian psychiatrist Emmanuil Gushansky , the scale of psychiatric abuses in the past, the use of psychiatric doctrines by the totalitarian state have been thoroughly concealed. The archives of

6223-481: The Soviet Ministries of Internal Affairs ( MVD ) and Health ( USSR Health Ministry ), and of the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry, which between them hold evidence about the expansion of psychiatry and the regulations governing that expansion, remain totally closed to researchers, says Gushansky. Dan Healey shares his opinion that the abuses of Soviet psychiatry under Stalin and, even more dramatically, in

6350-722: The Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s and they involve the incarceration of 'petitioners', human rights workers, trade union activists, members of the Falun Gong movement, and people who complain about injustices that have been committed against them by local authorities. It also seems that, China had no known high security forensic institutions until 1989. However, since then, the Chinese authorities have constructed an entire network of special forensic mental hospitals which are called Ankang which means 'Peace and Health' in Chinese. By that time, China had 20 Ankang institutions and their staff

6477-655: The Soviet Union, the "Joint Session" of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and the Board of the All-Union Neurological and Psychiatric Association took place from 10 to 15 October 1951. 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

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6604-449: The Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities built psychiatric hospitals at a rapid pace and increased the quantity of beds for patients with nervous and mental illnesses: between 1962 and 1974, the number of beds for psychiatric patients increased from 222,600 to 390,000. Such an expansion in the number of psychiatric beds was expected to continue in the years up to 1980. Throughout this period the dominant trend in Soviet psychiatry ran counter to

6731-535: The Soviet authorities and the Soviet Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists in particular still denied that psychiatry had been employed as a method of repression. 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". Louis Doedel (1905–1980)

6858-447: The Soviet authorities and the departure from the Soviet Union of the US delegation. The delegation concluded that nine of the 15 hospitalized patients had disorders which would be classified in the United States as serious psychoses, diagnoses corresponding broadly with those used by the Soviet psychiatrists. One of the hospitalized patients had been diagnosed as having schizophrenia although

6985-547: The Soviet state and social system) of the RSFSR Criminal Code. Forensic psychiatrists were asked to examine offenders whose mental state was considered abnormal by the investigating officers. In almost every case, dissidents were examined at the Serbsky Central Research Institute for Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, where persons being prosecuted in court for committing political crimes were subjected to

7112-572: The US team saw no evidence of mental disorder. 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. According to medical records, all these patients had diagnoses of psychopathology or schizophrenia. The authorities had justified compulsory psychiatric treatment by slow and weak forms of schizophrenia –

7239-406: The USSR were used for political purposes. It was the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" that was most prominently used in cases of dissidents. 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

7366-595: The West. 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. In accordance with the doctrine of state atheism , the USSR hospitalized individuals who were devout in their faith, such as many Baptist Christians. In March 1971 Vladimir Bukovsky sent detailed diagnoses of six individuals ( Natalya Gorbanevskaya and Pyotr Grigorenko among them) to psychiatrists in

7493-743: The West. They responded 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. In 1977 the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) condemned the USSR for this practice. Six years later, the Soviet All-Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists seceded from the WPA rather than face almost certain expulsion. During this period reports of continuous repression multiplied, but Soviet psychiatric officials refused to allow international bodies to see

7620-721: 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". The vice president of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences accused them of "diligently worshipping the dirty source of American pseudo-science". Those who articulated these accusations at the Joint Session – among them Irina Strelchuk , Vasily Banshchikov , Oleg Kerbikov , and Snezhnevsky – were distinguished by their careerist ambition and fear for their own positions. Not surprisingly, many of them were promoted and appointed to leadership posts shortly after

7747-678: The available data and materials accumulated in the archives of the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry , one can confidently conclude that thousands of dissenters were hospitalized for political reasons. From 1994 to 1995, an investigative commission of Moscow psychiatrists explored the records of five prison psychiatric hospitals in Russia and discovered about two thousand cases of political abuse of psychiatry in these hospitals alone. In 2004, Anatoly Prokopenko said he

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7874-480: The building of the plant. To fulfill this, NIMHANS developed a team of six members, all of them, from the Department of Social Psychiatry. The psychiatrists were sent to get a "peek into the protesters' minds" and help them learn the importance of the plant according to one news source. In July, 2013, the same institution, NIMHANS , was involved in a controversy where it was alleged that it provided assistance to

8001-511: The credibility of psychiatric practice in these states and drew strong condemnation from the international community. Similar abuses have been reported in the People's Republic of China . Psychiatric diagnoses, such as " sluggish schizophrenia " in the USSR, were specifically developed and used for political purposes. In the United States , psychiatry was used to control African-American slaves ,

8128-416: The criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps ." A well-documented practice was the use of psychiatric hospitals as temporary prisons during the two or three weeks around the 7 November ( October Revolution ) Day and May Day celebrations, to isolate "socially dangerous" persons who otherwise might protest in public or manifest other deviant behavior. In

8255-411: The diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia. Along with paranoia , sluggish schizophrenia was the diagnosis most frequently used for the psychiatric incarceration of dissenters. As per the theories of Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, schizophrenia was held to be much more prevalent than previously considered, for the illness might present with comparatively slight symptoms, and might only progress afterwards. As

8382-444: The diktats of power. Psychiatric confinement of sane people is uniformly considered a particularly pernicious form of repression and Soviet punitive psychiatry was one of the key weapons of both illegal and legal repression. As Vladimir Bukovsky and Semyon Gluzman wrote in their joint A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissenters , "the Soviet use of psychiatry as a punitive means is based upon the deliberate interpretation of dissent... as

8509-607: The dissident population dealt with psychiatrically. Would-be emigrants constituted about one-fifth of dissidents victimized by means of psychiatry. People detained only because of their religious activity made up about fifteen per cent of dissident-patients. Citizens inconvenient to the authorities because of their "obdurate" complaints about bureaucratic excesses and abuses accounted for about five per cent of dissidents subject to psychiatric abuse. In 1985, Peter Reddaway and Sidney Bloch provided documented data on some five hundred cases in their book Soviet Psychiatric Abuse . On basis of

8636-493: The doctrine of state atheism , the religious beliefs of prisoners, including those of well-educated former atheists who had become adherents of a religious faith, was considered to be a form of mental illness that required treatment. The KGB routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosis, in order to discredit dissidence as the product of unhealthy minds and to avoid the embarrassment caused by public trials. Highly classified government documents that became available after

8763-403: The early 1980s. As CPSU General Secretary, from November 1982 to February 1984, Yury Andropov demonstrated little patience with domestic dissafection and continued the Brezhnev Era policy of confining dissenters in mental hospitals. Political dissidents were usually charged under Articles 70 (agitation and propaganda against the Soviet state) and 190-1 (dissemination of false fabrications defaming

8890-416: The early 1990s, the number of such cases had dropped to five percent, but with the beginning of the campaign against Falun Gong , the percentage of such cases increased quite rapidly. Official Chinese psychiatric literature distinctly testifies that the Communist Party 's notion of 'political dangerousness' was institutionally engrafted as the main concept in the diagnostic armory of China's psychiatry for

9017-465: The end of Allied occupation, the National Diet of Japan passed the Mental Hygiene Act ( 精神衛生法, , Seishin Eisei Hō ) in 1950, which improved the status of the mentally ill and prohibited the domestic containment of mental patients in medical institutions. However, the Mental Hygiene Act had unforeseen consequences . Along with many other reforms, the law prevented the mentally ill from being charged with any sort of crime in Japanese courts. Anyone who

9144-571: The evaluation, because all psychiatrists were considered fully independent and equally credible before the law. According to dissident poet Naum Korzhavin , the atmosphere at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow altered almost overnight when Daniil Lunts took over as head of the Fourth Department (otherwise known as the Political Department). Previously, psychiatric departments were regarded as

9271-490: The event of abuse or negligence on the part of medical professionals. There have been a few accusations about abuse of psychiatry in Norway. See Arnold Juklerød and Knut Hamsun . In Romania, there have been allegations of some particular cases of psychiatric abuse during over a decade. In addition to particular cases, there is evidence that mental hospitals were utilized as short-term detainment centers. For instance, before

9398-444: The following comparison: 1–2% of all the forensic psychiatric examinations carried out by the Serbsky Institute targeted those accused of anti-Soviet activities; convicted dissidents in penal institutions made up 0.05% of the total number of convicts; 1–2% is 40 times greater than 0.05%. According to Viktor Luneyev, the struggle against dissent operated on many more layers than those registered in court sentences. We do not know how many

9525-430: The forensic wards seems, at least in many of the cited cases, not to be an adequate clinical treatment for the diagnosed state of the prisoner—in some cases the prisoners seem not to have been diagnosed at all. Conditions in the forensic wards have been described in repulsive terms and apparently are in striking contrast to the other parts of the mental hospitals that are said to be well-kept and modern. In August 1981,

9652-490: The former USSR damaged the credibility of psychiatric practice in these states and entailed strong condemnation from the international community. Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience. As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions have at times classified threats to authority during periods of political disturbance and instability as

9779-434: The fundamental human rights of certain groups and individuals in a society. It entails the exculpation and committal of citizens to psychiatric facilities based upon political rather than mental health-based criteria. Many authors, including psychiatrists, also use the terms "Soviet political psychiatry" or "punitive psychiatry" to refer to this phenomenon. In his book Punitive Medicine (1979) Alexander Podrabinek defined

9906-449: The help of the police or entrap them into coming to the hospital. The psychiatrists thereby doubled as interrogators and as arresting officers. Doctors fabricated a diagnosis requiring detention and no court decision was required for subjecting the individual to indefinite confinement in a psychiatric institution. By the end of the 1950s, confinement to a psychiatric institution had become the most commonly used method of punishing leaders of

10033-509: The hospitals and patients in question. They denied the charges of abuse. In February 1989, however, at the height of perestroika and over the opposition of the psychiatric establishment, the Soviet government permitted a delegation of psychiatrists from the United States, representing the U.S. government, to carry out extensive interviews of suspected victims of abuse. The delegation was able systematically to interview and assess present and past involuntarily admitted mental patients chosen by

10160-432: The hospitals was requested by the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), but denied by China, and the controversy subsided. The WPA attempted to confine the problem by presenting it as Falung Gong issue and, at the same time, make the impression that the members of the movement were likely not mentally sound, that it was a sect which likely brainwashed its members, etc. There was even a diagnosis of 'qigong syndrome' which

10287-591: The issue was broached during the General Assembly, the exact nature of compromise came to light. In order to investigate the political abuse of psychiatry, the WPA would send an investigative mission to China. The visit was projected for the spring of 2003 in order to assure that one could present a report during the annual meeting of the British Royal College of Psychiatrists in June/July of that year and

10414-500: The meantime, the political abuse of psychiatry persisted unabatedly, nevertheless the WPA did not seem to care. In August 2022, Safeguard Defenders issued an 85-page report on forced hospitalization in psychiatric hospitals between 2015 and 2021. Based on information from 144 cases, the report identifies 109 hospitals from 21 provinces in China, and documents repeated hospitalization of up to more than five times for victims. Some have spent around ten or more years inside. According to

10541-549: The mentally ill in settings that ranged from centralized mental-hospitals to jails and death camps . Psychiatrists played a central and prominent role in sterilization and ' euthanasia ', constituting two categories of the crimes against humanity . The taking of thousands of brains from 'euthanasia' victims demonstrated the way medical research was connected to the psychiatric killings. Germany operated six psychiatric extermination centers: Bernburg , Brandenburg , Grafeneck , Hadamar , Hartheim , and Sonnenstein . They played

10668-464: The moment he was appointed to head the KGB. He became KGB Chairman on 18 May 1967. On 3 July 1967, he made a proposal to establish a Fifth Directorate (ideological counterintelligence) within the KGB to deal with internal political opposition to the Soviet regime. The Directorate was set up at the end of July and took charge of KGB files on all Soviet dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn . In 1968, KGB Chairman Andropov issued

10795-556: The most prominent theorist of Soviet psychiatry and director of the Institute of Psychiatry of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, developed a novel classification of mental disorders postulating an original set of diagnostic criteria. A carefully crafted description of sluggish schizophrenia established that psychotic symptoms were non-essential for the diagnosis, but symptoms of psychopathy , hypochondria , depersonalization or anxiety were central to it. Symptoms referred to as part of

10922-655: 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. The British researcher Robin Munro, a sinologist who was writing his dissertation in London after

11049-557: The official dogma. 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. Article 58 -10 of the Stalin-era Criminal Code, " Anti-Soviet agitation ",

11176-466: The ordinary odium attaching to such political trials. In the period from the 1960s to 1986, the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was reported to have been systematic in the Soviet Union and episodic in other Eastern European countries such as Romania , Hungary , Czechoslovakia , and Yugoslavia . The practice of incarceration of political dissidents in mental hospitals in Eastern Europe and

11303-558: The police, according to psychiatry professor at the Peking University Yu Xin. As Liu's database suggests, today's most frequent victims of psychiatric abuse are political dissidents, petitioners, and Falun Gong members. 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 . Access to

11430-463: The political opposition. In the 1960s and 1970s, the trials of dissenters and their referral for "treatment" to the Special Psychiatric Hospitals under MVD control and oversight came out into the open, and the world learned of a wave of "psychiatric terror" which was flatly denied by those in charge of the Serbsky Institute . The bulk of psychiatric repression spans the period from the late 1960s to

11557-521: The political system and proposals to reform this system to the delusional construct. Diagnostic approaches of conception of sluggish schizophrenia and paranoiac states with delusion of reformism were used only in the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries. 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",

11684-427: 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. Snezhnevsky,

11811-451: The prestige of medicine in the Soviet Union. Upon analysis of over 200 well-authenticated cases covering the period 1962–1976, Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway developed a classification of the victims of Soviet psychiatric abuse. They were classified as: The advocates of human rights and democratization, according to Bloch and Reddaway, made up about half the dissidents repressed by means of psychiatry. Nationalists made up about one-tenth of

11938-489: The provinces combined elements of both systems. If someone was mentally ill then, they were sent to psychiatric hospitals and confined there until they died. If their mental health was uncertain but they were not constantly unwell, they and their kharakteristika [testimonial from employers, the Party and other Soviet institutions] were sent to a labour camp or to be shot. When allusions to socialist legality started to be made, it

12065-467: The records of the three Special Psychiatrial Hospitals — Sychyovskaya, Leningrad and Chernyakhovsk hospitals — to which human rights activists gained access in 1991, Prokopenko concluded that psychiatry had been used as punitive measure against about 20,000 people for purely political reasons. This was only a small part of the total picture, Prokopenko said. The data on the total number of people who had been held in all sixteen prison hospitals and in

12192-548: The report, victims are mostly petitioners and activists . Although Cuba has been politically connected to the Soviet Union since the United States broke off relations with Cuba shortly after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, few considerable allegations regarding the political abuse of psychiatry in this country emerged before the late 1980s. Americas Watch and Amnesty International published reports alluding to cases of possible unwarranted hospitalization and ill-treatment of political prisoners. These reports concerned

12319-652: The results were the same: long hospitalizations in mental hospitals, involuntary treatments with neuroleptics , torture , abuse, all of which were aimed at breaking the victim's will. In accordance with Chinese law which contains the concept of "political harm to society" and the similar phrase dangerous mentally ill behavior, police take "political maniacs into mental hospitals, those who are defined as persons who write reactionary letters, make anti-government speeches, or "express opinions on important domestic and international affairs". Psychiatrists are frequently caught involved in such cases, unable and unwilling to challenge

12446-616: The risk posed by the mentally ill, Andropov circulated a report from the Krasnodar Region. A secret resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers was adopted. Andropov's proposal to use psychiatry for struggle against dissenters was adopted and implemented. In 1929, the USSR had 70 psychiatric hospitals and 21,103 psychiatric beds. By 1935, this had increased to 102 psychiatric hospitals and 33,772 psychiatric beds, and by 1955 there were 200 psychiatric hospitals and 116,000 psychiatric beds in

12573-422: The same psychiatrists who promoted the system of political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. As a consequence, diagnostics in China were not much different than those which were made in the Soviet Union. The only difference was that the Soviet Union preferred " sluggish schizophrenia " as a diagnosis, and that China generally cleaved to the diagnosis of " paranoia " or " paranoid schizophrenia ". However,

12700-434: The secret services kept under surveillance, held criminally liable, arrested, sent to psychiatric hospitals, or who were sacked from their jobs, and restricted in all kinds of other ways in the exercise of their rights. No objective assessment of the total number of repressed persons is possible without fundamental analysis of archival documents. The difficulty is that the required data are very diverse and are not to be found in

12827-565: The session. The Joint Session also had a negative impact on several leading Soviet academic neuroscientists, such as Pyotr Anokhin , Aleksey Speransky , Lina Stern , Ivan Beritashvili , and Leon Orbeli . They were labeled as anti-Pavlovians, anti-materialists and reactionaries and subsequently they were dismissed from their positions. In addition to losing their laboratories some of these scientists were subjected to torture in prison. The Moscow, Leningrad, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Armenian schools of neuroscience and neurophysiology were damaged for

12954-488: The social control of political dissenters. As early as 1948, the Soviet secret service took an interest in this area of medicine. One of those with overall responsibility for the Soviet secret police , pre-war Procurator General and State Prosecutor, the deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrey Vyshinsky , was the first to order the use of psychiatry as a tool of repression. Russian psychiatrist Pyotr Gannushkin believed that in

13081-461: The social sense. Their symptoms could be like those of a neurosis or could assume a paranoid character. The patients with paranoid symptoms retained some insight into their condition but overestimated their own significance and could manifest grandiose ideas of reforming society. Thereby, sluggish schizophrenia could have such symptoms as "reform delusions", "perseverance", and "struggle for the truth". As Viktor Styazhkin reported, Snezhnevsky diagnosed

13208-405: The term "punitive medicine", which is identified with "punitive psychiatry," as "a tool in the struggle against dissidents who cannot be punished by legal means." 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

13335-514: The victims from receiving legal aid, makes indefinite incarceration possible, and discredits the individual and their ideas. This allows authorities to avoid open trials when deemed undesirable. The political abuse of medical power, particularly in psychiatry, has a long history, including notable examples during the Nazi era and Soviet rule, where religious and political dissenters were labeled "mentally ill" and subjected to inhumane "treatments". From

13462-414: The victims of "political psychiatry." The political abuse of psychiatry in Russia has continued, nevertheless, since the fall of the Soviet Union , and human rights activists may still face the threat of a psychiatric diagnosis for their legitimate civic and political activities. Political abuse of psychiatry is the misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, detention and treatment for the purposes of obstructing

13589-491: The vigorous attempts in Western countries to treat as many as possible as out-patients rather than in-patients. On 15 May 1969, a Soviet Government decree (No. 345–209) was issued "On measures for preventing dangerous behavior (acts) on the part of mentally ill persons." This decree confirmed the practice of having undesirables hauled into detention by psychiatrists. Soviet psychiatrists were told whom they should examine and were assured that they might detain these individuals with

13716-425: The visiting team, as well as to talk over procedures and methods of treatment with some of the patients, their friends, relatives and, sometimes, their treating psychiatrists. The delegation originally sought interviews with 48 persons, but saw only 15 hospitalized and 12 discharged patients. About half of the hospitalized patients were released in the two months between the submission of the initial list of names to

13843-424: The war effort, and the mentally ill were unable to do so, and as such were looked down upon and abused. The main cause of death for these patients was starvation, as caretakers did not supply the patients with adequate food, likely as a form of torture and a method of sedation. Because mentally ill patients were kept secluded from the outside world, the large number of deaths went unnoticed by the general public. After

13970-539: Was a trade unionist. He was involuntary committed in psychiatric hospital Wolfenbüttel  [ nl ] on 28 May 1937 by Governor Kielstra . Doedel was forgotten and presumed dead. It was not until 1980, 43 years later, that he was released. Following the 2014 Thai coup d'état , there were a few cases where the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO, the Thai military junta) alleged its opponents, including

14097-460: Was damaging to Soviet psychiatry. During the Joint Session, these eminent psychiatrists, motivated by fear, had to publicly admit that their scientific positions were erroneous and they also had to promise to conform to "Pavlovian" doctrines. These public declarations of obedience proved insufficient. In the closing speech, Andrei Snezhnevsky , the lead author of the Session's policy report, stated that

14224-491: Was decided to prosecute such people. Soon it became apparent that putting people who gave anti-Soviet speeches on trial only made matters worse for the regime. Such individuals were no longer tried in court. Instead they were given a psychiatric examination and declared insane. In the 1950s, the psychiatrists of the Soviet Union turned themselves into the medical arm of the Gulag State. A precursor of later abuses in psychiatry in

14351-480: Was employed by the Ministry of State Security (MSS). The psychiatrists who worked there wore uniforms under their white coats. The political abuse of psychiatry in China only seems to take place in the institutions which are under the authority of the police and the MSS but it does not take place in those institutions which belong to other governmental sectors. Psychiatric care in China falls into four sectors which are hardly connected with each other. These are

14478-492: Was finally passed in 1987. The new law corrected the flaws of the Mental Hygiene Act by allowing the Ministry of Health and Welfare to set regulations on the treatment of mental patients in both medical and legal settings. With the new law, the mentally ill have the right to voluntary hospitalization, the ability to be charged with a crime, and right to use the insanity defense in court, and the right to pursue legal action in

14605-560: Was found to be mentally unstable by a qualified psychiatrist was required to be hospitalized rather than incarcerated, regardless of the severity of any crime that person may have committed. 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. After almost four decades, the Mental Health Act ( 精神保健法, , Seishin Hoken Hō )

14732-581: Was impossible for people in a socialist society to have an anti-socialist consciousness. Whenever manifestations of dissidence could not be justified as a provocation of world imperialism or a legacy of the past, they were self-evidently the product of mental disease. In a speech published in the Pravda daily newspaper on 24 May 1959, Khrushchev said: A crime is a deviation from generally recognized standards of behavior frequently caused by mental disorder. Can there be diseases, nervous disorders among certain people in

14859-459: Was involved, implying psychological warfare rather than political psychiatry. 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. Tiwagorn has stated that he does not wish

14986-451: Was just one part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the Soviet state's foundation. Similar ideas can be found in the 1983 book Speeches and Writings by Andropov published when he had become General Secretary of the CPSU: [w]hen analyzing the main trend in present-day bourgeois criticism of [Soviet] human rights policies one is bound to draw the conclusion that although this criticism

15113-471: Was long attacked in the West as an exemplar of psychiatric abuse in the USSR. The leading critics implied that Snezhnevsky had designed the Soviet model of schizophrenia and this diagnosis to make political dissent into a mental disease. He was charged with cynically developing a system of diagnosis which could be bent for political purposes, and he himself diagnosed or was involved in a series of famous dissident cases, and, in dozens of cases, he personally signed

15240-456: Was no compelling requirement to develop an alternative and more expensive psychiatric substitute. The abuse of psychiatry was a natural product of the later Soviet era. From the mid-1970s to the 1990s, the structure of the USSR mental health service conformed to the double standard in society, being represented by two distinct systems which co-existed peacefully for the most part, despite periodic conflicts between them: The hundreds of hospitals in

15367-468: Was released by Rajanagarindra Psychiatric Hospital, on July 22, 2020. Whistleblowers who part ranks with their organizations have had their mental stability questioned, such as, for example, NYPD veteran Adrian Schoolcraft who was coerced to falsify crime statistics in his department and then became a whistleblower. In 2010 he was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital. Alexander Podrabinek Too Many Requests If you report this error to

15494-471: Was republished in 2005. 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. The attention paid to political prisoners by Soviet psychiatrists was more than 40 times greater than their attention to ordinary criminal offenders. This derives from

15621-623: Was surprised at the facts obtained by him from the official classified top secret documents by the Central Committee of the CPSU , by the KGB, and MVD. According to his calculations based on what he found in the documents, about 15,000 people were confined for political crimes in the psychiatric prison hospitals under the control of the MVD. In 2005, referring to the Archives of the CPSU Central Committee and

15748-557: Was then under the rule of Mao Zedong and the Gang of Four , who established a very repressive and harsh regime. No deviance or opposition was tolerated, either in thought or in practice. 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. In the 1980s, according to official documents, fifteen percent of all forensic psychiatric cases had political connotations. In

15875-484: Was to a considerable degree preserved in the new 1958 RSFSR Criminal Code as Article 70 "Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda". In 1967, a weaker law, Article 190-1 "Dissemination of fabrications known to be false, which defame the Soviet political and social system", was added to the RSFSR Criminal Code. These laws were frequently applied in conjunction with the system of diagnosis for mental illness, developed by academician Andrei Snezhnevsky . Together, they established

16002-587: Was transferred to the control of the NKVD (the secret police and precursor of the KGB ) on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria , the head of the NKVD. International human rights defenders such as Walter Reich have long recorded the methods by which Soviet psychiatrists in Psikhushka hospitals diagnosed schizophrenia in political dissenters. Western scholars examined no aspect of Soviet psychiatry as thoroughly as its involvement in

16129-469: Was used reflecting on the exercises practiced by Falung Gong. It was the unfair game aiming to avoid the political abuse of psychiatry from dominating the WPA agenda. In August 2002, the General Assembly was to take place during the next WPA World Congress in Yokohama . The issue of Chinese political abuse of psychiatry had been placed as one of the final items on the agenda of the General Assembly. When

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