Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union

Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was used for punitive purposes. Psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally; as such they were considered a form of torture.

Psikhushka (Russian: психушка) is a Russian colloquialism for psychiatric hospital. It has been occasionally used in English since the dissident movement in the Soviet Union became known in the West.

History

Psikhushkas had been already used since the end of the 1940s (see Alexander Esenin-Volpin) and during the Khrushchev Thaw period in the 1960s. One of the first psikhushkas was the Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the city of Kazan. It was transferred to NKVD control in 1939 under the order of Lavrentiy Beria. On April 29, 1969, the head of KGB, Yuri Andropov, submitted to the Central Committee of CPSU a plan for creating a network of psikhushkas.

The official Soviet psychiatry allegedly abused the diagnosis of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia (вялотекущая шизофрения), a special form of the illness that supposedly affects only the person's social behavior, with no trace of other traits: "most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure," according to the Moscow Serbsky Institute professors (a quote from Vladimir Bukovsky's archives). Some of them had high rank in the MVD, such as the infamous Danil Luntz, who was characterized by Viktor Nekipelov as "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps" .

The sane individuals who were diagnosed as mentally ill were sent either to regular psychiatric hospitals or, those deemed particularly dangerous, to special ones, run directly by the MVD. The treatment included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, electromagnetic torture, radiation torture, entrapment, servitude, a range of drugs (such as narcotics, tranquilizers, and insulin) that cause long lasting side effects, and sometimes involved beatings. Nekipelov describes inhuman uses of medical procedures such as lumbar punctures.

At least 365 sane people were treated for "politically defined madness" in the Soviet Union, and there were surely hundreds more .

Soviet psychiatric abuse exposed

In 1971, Bukovsky managed to smuggle to the West over 150 pages documenting abuse of psychiatric institutions for political reasons in the USSR. The facts galvanized the human rights activists worldwide, including inside the USSR. In January 1972, the Soviet authorities incarcerated Bukovsky for 7 years of imprisonment plus 5 years in exile, officially for contacts with foreign journalists and possession and distribution of samizdat (Article 70-1).

Together with a fellow inmate in Vladimir prison, psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, Bukovsky coauthored A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents in order to help other dissidents fight abuses of the authorities.

In 1971, a renowned Soviet physicist Academician Andrei Sakharov supported protest of two political prisoners, V. Fainberg and V. Borisov, who announced a hunger strike against "compulsory therapeutic treatment with medications injurious to mental activity" in a Leningrad psychiatric institution. For his activism in defense of human rights Sakharov was expelled from the Soviet Academy of Sciences and sent to internal exile.

Reaction by the World Psychiatric Association

When early concerns were raised in the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), the Soviet delegation threatened to withdraw from the international organization and WPA held out its involvement in the issue. As the number of documented cases of abuse continued to increase and international protests started to mount, WPA changed its stance and adopted an ethical code of conduct for its members and established investigative bodies to enforce it.

The first committee against the political abuse of psychiatry was founded in 1974 in Geneva. In 1977, the WPA's World Congress in Honolulu adopted the Declaration of Hawaii, the first document to set forth a set of basic ethical standards guiding the work of psychiatrists worldwide. The congress also officially condemned Soviet political psychiatric abuses for the first time. In 1982, facing imminent expulsion from the WPA, the Soviet delegation voluntarily withdrew, and in 1983 the WPA's World Congress in Vienna adopted a resolution that placed strict conditions on its return.

Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost campaign significantly contributed to the exposure of more evidence in the Soviet press. In 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet delegation to the WPA's World Congress in Athens acknowledged that systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes had indeed taken place in their country.

Post-Soviet times

In modern Russia, the role of psychiatry in the criminal field is the same as in other countries: to evaluate whether defendants in criminal cases are legally sane to stand trial. For example, when an accused war criminal Yuri Budanov was tested at the Moscow Serbsky Institute in 2002, the panel conducting the inquiry was led by Tamara Pechernikova, who had declared poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya insane several decades earlier. Budanov was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, but later he was found legally sane to stand the trial by another panel that included Georgi Morozov, the former Serbsky director who had declared many dissidents insane several decades earlier.

There have been reports in the 2000s about alleged imprisonment of people "inconvenient" for Russian authorities in psychiatric institutions. The BBC reported, notably, that dissident Larisa Arap was forcibly confined at a psychiatric clinic in Apatity. The charge that psychiatry is again being abused is not universally accepted within the profession in Russia. "The problem of forced treatment or psychiatric persecution existed more than 20 years ago, but it was solved. And since then I haven't heard of any case of forced psychiatric examination or treatment," said Vladimir Rotstein, president of Public Initiative on Psychiatry, an advocacy group. The Independent Psychiatric Association, however, says that the number of activists being wrongfully hospitalized in mental facilities totals dozens of cases in recent years. . In 2006, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons issued a warning that in the Russian Federation "psychiatry is used as a tool against dissent". In March 2006, a former nuclear scientist and vocal public defender Marina Trutko was subjected to daily injections for six weeks at Psychiatric Hospital No. 14 in Dubna, Russia, to treat her for a “paranoid personality disorder.” In 2005, Nikolai Skachkov, who protested police brutality and official corruption in the Omsk region of Siberia, spent 6 months in a closed psychiatric facility, with a diagnosis of paranoia. "In the United States, the Federation of State Medical Boards has seemingly embraced the concept that the “disruptive physician” has a “mental illness” that needs to be treated. Some advertisements of self-styled centers of excellence for treating the “disruptive physician” talk about “therapeutic punishment.” "

Popular culture

British playwright Tom Stoppard wrote Every Good Boy Deserves Favour about the relationship between a patient and his doctor in one of these hospitals.

Dissidents

• Leonid Plyushch
• Vladimir Bukovsky
• Natalya Gorbanevskaya
• Alexander Esenin-Volpin
• Pyotr Grigorenko
• Zhores Medvedev
• Viktor Nekipelov
• Valeriya Novodvorskaya
• Andrei Sakharov
• Natan Sharansky
• Andrei Sinyavsky
• Anatoly Koryagin, a whistle blower

Politicians from territories occupied by Soviet forces

• Konstantin Päts

See also

• Involuntary commitment
• Human rights
• Gulag
• Larisa Arap
• Andrei Snezhnevsky - Soviet psychiatrist credited with the invention of "sluggish schizophrenia".
• Excited delirium

Further reading

• Antébi, Elizabeth (1977). Droit d'asiles en Union Soviétique. Paris: Editions Julliard. ISBN 2260000657.
• Applebaum, Anne (2003). Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-7679-0056-1.
• Boulet, Marc (2001). Dans la peau d'un... Paris: Seuil. ISBN 2-02-038072-2.
• Fireside, Harvey. Soviet Psychoprisons.