Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of abuse of psychiatry is spoken when the psychiatric diagnosis and the (drug) treatment are abused in psychiatry for the restriction on the fundamental rights of certain groups and individuals in a society. The Helsinki Declaration on Ethical Principles for Medical Research on Humans expressly contradicts such abuse and outlaws it internationally.

In the Soviet Union , however, psychiatry was systematically abused, among other things, to pathologize, weed out and deprive people who think differently and political dissidents . Dissenters, who in socialist ideology were often seen as both a burden and a threat to the system, could easily be discredited and detained.

In the course of its history, the Soviet Union has become increasingly known abroad for massively suppressing and mistreating politically dissenters and other dissidents without regard to their rights.

In the 1960s and 1970s it was then revealed that so-called counter - revolutionary thoughts were perceived and treated as psychological disorders in the Soviet Union - even against the declared will of the "sick".

The Pavlovian reflex psychology was with the establishment of Stalinism as the only "politically correct" subspecies of psychology established. The psychoanalysis previously advocated by Leon Trotsky came under increasing criticism, even with his exclusion from the inner circle of the CPSU.

history

The diagnosis of "creeping" schizophrenia

In the early 1930s, after the center of psychiatry research and the seat of government moved to Moscow , research on schizophrenia in particular was a highly heterogeneous field: Pyotr Gannushkin, for example, one of Moscow's leading psychiatrists, was best known for exploring the "borderline" between mental health and illness. He studied personality disorders and as early as 1931 described schizoid psychopathy in a way that partially anticipated the modern understanding of the disease.

Andrei Snezhnevsky , director of the Moscow Institute of Psychiatry and member of the Academy of Medical Sciences, announced his discovery of so-called "creeping" schizophrenia at the 1971 World Congress in Mexico.

The criteria for the "lazy" or "creeping" form of schizophrenia led to overdiagnosis of schizophrenia and that facilitated compulsory treatment actually healthy "patients".

Reports of Forced Treatment

Reports began to reach the West in the early 1970s that political and religious dissidents in the Soviet Union were being detained and forcibly treated in high-security units of psychiatric hospitals for no medical justification. The autobiographical novel Палата № 7 by Valerij Tarsis , which was smuggled out of the country and published in 1965 a. a. was published in Tamizdat in West Germany and the USA , was one of the first literary evidence of the forced treatment.

The usual procedure here was to subject a dissident to a compulsory psychiatric examination on the basis of political offenses such as those under Article 70 ("Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda") Article 58 or Article 190-1 (Defamation) of the RSFSR Criminal Code, which was usually carried out at the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry, either superficially or even “in the absence”.

Without any delay, the "patient" was then imprisoned indefinitely in one of countless special psychiatric clinics across the country under the direct jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs . Data available to the European Parliament show that by the 1960s at the latest, the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union had become one of the main methods of repression: by the end of the decade, many well-known dissidents had been diagnosed as mentally ill.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov

The then KGB chairman Yuri Andropov personally played a decisive role in this ; in 1967 he declared the fight against ideological diversion to be the core of his KGB work. Andropov, in collaboration with a select group of employees, turned the political abuse of psychiatry into a systematic means of oppression.

The abuse in psychiatric hospitals

In 1989, in the wake of glasnost and perestroika, a delegation of psychiatrists from the United States was invited by the Soviet leadership to the disintegrating USSR and was able to conduct extensive interviews with alleged victims of psychiatric abuse that uncovered serious and routine abuse. High doses of antipsychotics were routinely administered by injection as part of a 10 to 15 day cure, for example to treat “ delusions of reformism” and after expressing “anti-Soviet thoughts”, but also to punish violations of hospital rules.

Significant testimony from Doctor Koryagin

After Anatoly Koryagin wrote an indictment against the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR under the title "Patients against their own will" in The Lancet , he was declared insane himself. Korjagin testified in 1987 that he was with powerful neuroleptic drugs forcibly medicated advantage Service. To improve the effectiveness of the drugs, he was forcibly fed a certain substance, which was administered to him nasally, among other things.

Position of the Soviet Association of Psychiatrists

Associations of psychiatrists and psychologists around the world made it clear in the 1980s that they were "no longer willing to tolerate the perversion of their subject and - if they can not turn it off - at least no longer willing to make common with those responsible".

At the general assembly of the World Association for Psychiatry in Vienna in the summer of 1983, the exclusion of the Soviet Association of Psychiatrists was to be requested. This subdivision, operating as the All Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists , and the largest psychiatric society in the world with over 20,000 members, preceded its expulsion on January 31, 1983, when it announced its withdrawal from the World Organization of Neuropathologists.

Aftermath in the Post-Soviet Era

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there have been repeated reports of a renewed use of psychiatry for political purposes. Most of the more recent cases involve the Russian Federation and Ukraine, although none of them have been hospitalized in a psychiatric facility with compulsory treatment for several years.

Certain views and perspectives that stand in the way of humane treatment of mentally ill patients persist in the field of mental health care 20 years after the end of Soviet power, in Russia and in other former Soviet republics. In most of these countries, work in “intensive care homes,” as the NKVD custody facilities were euphemistically called, has changed little, and hundreds of thousands of people are interned in such institutions, likely for the rest of their lives.

Debates are going on about the reasons for a renewed abuse of psychiatry.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ R. van Voren : Political abuse of psychiatry-an historical overview. In: Schizophrenia bulletin. Volume 36, Number 1, January 2010, pp. 33-35, doi: 10.1093 / schbul / sbp119 . PMID 19892821 , PMC 2800147 (free full text).
  2. ↑ Robert van Voren: Abuse of Psychiatry for Political Purposes in the USSR: A Case-Study and Personal Account of the Efforts to Bring Them to an End. In: Hanfried Helmchen , Norman Sartorius (Ed.): Ethics in Psychiatry: European Contributions. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht 2010, ISBN 978-90-481-8720-1 , pp. 480-507. (books.google.de , accessed on November 17, 2014)
  3. ↑ World Medical Association (Ed.): WMA Declaration of Helsinki - Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects (full text of the Helsinki Declaration) ( wma.net ( Memento of December 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on 11. November 2014)
  4. ^ Translation of the Helsinki Declaration into German (German Medical Association) ( Memento from November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF file), accessed on November 11, 2014.
  5. ↑ Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (Ed.), "Psychiatry in the Soviet Union" Chapter 6 of Psychiatry: Death Instead of Help (video), accessed November 11, 2014.
  6. ↑ a b Human Rights Watch (ed.): The Legacy of Psychiatric Abuse in the USSR (PDF file), accessed November 11, 2014.
  7. ↑ George Dvorsky: How the Soviets used their own twisted version of Psychiatry to supress political Dissent (April 9, 2012), accessed November 11, 2014.
  8. ↑ Brigitte Nölleke: History of Psychoanalysis in Russia. accessed on November 16, 2014.
  9. ↑ a b Helen Lavretsky: The Russian Concept of Schizophrenia: A Review of the Literature. In: Schizophrenia Bulletin . Volume 24, No. 4,1998, p. 539 (PDF file), accessed on January 5, 2015.
  10. ↑ a b Creeping madness. In: Der Spiegel . No. 28, 1983, accessed November 11, 2014.
  11. ↑ Arutyunov Heinrich: "creeping" schizophrenia from KGB - genuine original political diagnosis, for the first time in the global Internet . March 9, 2017.
  12. ^ A b c Richard J. Bonnie: Political Abuse of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union and in China: Complexities and Controversies. (PDF file), accessed November 11, 2014.
  13. ↑ Rosalind Marsh: Soviet fiction since Stalin: science, politics and literature. Croom Helm, London 1986, ISBN 0-7099-1776-7 , p. 208.
  14. ^ A b c Robert van Voren: Is there a resumption of political psychiatry in the former USSR? Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  15. ^ Orthodox America The Cry of the New Martyrs - Speaking Out in Freedom, Anatoly Koryagin. ( Memento of September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on November 16, 2014.
  16. ^ Daniel Goleman: Psychiatric Abuse in Soviet Assailed. In: The New York Times . May 14, 1987. Retrieved November 16, 2014.
  17. ↑ German Association against Political Abuse of Psychiatry e. V .: Statement of the DGPN on the abuse of psychiatry. June 4, 1982. In: IAPUP and DVPMP (eds.): Rundbrief. 1/83. ( psychiatrie-und-ethik.de ( memento of November 7, 2017 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on November 16, 2014)