Political Abuses of Psychiatry - Soviet Union

Soviet Union

From the early 1970s, during Leonid Brezhnev's rule of the Soviet Union, reports started reaching the West that religious and political dissenters were being detained in maximum-security mental hospitals in the USSR without medical justification. In 1977, the World Psychiatric Association condemned the USSR for this practice, and six years later, the All-Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists seceded from the WPA rather than face almost definite expulsion. During this period, while reports of continuous repression multiplied, Soviet psychiatric officials refused to allow international bodies to see the hospitals and patients in question and denied the charges of abuse. In 1989, however, the stonewalling of Soviet psychiatry was overcome by perestroika and glasnost. Over the objection of the psychiatric establishment, the Soviet government permitted a delegation of psychiatrists from the USA, representing the U.S. Government, to carry out extensive interviews of suspected victims of abuse.

In February 1989, a delegation of US psychiatrists and other experts visited the Soviet Union on the invitation of the Soviet government. The delegation was able systematically to interview and assess present and past involuntarily admitted mental patients chosen by 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. Whereas the delegation originally sought interviews with 48 persons, it eventually saw 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 the Soviets authorities and the departure from the Soviet Union of the US delegation. The delegation came to the conclusion 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 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 record, all these patients had diagnoses of psychopathology or schizophrenia.

When returned home after a visit of more than two weeks, the delegation wrote its report which was pretty damaging to the Soviet authorities. The delegation established not only that there had taken place systematic political abuse of psychiatry but also that the abuse had not come to an end, that victims of the abuse still remained in mental hospitals, and that the Soviet authorities and particularly the Soviet Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists still denied that psychiatry had been employed as a method of repression.