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Fifty years of political abuse of psychiatry – no end in sight
Abstract
In October 1989, the General Assembly of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) accepted the Soviet psychiatric association back conditionally, after having been forced to leave the organization six years earlier because of systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes. Three weeks later, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and in 1991, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. However, over the past years, an increasing number of reports on the internment of political activists in former Soviet republics made people realize that 25 years after the decision of the WPA, political abuse of psychiatry still has not been eradicated. Using psychiatry as a means of repression has been a particular favorite of totalitarian regimes with a communist State ideology. Cases have been reported from other countries as well, including Western democratic societies, yet nowhere else has it been developed into a systematic method of repression. While probably the overwhelming majority of Soviet psychiatrists were unaware that they had become part of a perfidious system to treat dissenters as psychiatrically ill on the orders of the Party and the KGB, there is also ample evidence that the core group of architects of the system knew very well what they were doing. When the USSR disintegrated, the practice of using psychiatry against political opponents virtually ceased to exist. What came in its place, however, was a very disturbing collection of other forms of abuses, including human rights abuses due to lack of resources, outdated methods of treatment, lack of understanding of human individual rights and a growing lack of tolerance in society. Starting this century, the number of individual cases of political abuse of psychiatry has increased, in particular, over the past few years in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The issue of Soviet political abuse of psychiatry had a lasting impact on world psychiatry. It triggered the discussions on medical ethics and the professional responsibilities of physicians (including psychiatrists), resulting in both national and international declarations and ethical codes that address the interface between human rights, professional responsibilities of physicians and medical ethics.
... V. Timoshenko (2011) emphasizes the need for a clear demarcation between criminological investigations of political crime and the analysis of the issue solely from a political science perspective. Nevertheless, there are instances where criminological and political science approaches to studying political crime intersect, as evident in the examination of political repression (Bove et al., 2017; see also Bhasin & Gandhi, 2013;Gooch, 2019;Roberti, 2019;Van Voren, 2015). Notably, criminologist V. Luneev (2005) dedicates a chapter in his work «Crime in the XXth Century: Global, Regional and Russian Trends» to scrutinizing political crimes, including political repression, as one of its subsets. ...
The article discusses one of the types of crimes, specifically political crimes. It emphasizes that the research remains relevant and significant in democratic countries. While conditions have been created in such countries to reduce the factors that lead to political crimes, the occurrence of such crimes has not been completely eliminated. The study aims to clarify the characteristics of contemporary political crimes. The author points out that despite the long history of research into this phenomenon, there is still no universally accepted definition for the concept of "political crime." In most definitions of political crime, these crimes are typically associated with the pursuit, maintenance, and use of power. The article focuses on the main issues that currently pique the interest of researchers analyzing political crimes, and it presents a classification based on the subjects and objects of these crimes. Studying both the individuals who commit political crimes and their victims is crucial to understanding the specificities of these crimes. The article draws attention to the fact that labeling actions within the political sphere as "criminal" is contingent upon various factors, including systems of values, established norms and regulations, societal norms, and the influence of media on public awareness. Trust in authorities and their legitimacy also plays a role. Furthermore, the article presents models that demonstrate shifts in attitudes towards revolutions, uprisings, and the reassessment of actions that were once considered "criminal." These shifts can be attributed to changes in the political and social systems. The author highlights that these alterations could be linked to transformations in the political and social systems.
... The long-standing tradition of population data concealment in the Soviet Union (Tolts, 2008) and limited support of social sciences in modern Russia has not allowed for large-scale investigations into many social and psychological issues. Moreover, the engagement of psychiatry in political repressions has resulted in the withdrawal of Soviet psychiatrists from the World Psychiatric Association and in significant damage to psychiatric research and practice in the country (van Voren, 2015). Even today, there is limited expertise and interest in psychiatric epidemiology within Russia as well as notable reluctance to share existing data internationally. ...
People have been using images to express ideas, share stories, and communicate since early history. The advent of social media has made sharing images an important part of everyday life. Among other things, social networks can be used to express psychological distress; however, research on this topic is limited. The goal of this study was to explore representations of psychological distress in the Russian-speaking segment of Instagram. The study involved contrasting images labeled with hashtags in Russian with images marked by analogous Anglophone hashtags in a data set of 1,512 images. Quantitative content analysis revealed significant differences between images labeled with Russian and Anglophone hashtags. Images containing depictions of texts were significantly less frequent among images with Russian hashtags, while inanimate object depictions were more prevalent. Hashtags for fear in both languages were related not to psychological distress but to the “scary” in popular culture. Images of alcohol were associated with stress hashtags in both languages and with hashtag for depression in Russian only. Images of food were significantly more prevalent among images with Russian hashtag for stress. Current study highlights the need for culturally and linguistically appropriate online mental health interventions.
Psychiatry's relationship with politics has been historically problematic. There has been extensive debate about whether psychiatry's own origins as a medical specialty were political themselves. But, it is beyond dispute that the Soviet Union did use psychiatry for political purposes, and currently Russia and China do the same. On the basis of this historical experience, there has been a consensus that psychiatrists must be very careful not to mingle with politics. In the United States, this has been enshrined in the Goldwater rule. But, the election of Donald Trump as US President, and questions about his mental stability, have motivated a reassessment of the status quo. This article considers the ethics of psychiatrists’ political involvement. It concludes that, despite understandable concerns, psychiatry must remain fundamentally apolitical.
With the recent rise of a new confrontation between the East and the West, the convergence of different understandings of brainwashing emerges as a problem of political communication and poses a challenge for information security. The principle objective of this paper is to present a contemporary understanding of brainwashing, determine its propaganda potential, and provide educated guesses about successor concepts, which could be traced back to the origins of brainwashing. Therefore, the article describes the ‘classical’ Western understanding of brainwashing; looks for the potential equivalents of brainwashing on the other side of the Iron Curtain; reveals the rebirth and transformations of the concept in post-communist countries during the period of time, when brainwashing in the West had already came out of fashion; notes to the potential misunderstandings between the new and old democracies, which arise because of the different interpretation of brainwashing.The contemporary comprehension of brainwashing continues to alternate between instrumental and political understanding. The broadened concept becomes more blurred, although the lack of precision compensates the potential loss of mystery and allows the brainwashing to preserve an image of an almighty technique.
After the outbreak of the Ukrainian crisis in the spring of 2014, the former Soviet Union again became front-page news. The sequence of events led to an atmosphere reminiscent of the Cold War. In Russia itself it led to a hunt for ‘national traitors’ and ‘foreign agents’ and observers both inside the country and abroad fear a return to Soviet-style repression. For the outside world this may come as a surprise, but human rights activists have been ringing the alarm bells for a few years. Ever since Vladimir Putin took power, the human rights situation has deteriorated. One of the warning signs was the return of the use of psychiatry for political purposes, to ‘prevent’ social or political activism or to ostracise an activist.
As one article in an ongoing series on Global Mental Health Practice, Robert van Voren and Nino Makhashvili provide a case study from Georgia on mental health care reforms.
Trofim Lysenko's campaign against genetics and biology during the era of Stalin and Khrushchev is one of the great tragedies of modern science. In the purges that Lysenko (1898-1976) instigated, even the greatest of Soviet scientists were not safe. Only in 1964, when Khrushchev fell from power and when massive crop failures revealed the emptiness of the peasant-scientist's theories, did Lysenko lose favor. Even now, his long shadow stretches over the countries of the former Soviet Union as they deal with the disastrous consequences of Lysenkoist policies on science, agriculture, medicine, and the environment. As a young student in the 1950s, Valery N. Soyfer saw Lysenko's power - and charismatic charm - at first hand. In the 1970s, when Soyfer found himself stripped of his scientific degrees and positions because he had supported physicist Andre Sakharov and joined the dissident movement in the USSR, he used his time to find out all he could about the man who had destroyed Soviet science. This is the fullest account yet of Lysenko's life and times. It draws on extensive interviews, archives long inaccessible to scholars, and Soyfer's own memories. With the passion of a novelist and the precision of a scientist, Soyfer re-creates this terrible episode in twentieth-century history. The original Russian manuscript of this unique biography circulated as an underground samizdat book and was to the West for publication. When Dr. Soyfer was unexpectedly allowed to leave the USSR in 1988, Rutgers University Press greeted him with a contract for the work.
The concept of 'sluggish schizophrenia' is virtually limited to the USSR and some other East European countries, and may contribute to the mis-diagnosis of democrats as psychiatric patients. Recently, a number of articles have appeared in the Soviet literature relating the diagnosis of 'sluggish schizophrenia' or 'slowly progressive schizophrenia' to affective disorders, especially hypomania. Soviet publications on this theme from 1980 to 1984 are discussed, together with their relationship to questions on the abuse of psychiatry.
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