Political abuse of psychiatry in Russia
Political abuse of psychiatry is the purported misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, detention and treatment for the purposes of obstructing the fundamental human rights of certain groups and individuals in a society. In other words, abuse of psychiatry including one for political purposes is deliberate action of getting citizens certified, who, because of their mental condition, need neither psychiatric restraint nor psychiatric treatment. 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 code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances. Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions. Psychiatric confinement of sane people is uniformly considered a particularly pernicious form of repression.
In the period from the 1960s up to 1986, abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was reported to be occasional in Eastern European countries such as Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, and systematic in the Soviet Union.
Robert van Voren of the Global Initiative on Psychiatry says the emergence of individual cases of political abuse of psychiatry in Russia is directly related to the deterioration of the human rights situation and to the fact that on-the-spot authorities feel more carefree than they did before, and deal with undesirable elements at their own discretion. The aura of inviolability is returned to the Russian rulers, the rule of law becomes subject to political machinations. Everything points to the fact that Russia still has the structure to exercise political abuse of psychiatry. Both political and economic nomenklatura is quite powerful and would not stop short at using illegal means especially now, when the political nomenklatura has absorbed economic power from Russian oligarchs, and the country is, in fact, ruled by the circle of people who came directly from the KGB whose capacities to establish control are limitless. This does not bode well for the future. According to Eduard Kuznetsov, "More than 50 percent of the key state positions are occupied by former KGB officials. The KGB officials have a specific mentality. They can't change. There is a danger that it will really be a police state. Not so straightforward as it was under Brezhnev, because there is inertia, because they have to balance between the [opinion of the] free world and a controlled society." The same occasionally happens in many countries monitored by the Global Initiative on Psychiatry. Psychiatry is regarded as a handy tool to solve disputes, and one can easily buy a diagnosis from a psychiatrist. In most of the countries, forensic psychiatry has changed only slightly, the strong resistance to introducing the modern practices of forensic psychiatry is due to not disparities in schools or views but the fact that the reform of the system would mean the end of corruption. Criminals pay off their imprisonment of many years by having themselves declared insane. Wealthy husbands declare about the mental illnesses in their wives to get rid of them and yet keep control over their children. Children declare their parents and grandparents legally incapable to sell their apartments. Even medical institutions recognize their patients as insane to take their property. It is just a press for printing money. Today the Russian opposition cannot expect the type of help the West gave in Soviet times. Supporting Soviet dissidents was part of anti-Soviet policy but now pragmatism and precise calculation rules.
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