Soviet psychiatry

Comparing Soviet and Chinese political psychiatry.

The international campaign against the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union spanned a period of 20 years. It started roughly in the beginning of the 1970s when the Moscow-based dissident Vladimir Bukovsky sent the first documentation to the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) and ended in 1991 when the same WPA sent a mission to the Soviet Union to investigate whether the political...

The structure of psychiatry in the Soviet Union

the Ethiopian artist Admassu Mammo based on recent famine conditions in the country; and Pankhurst provides an introduction ('A forward view', pp. 4-6) in which he discusses current efforts to implement long-term solutions to the threat of famine in Ethiopia, and deplores current international aid facilities for their tendency to link development aid to considerations of economy and power polit...

Law, Theory, and Politics: The Dilemma of Soviet Psychiatry

The prostitution of forensic psychiatry in the Soviet Union.

As Forensic Psychiatrists we are deeply bound by the medical oaths we took as physicians never to harm our patients. If it is brought to our attention that our colleagues are involved in an unethical practice of our profession, it is our responsibility not only to bring it to their attention but also to do whatever is necessary to correct the situation. In the U. S. S. R. diagnoses are made to ...

Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union and in China: complexities and controversies.

On first glance, political abuse of psychiatry appears to represent a straightforward and uncomplicated story: the deployment of medicine as an instrument of repression. Psychiatric incarceration of mentally healthy people is uniformly understood to be a particularly pernicious form of repression, because it uses the powerful modalities of medicine as tools of punishment, and it compounds a dee...