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 abuse of psychiatry had indeed come to an end and democratization had also reached Soviet psychiatry. In the meantime, the attitude of world psychiatry toward the problem changed almost 180 degrees, and bodies such as the WPA were triggered into adopting codes of ethics and setting up investigative bodies that would assure that the newly adopted codes of conduct would be adhered to and that violators would be sanctioned.