Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 17 – The use of psychiatry against dissidents, one of the most notorious aspects of the last years of the Soviet Union, has returned to Putin’s Russia with a vengeance. In Nizhny Novgorod alone, there have been three well-documented cases of such abuse of psychiatry by the siloviki against those who protest what they authorities are doing.
Radio Liberty documents each of the cases with interviews both of the victims and of those who have tried to help them both recover from this form of abuse and block it from happening to others (svoboda.org/a/normaljnye-lyudi-ne-protestuyut-vozrozhdenie-karateljnoy-psihiatrii/32083814.html).
But perhaps the most important aspect of this report is its description of the attitudes of a psychiatrist who has sold out the principles of her profession to serve the interests of the FSB and the Kremlin. According to those who have viewed her work, she views “all forms of political and social activism at odds with the authorities to be a manifestation of psychological illness.”
“’Normal’ people in her view do not protest but live silent vegetative lives. Even examples of successful struggle – for example, the reduction of tariffs as a result of protest and the end of construction in a park – she disparaged by suggesting the tariffs would go up and trees cut down and that it is useless to fight against that,” one of her victims says.
“If you fight against the authorities,” he continues, in her view, “you are mentally ill,” deserve to be forcibly confined in a psychiatric hospital and treated with psychotropic medications.
Such attitudes which recall those Soviet psychiatrists who misused their science for the benefit of the communist authorities were enough for the International Psychiatric Association to expel the USSR from its ranks. Something similar must now be done with Russian psychiatrists and their organizations who have revied this barbaric practice.
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