Political abuse of psychiatry

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Political abuse of psychiatry, also known as punitive psychiatry, refers to the misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, detention, and treatment to suppress individual or group human rights in society. This abuse involves the deliberate psychiatric diagnosis of individuals who require neither psychiatric restraint nor treatment, often for political purposes. Psychiatrists have been implicated in human rights abuses worldwide, particularly in states where diagnostic criteria for mental illness are expanded to include political disobedience. Scholars have long observed that government and medical institutions tend to label threats to authority as mentally ill during periods of political unrest. In many countries, political prisoners are confined and abused in psychiatric hospitals. Psychiatry is uniquely vulnerable to being used for abusive purposes compared to other specialties of medicine. The power to diagnose mental illness allows the state to detain individuals against their will and administer...

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