Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union

Common card · No. 351909

There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem, rather than a social, political, or material one. The extent of this abuse depended on the time period. It started in the late 1940s and was systemic in the 1960s to the mid-1980s. The Criminal Code was applied in conjunction with the system of diagnosis for mental illness developed by Andrei Snezhnevsky to establish a framework within which non-standard beliefs could easily be defined as criminal offences and subsequently be the basis for a psychiatric diagnosis. Diagnoses such as "sluggish schizophrenia" or "political intoxication" were applied to dissenters, who were then incarcerated in psychiatric wards with poor living conditions. Psychiatry allowed Soviet authorities to bypass standard legal procedures and avoid the odium attached to political trials. Dissidence was also thus discredited as the result of unhealthy minds...

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