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7 Poly L. Rev. 82 (1982)
Psychiatric Treatment for Political Dissidents in the USSR

handle is hein.journals/polylawr7 and id is 82 raw text is: Psychiatric treatment for political dissidents in the USSR Michael Ellman Solicitor* In any modem society, one of the great- est pressures on the life of an individual is the pressure to conform. Even in the West, individualists are (and particularly were until the 1960s) considered odd and deviations from the social norm categor- ised as unhealthy and socially danger- ous. Thus, homosexual behaviour, even between consenting adults, was a crime, and is still the subject of social pre- judice and ridicule. Recently, an elderly woman was released from a mental hospital where she had been confined in the 1920s for the 'abnormal' and socially unacceptable behaviour of bearing an illegitimate child: no doubt her family and/or friends had considered it so inconvenient (and perhaps she had refused to be ashamed) that she must be mentally deranged, and that was how she was categorised. In the U S SR, where Party members and their parents struggled for years to achieve what they genuinely think of (and, having no contact with the outside, have no yardstick by which to find them- selves wrong) as a near Utopia, anyone who deliberately struggles against it must be abnormal and so a danger to society. We are talking here of a highly regimented and repressive society which it has been since Tsarist times. Diagnoses of mental illness Soviet psychiatrists themselves, brought up in the same narrow educational and social system as their compatriots, are not immune from these attitudes, and have reinforced their diagnoses by appropriate scientific theories. Thus 'apparent normality' is not sufficient to prevent individuals being labelled as 'dangerously mentally ill' and forcibly detained in hospital under the theories of Professor Snezhnevsky and others of the Serbsky 'Institute for Criminal Psychiatry'. The practice is covered by a secret directive on emergency confinement of mentally ill persons who represent a social danger, issued on 26th August 1971 by the Ministry of Health with the Procurator-General and the Ministry of the Interior. This states that mentally ill people may be confined to a psych- iatric hospital without their permission or their family's if they are an evident danger to themselves or those around them. The terms for the symptoms are so broad and lacking in medical pre- cision that they cover almost any non- -conformist behaviour : for example, a hypochondriac delusion, causing an abnormal aggressive attitude in the ill person towards individuals or organis- ations and institutions and a system- atic syndrome of delusions with chronic deterioration if it results in behaviour dangerous to society. These diagnoses have been backed up by new appellations of mental illness, such as sluggish schizophrenia invented by Professor Snezhnevsky. In 1973, for the first time, Soviet psych- iatrists became worried by foreign attacks on their professional activities and put out a statement which was widely publicised within the USSR and sent to foreign newspapers : There is a small number of mental cases whose disease, as a result of mental derangement, paranoia and other psycho-pathological symptoms can lead them to anti-social actions Most of the examples, and much of the material for this article, are taken from the Amnesty International publication Prisoners of Conscience in the USSR (Amnesty International, London, 2nd edition 1980) to which the writer is much indebted. The quotations of speech come from the Chronicle o f Current Events (the Samizdat - a private publication by dissidents, also pub- lished in English by Amnesty International.

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