Psikhushka

Psikhushka ("психушка") is a Russian colloquialism for "psychiatric hospital". It has been occasionally used in English since the dissident movement in the Soviet Union became known in the West. In the Soviet Union, psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. The official explanation was that "no sane person would declaim against Soviet government and communism".

History

Historians debate the circumstances of the origins of this practice, but there is evidence that it was used by the end of 1940s (see Alexander Esenin-Volpin), and it is generally believed that it was in wide use in the wake of the Khrushchev Thaw period in the 1960s. The official Soviet psychiatric science came up with the definition of "sluggishly progressing schizophrenia" (вялотекущая шизофрения), a special form of the illness that supposedly affects only the person's social behavior, with no trace on other traits: "most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure," according to the Serbsky Institute professors (a quote Applebaum, 2003 from Vladimir Bukovsky's archives). Some of them had high rank in the MVD, such as the infamous Danil Luntz, who was characterized by Viktor Nekipelov as "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps".

The sane individuals who were diagnosed as "mentally ill" were sent either to a regular psychiatric hospitals or, those deemed "particularly dangerous", to a special ones, run directly by the MVD. The "treatment" included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, a range of drugs (such as narcotics, tranquilizers, and insulin) that cause long lasting side effects, and sometimes involved beatings. Nekipelov describes inhuman uses of medical procedures such as lumbar punctures as "treatments".

Soviet psychiatric abuse exposed

In 1971, Bukovsky managed to smuggle to the West over 150 pages documenting abuse of psychiatric institutions for political reasons in the USSR. The facts galvanized the human rights activists worldwide, including inside the USSR. In January 1972, the Soviet authorities incarcerated Bukovsky, officially for contacts with foreign journalists and possession and distribution of samizdat (Article 70-1, 7 years of imprisonment plus 5 years in exile).

Reaction by the World Psychiatric Association

The World Psychiatric Association (WPA) resisted involvement in the issue after the Soviet delegation threatened withdrawal. As the number of documented cases of abuse continued to increase and international protests started to mount, WPA changed its stance and adopted ethical code of conduct for its members and established investigative bodies to enforce it.

The first committee against the political abuse of psychiatry was founded in 1974 in Geneva. In 1977, the WPA's World Congress in Honolulu adopted the Declaration of Honolulu, the first document to set forth a set of basic ethical standards guiding the work of psychiatrists worldwide. The congress also officially condemned Soviet political psychiatric abuses for the first time. In 1982, facing imminent expulsion from the WPA, the Soviet delegation voluntarily withdrew, and in 1983 the WPA's World Congress in Vienna adopted a resolution that placed strict conditions on its return.

Mikhail Gorbachev' glasnost campaign significantly contributed to the exposuse of more evidence in the Soviet press. In 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet delegation to the WPA's World Congress in Athens acknowledged that systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes had indeed taken place in their country.The Soviet Case: Prelude to a Global Consensus on Psychiatry and Human Rights by Robin Munro. First published in the Columbia Journal of Asian Law, vol. 14, no. 1 (2000)

People

References

Bibliography

Applebaum, Anne: Gulag: A History (Broadway Books, 2003) ISBN 0767900561
Fireside, Harvey: Soviet Psychoprisons

Mental hospitals | Prisons in Russia | Imprisonment and detention

Psychiatria represyjna w ZSRR