Political abuse of psychiatry in Russia

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Political abuse of psychiatry implies a misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, detention and treatment for the purposes of obstructing the fundamental human rights of certain groups and individuals in a society.^[1] In other words, abuse of psychiatry including one for political purposes is the deliberate action of getting citizens certified, who, because of their mental condition, need neither psychiatric restraint nor psychiatric treatment.^[2] Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience.^[3] As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances.^[4] Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions.^[5] Psychiatric confinement of sane people is uniformly considered a particularly pernicious form of repression.^[6]

In the period from the 1960s up to 1986, abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was reported to be occasional in Eastern European countries such as Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. It was reported as systematic in the Soviet Union.^[7]