09-12-27 Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union and in the US

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

психушка (slang)

Russian term
Translit	psikhushka
English	psychiatric hospital

In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was used for punitive purposes. 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; as such they were considered a form of torture.^[1]

Psikhushka (Russian: 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.

History

Psikhushkas had been already used since the end of the 1940s (see Alexander Esenin-Volpin) and during the Khrushchev Thaw period in the 1960s. One of the first psikhushkas was the Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the city of Kazan. It was transferred to NKVD control in 1939 under the order of Lavrentiy Beria. ^[2] On April 29, 1969 the head of KGB, Yuri Andropov, submitted to the Central Committee of CPSU a plan for creating a network of psikhushkas.^[3]

The official Soviet psychiatry allegedly abused the diagnosis of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia (вялотекущая шизофрения), a special form of the illness that supposedly affects only the person's social behavior, with no trace of other traits: "most frequently, ideas about astruggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure," according to the Moscow Serbsky Institute professors (a quote ^[4] 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 Naziconcentration camps" ^[4].

The sane individuals who were diagnosed as mentally ill were sent either to regular psychiatric hospitals or, those deemed particularly dangerous, to special ones, run directly by the MVD. The treatment included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, electromagnetic torture^{[clarification needed]}, radiation torture^{[clarification needed]}, entrapment, servitude, a range of drugs (such as narcotics, tranquilizers, andinsulin) that cause long lasting side effects, and sometimes involved beatings. Nekipelov describes inhuman uses of medical procedures such as lumbar punctures.

At least 365 sane people were treated for "politically defined madness" in the Soviet Union, and there were surely hundreds more ^[4].

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Current practice in the US

In recent years the custom has been increasingly used in the United States, or at least - the evidence showed it was used in Los Angeles County. Two recent inmates in the Los Angeles Central Men's jail were attorneys who filed complaints against corrupt California judges in United States courts. One - Richard Isaac Fine is held for 10 month (as of December 2009) under false hospitalization with no warrant at all.^[15]. The other - Ronald Gottschalk was help from about October 8, 2009 to November 6, 2009 in a psychiatric ward. ^[16]. In parallel, the Los Angeles County California Sheriff Department has refused to allow access to arrest and booking papers of the two inmates, as required by California Public Records Act ^[17].

In his case as well- there was no warrant at all. Although no statistics are available regarding the practice, anecdotal evidence from Los Angeles County and elsewhere suggested that it was much more common than the public may believe. The practice is doubly effective, since after such forced psychiatric hospitalization, and diagnosis by prison staff that the prisoner is mentally unstable, any future damaging evidence he/she would present would be undermined.

Linked Records:
15. ^ See: Booking No.: 1824367 Last Name: FINE First Name: RICHARD Middle Name: I at: Los Angeles County Sheriff's Departmenthttp://app4.lasd.org/iic/ajis_search.cf
16 ^ See: Booking No.: 2088144 Last Name: GOTTSCHALK First Name: RONALD Middle Name: NORTON at: Los Angeles County Sheriff's Departmenthttp://app4.lasd.org/iic/ajis_search.cfm
17 ^ http://inproperinla.com/09-12-23-req-supervisor-antonowitch-inquiry-on-sheriff-baca-letter-s.pdf