Political abuse of psychiatry in Russia () 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.; 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. 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. As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances. Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions. Psychiatric confinement of sane people is uniformly considered a particularly pernicious form of repression.
In the period from the 1960s up to 1986, abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was reported to be occasional in Eastern Bloc countries such as Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. It was reported as systematic in the Soviet Union.
Background
Robert van Voren of the Global Initiative on Psychiatry says the emergence of individual cases of political abuse of psychiatry in Russia is directly related to the deterioration of the human rights situation and to the fact that on-the-spot authorities feel more carefree than they did before, and deal with undesirable elements at their own discretion. The aura of inviolability is returned to the Russian rulers, and the rule of law becomes subject to political machinations. Everything points to the fact that Russia still has the structure to exercise political abuse of psychiatry. Both political and economic nomenklatura is quite powerful and would not stop short of using illegal means, especially now when the political nomenklatura has absorbed economic power from Russian oligarchs, and the country is, in fact, ruled by the circle of people who came directly from the KGB whose capacities to establish control are limitless. According to Eduard Kuznetsov, "More than 50 percent of the key state positions are occupied by former KGB officials. The same occasionally happens in many countries monitored by the Global Initiative on Psychiatry. Psychiatry is regarded as a handy tool to solve disputes, and one can easily buy a diagnosis from a psychiatrist. In most of the countries, forensic psychiatry has changed only slightly. The strong resistance to introducing the modern practices of forensic psychiatry is not due to disparities in schools or views, but the fact that the reform of the system would mean the end of corruption. Criminals pay off their imprisonment of many years by having themselves declared insane. Wealthy husbands declare about the mental illnesses in their wives to get rid of them and yet keep control over their children. Children declare their parents and grandparents legally incapable to sell their apartments. Even medical institutions recognize their patients as insane to take their property. Today, the Russian opposition cannot expect the type of help the West gave in Soviet times. Supporting Soviet dissidents was part of anti-Soviet policy, but now pragmatism and precise calculation rules.
According to psychiatrist Sofia Dorinskaya, the situation always develops in the same way — either in the evening or at night, or in the early morning, when a person sleeps, the police break the door down in his apartment or room, handcuff and escort him directly or through a police office to a mental hospital, where the door is closed behind the person. When the door is closed, and you sit face to face with a psychiatrist, then all written by the psychiatrist will be a proof of your madness for a judge in court. Even if you just sit on a chair, say nothing, or speak reasonably, the psychiatrist can write that you threw yourself against walls and that you tried to scratch his eyes out and so on and so forth.
Discrediting the citizens by instituting far-fetched proceedings to obtain a ground for examination is a favorite tactic of officials whose interests are hurt by the active members of public. The police deliver "the ill" to a psychiatric facility, and the doctor can be sure that his facility will not be reduced, and, in general, the more "patients", the more funding. Even if the criminal case is closed due to its complete failure, it does not regard the dispensary, the person is all the same "ill". According to Doctor of Legal Sciences Vladimir Ovchinsky, regional differences in forensic psychiatric expert reports are striking. For example, in some regions of Russia, 8 or 9 percent of all examinees are pronounced sane; in other regions up to 75 percent of all examinees are pronounced sane. In some regions less than 2 percent of examinees are declared schizophrenics; in other regions up to 80 percent of examinees are declared schizophrenics. According to Vitaly Portnikov, 86 percent of Russians support the policy of their president, who renewed punitive psychiatry, and approve of declaring the healthy people the mentally ill.
Mass trials From 1994, the nationalization of expert activity started, and people witnessed the same technologies as those practiced on political dissidents. The same gimmicks were applied to religious dissenters to a not lesser extent. In the Serbsky Center, the special group for "study of the negative influence of religious groups" under the leadership of professor Fyodor Kondratyev was created. Kondratyev's group started supervising numerous trials initiated all over the country. It came to legal actions practically for sorcery. The Nezavisimiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal documented the history of numerous religious trials, demonstrated the total groundlessness of the charges of "gross harm on mental health", and evolved their political and ideological background. The Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia repeatedly caught Fyodor Kondratyev, the author of pseudoscientific theory of sectomania, in his falsifications. His special department "for studying destructive cults," which is located in the Serbsky Center, closely collaborated with Alexander Dvorkin. Known for his intolerance and radicalism, Dvorkin has nothing in common with science and ranks even followers of Nikolai Rerikh and the religious communities of Yakov Krotov and Grigori Kochetkov among "totalitarian sects." In Yuri Savenko's words, "when a psychiatrist-academician (Dmitrieva, Sidorov) or an expert-psychologist of the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences rely on the works by Dvorkin and Hassan, which do not belong to science, it is a symptom of degradation." In 2014, the experts of the Serbsky Center received the medical documents about the mental health condition of Alexander Dvorkin from a psychoneurological dispensary, studied them and concluded that he needed to be constantly supervised by a psychiatrist and take psychotropic drugs.
The denial by the Serbsky Center of the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes in 1960–1980s and the open rehabilitation of the main director of this infamous campaign academician Georgi Morozov are a direct evidence of the restoration of police psychiatry.
There have been examples of the serious misuse of psychiatry by local authorities reminiscent of the Soviet abuses. A number of human rights organizations including the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia criticized the use of psychiatry in "deprogramming" members of "totalitarian sects."; In such cases, authorities apply spiritual and pseudo-psychological techniques to "treat" individuals who are members of new religious groups. Six Scientologists were arbitrarily detained for psychiatric examination. In January 2000 in St. Petersburg, chief psychiatrist Larisa Rubina charged leader of Sentuar (the local offshoot of the Church of Scientology) Vladimir Tretyak with inflicting psychological damage on his coreligionists. On June 17, six members of Sentuar – Lyudmila Urzhumtseva, Svetlana Pastuchenkova, Svetlana Kruglova, Irina Shamarina, Igor Zakrayev, and Mikhail Dvorkin – were forcibly hospitalized and subjected to 3 weeks of criminal investigation at the behest of Boris Larionov, procurator of the Vyborgsky district of St. Petersburg.
In 2005, , a professor of the Moscow State University, wrote that psychiatrists and psychologists were actually being involved in a very unattractive occupation, stigmatizing "alien" religions and their followers, who were about 1 million first-class citizens of the Russian Federation, and putting them "on the basis of a list of them" in the category of "psychic terrorists." While reviewing Sidorov's article "Psychic terrorism is nonlethal weapon of mass destruction" published by the Rossiyskiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal in its issue 3 of 2005, Kanterov notes that, according to it, religious behavior is regarded as inherently deviant from the "norm", that similar type of behavior is always dependent and imposed by recruiting and manipulative influence and that, thus, the possibility to be initiated into religious organizations due to free choice of religious belief guaranteed by the Constitution of the Russian Federation is outright rejected. In his 2010 article, Kanterov writes about the works by P.I. Sidorov and V.E. Pashkovskiy and points out that inspired by the desire to expose the malicious actions of "totalitarian cults," P.I. Sidorov and V.E. Pashkovskiy at the same time never resort to Russian laws regulating activity of religious associations, and it can hardly be considered accidental, since all the original sets of the authors are in flagrant contravention of current legislation. The Federal Law of the Russian Federation "On Freedom of Conscience and on Religious Associations" contains the following types of associations of believers: religious groups, religious organizations, local and centralized religious associations, and its legislator mentions about no "sects," "cults," especially with the frightening adjectives "destructive" or "totalitarian." However, in Kanterov's words, peer-reviewed publications use the term "totalitarian sects" as a key concept that naturally generates psychiatric disorders and produces horror stories about "psychic terrorism," "non-lethal weapon of mass destruction," "usurpation of belongings and savings of followers," "recruitment," etc. P.I. Sidorov presents a list of "totalitarian cults" with the names of over twenty religious organizations, and many of them have status of registered centralized organizations that successfully passed registration and re-registration provided for by the Law "On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations" after the Expert Council for Religious Examination under the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation made for each of these organizations expert reports, in which the detailed assessment of the religious doctrine, rituals, attitude of the religious organizations to society, family, and individual were given, but no violations were found.