During the Cold War, it was standard practice in many communist bloc countries to send political dissidents who lodged complaints against the government to a psychiatric hospital, classifying their opinions as symptoms of a mental health disorder.
In the late '80s, I remember reading about a case in Romania where a man was diagnosed with "political paranoia" and accused of suffering a "persecution complex" after he demanded compensation for having his home seized by Nicolae Ceausescu's repressive regime.
With the rise of pop psychology, the utter proliferation and classification of new psychiatric disorders all over the world, and the knowledge that everybody at one point in their lives displays symptoms of a disorder - anxiety and depression being the most common - the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact governments apparently thought they could take it a step further: invent new disorders that pertain only to one's politics.
I pray the day never comes when merely holding a political opinion is grounds for a psychiatric evaluation, but this was a very real phenomenon under the Soviet Union and the ex-KGB agent currently dictating things from the Kremlin has decided to bring it back.
In April 2014, a man who took part in a peaceful demonstration in Moscow was declared legally insane and sentenced to indefinite psychiatric observation. Amnesty International him a prisoner of conscience and called his sentence a return to the Soviet practice of confining dissidents to psychiatric institutions.
Controversial Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky cut off his own ear to protest "bureacrats in white lab cots" who "cuts off from society those pieces that prevent him from establishing a monolithic dictate of a single, mandatory norm for everyone", a reference to the state psychiatrists.
Most recently, a Russian court ordered a female Ukrainian soldier and POW captured by Russian forces during the Donbass conflict to undergo involuntary psychiatric treatment and be confined to an asylum. This treatment of a prisoner of war is especially barbaric.
There are dozens of similar cases in recent memory. Back in 2004 a human rights lawyer was also involuntarily institutionalized in a psych ward, as well as a journalist who published an article on the abuse of electro-shock therapy in Russian hospitals.
All in all, it seems that the political abuse of the mental health system is returning under Putin's government. What do you think of this NSG? Personally my opinion is that this is a step backwards for Russia and something that doesn't get nearly enough attention. The mental health profession was being ruined and politicized by the Soviet regimes, and now it seems that modern Russia is returning to that archaic order. I was especially shocked that a Ukrainian soldier was confined to a psychiatric hospital involuntarily, that is absolutely unacceptable treatment for a POW.
Is this indeed a step backwards to the dark days of Soviet bedlam house? If the trend of politicization in the Russian mental health system continues, will it jeopardize the treatment and diagnosis of those who legitimately suffer from various psychiatric disorders?
