Soviet Paper Attacks Abuse of Psychiatry
A Communist Party newspaper today launched an unprecedented attack on the abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, an assault that broke new ground in the Kremlin’s drive for openness.
Komsomolskaya Pravda, newspaper of the Communist Youth League, said healthy people are institutionalized with the collusion of psychiatrists who administer incapacitating drugs and are ignorant of modern psychiatric methods.
While the newspaper did not mention psychiatric internment of dissidents, its discussion of the previously taboo topic of Soviet psychiatric abuse was unprecedented in scope.
“High, impenetrable fences have for long years shielded psychiatric science and practice from glasnost (openness),” Komsomolskaya Pravda said. “And behind those fences illegality is in progress.”
It described the case of a 20-year-old Leningrad factory worker who was diagnosed as schizophrenic and committed to a mental hospital against her will after openly criticizing her boss and factory working conditions.
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