Americans to Probe Soviet Asylums for Political Abuses

A delegation of American psychiatrists and other mental health experts will inspect Soviet psychiatric institutions in January to determine if Moscow continues to use mental asylums to punish political and religious dissidents, the Reagan Administration announced Monday.

State Department spokesman Charles Redman said that the U.S. delegation will consist primarily of private psychiatrists, although some U.S. government officials also will make the trip.

“Our concern, our interest (is) in the abuse of psychiatry as a threat, as a punishment, for people who we feel are actually incarcerated for political and religious activity,” Redman said.

He said that the United States has a list of names of individuals who are believed to have been given unwarranted psychiatric treatment, but he would not make the list public. Nor would he say how many names are on it.

Asked if the United States has been assured that it can interview individuals thought to have been improperly committed, Redman said, “I can’t answer the question in specific terms.”

Examinations to Be Allowed

But he said that the American delegation “will be able to examine patients . . . visit psychiatric hospitals and have discussions on important topics in the area of law and mental health.”

Soviet dissidents, supported by the United States and other Western governments, long have accused Moscow of sending political prisoners to mental wards where they often are subjected to drugs that cause severe pain and sometimes cause the symptoms of mental illness in otherwise healthy individuals.

The State Department announced last March, after U.S.-Soviet human rights talks in Washington, that the two countries had reached an agreement that would allow U.S. psychiatrists to inspect Soviet mental hospitals.

The Soviet Union has not agreed previously to permit extensive inspections of its psychiatric institutions, although in recent years it has begun to discuss the subjectwith outsiders.

“This is part of a process that we’ve been working on,” Redman said Monday. “We’ve had these round-table discussions (with Soviet officials) on human rights issues on a number of occasions. . . . We have considered that there has been a general process of moving the issue forward, of being able to address it more forthrightly, and much more constructively, as far as we’re concerned.”

Redman said that if the January visit goes well, “both sides look for an intensification of cooperative professional contacts between Soviet and U.S. psychiatrists.”

He said that a Soviet delegation may pay a return visit, although details have not been set. If Soviet psychiatrists want to come to the United States, he said, Washington “will take every appropriate measure to assure that the Soviet visitors will be able to study and analyze U.S. psychiatric practice.”

The Soviet Union has not accused the United States of abusing psychiatric patients.

For years, the Soviet government maintained that how it treated its own citizens was no business of any other country. Since Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power, Soviet officials have agreed to add human rights to the normal agenda for U.S.-Soviet contacts. In general, Moscow’s response to U.S. criticism of its overall human rights record has been to accuse Washington of human rights abuses such as homelessness and unemployment.