CAMARILLO : Soviet Psychiatrists Tour State Hospital

A group of Soviet psychiatrists who toured Camarillo State Hospital on Wednesday said they were impressed by the low number of patients at the facility but agreed that the United States needs to do more for the mentally ill on the streets.

“You may not have overcrowding in your wards, but you have overcrowding with the same type of people on the streets,” said Boris Lebedev, the head of psychiatric faculty at the First Leningrad Medical Institute. “We don’t have that problem.”

But Revaz Uturgauri, assistant to the head of the Department of International Humanitarian Cooperation and Human Rights, added: “We’re not here looking for your problems.

“We have quite a few problems at home. We’re here looking for solutions.”

The visit, part of a national tour of mental health facilities, was arranged through the National Institute of Mental Health as part of an exchange between the two countries. A U.S. team of psychiatrists and other mental health experts visited the Soviet Union in 1989 to assess psychiatric practices there.

American experts found that a vast number of Soviet facilities were overcrowded, said John Finerty, a congressional staff assistant who attended the Camarillo tour.

About six years ago, the Soviet Union’s Psychiatric Society was expelled from the World Psychiatric Assn. after being accused of placing political dissidents in mental institutions and diagnosing them as mentally ill.

Although the Soviet Psychiatric Society was provisionally readmitted to the association earlier this year, more reforms are needed.

U.S. officials had hoped the national tour would give the Soviet psychiatrists the basis for change and a chance to learn from America’s problems.

The 14 Soviet psychiatrists, including some of the country’s leading experts, have spent two weeks traveling from Washington to California visiting U.S. mental health facilities and homeless shelters.