Rendering Unto Caesar: Investigating Soviet Political Psychiatry‏

[sophia_sadek]

Back in the day word leaked out of the Soviet Union that political dissidents were being incarcerated as mental patients. To be opposed to the outcome of the proletarian Revolution was seen as a symptom of psychosis. A rationale could easily be made that only a sick mind would seek to depose the all-powerful Communist Party. The logic of

Comments

[dexeron]

The problems with Rosenhan's methodology have been well documented, but even if we accept that some of his conclusions are valid, they are conclusions about the psychiatric profession from forty years ago. Is it your contention that psychiatry, as a practice, and the treatment of the mentally ill has not evolved at all in forty years?

[sophia_sadek]

Some things have changed in forty years while others have not. It is more difficult for psychiatrists to incarcerate people and force them to take drugs unwillingly due to the good work of the ACLU. On the other hand more minors and elderly are subjected to abuse than forty years ago. Psychiatry is still the method of choice for defrauding citizens of their rights.

Szasz wrote a critique of the Rosenhan experiment from his own perspective. It has also been characterized by a leading pro-drug psychiatrist as pseudo-science. Still, it revealed significant aspects of the treatment regime of the time. The anecdotal evidence detailed in the report cannot be ignored.

[kylinrouge]

How do you feel about vaccines?

[sophia_sadek]

Vaccines have a much better track record than brain damaging sedatives.

BTW, one of our students pointed out that American courts do not order forced vaccinations, though they might support denial of educational services to unvaccinated children.

[luzribeiro]

You never tire of bashing psychiatry, don't you. It's the deadest dead-beaten horse I've ever seen online.

[sophia_sadek]

Psychiatry is not alone in this caper. There are people who employ it to advantage.

[luzribeiro]

That in no way addresses the above question.

[sophia_sadek]

Which question is that? The one about never tiring in exposing the fly in the ointment?

[usekh]

Without it me and many of my friends would not be here today. So fuck that nonsense.

[sophia_sadek]

I am sure some Russians responded in a like fashion to the idea that psychiatry was used against political dissidents. It is nonsense to you just as a Sun spots were nonsense to medieval academics.

[luvdovz]

Stay classy.

[usekh]

I am sure that made sense in your head.

[oportet]

I may be overlooking an obvious contradiction to what I'm about to say, but here goes....

Here in America, psychiatry doesn't pick a person at random and determine them to be crazy. Psychiatry doesn't find people, people find psychiatry (and whether psychiatry is bullshit or not does not change this).

I'm not claiming there is nothing unethical or immoral involved at all in western psychiatry, I'm simply claiming that western psychiatry isn't aggressive (or as aggressive?).

[sophia_sadek]

So would you contend that nobody has ever been arrested by political agents and incarcerated in a psychiatric facility in the US?

[underlankers]

Chaadeyev might dispute the notion that this particular practice originated with the Soviets. At a purely abstract political level it's actually a genius move: declare that only a lunatic would disagree with the state and you remove grounds for any legitimate kind of dissidence. It was one of several lessons Bolshevism learned from Official Nationality rather well.

[sophia_sadek]

Lenin advocated using the same instruments of oppression that the Czar used. It does not surprise me that people took him seriously. Historians of mental asylums have pointed out that they had been used for political purposes long before Marx was born.