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Mind Control, Political Psychiatry and Human Rights
Published in Petteri Pietikainen, Madness, 2015
In 1963, when Tarsis was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow, the authorities accused the poet Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) of being a ‘loafer’. He was taken to a psychiatric clinic in Moscow, where he was examined for several days. Some weeks later, Brodsky was arrested again, put to trial and hospitalized against his will, this time in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). His crime was that he was a poet who ‘pursued a parasitic way of life’. In his trial, he was called a ‘pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers’ who failed to fulfil his ‘constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland’ (McFadden 1996). Brodsky was sent for psychiatric examination to the Psychiatric Hospital No. 2, where he was kept for about three weeks. In the hospital, Brodsky was given neuroleptics, wakened in the middle of the night and immersed in cold water. The most horrendous treatment was the abusive use of the wet pack: wrapped in a wet sheet, Brodsky was put next to the heater so that the sheet would cut into his body and cause him considerable pain and breathing difficulties when it dried and shrank. These two incarcerations in psychiatric establishments inspired him to write his poem ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’ (1970) about two patients confined in a mental asylum near Leningrad. For his ‘parasitism’, Brodsky spent 18 months in harsh conditions on a village farm located in the Arctic Archangelsk region. In 1972, when the authorities wondered whether the onerous Brodsky should be exiled, they consulted Andrei Snezhnevsky, the Director of the Institute of Psychiatry of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and the most eminent psychiatrist in the country. Snezhnevsky, who was the inventor of the diagnosis of ‘sluggish schizophrenia’, diagnosed Brodsky as schizophrenic without examining him personally. He concluded that Brodsky was ‘not a valuable person at all and may be let go’. In 1972, Brodsky was put on a plane headed for Vienna, and he never returned to his home country. Fifteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Psychiatric disorders as an imperfect community: interview with Peter Zachar, PhD
Published in International Review of Psychiatry, 2021
In the 1960s Soviet psychiatrists tried to expand the domain to include symptoms that “manifest” in the profiles of political dissidents under the name of sluggish schizophrenia – but it did not follow the process of how the domain gradually came together and was rejected as too much of a leap. My guess is the same thing would happen if someone tried to force white supremacy or atheism into the domain.
Mental disorder and social deviance
Published in International Review of Psychiatry, 2021
Awais Aftab, Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed
Historical examples abound, from homosexuality to “sluggish schizophrenia” (Drescher, 2015; Merskey & Shafran, 1986). This history of “misuse” of psychiatric diagnosis appears to suggest that a society will utilise whatever tools are available to regulate violations of social norms, including the tool of disorder designation. The charge that psychiatry is an instrument of social control is an old one but was articulated perhaps most forcefully and memorably by psychiatric critics in the 60 s and 70 s (such as Thomas Szasz, R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault). In the face of these concerted criticisms, psychiatry made an organised effort to distance itself from charges that it pathologizes or medicalizes social deviance (Decker, 2013). This was in some ways a direct result of the debate surrounding the diagnostic status of homosexuality and the eventual decision of the APA—backed by a referendum of its membership—to exclude ego-syntonic homosexuality from DSM-II (Bayer, 1987). Robert Spitzer, who crafted the proposed change, primarily utilised a conceptual strategy to achieve this outcome by arguing for a definition of mental disorder that places central emphasis on the presence of distress and impairment of function (disability) (Bayer, 1987). This line of thinking was formalised in DSM III where a definition of mental disorder was offered; one of the aims of this definition was to make explicit the distinction between mental disorder and social deviance, and to emphasise that psychiatry does not (and does not wish to) pathologize mere conflict with society (Spitzer & Williams, 1982). However, it is well-recognized that psychiatric disorders frequently manifest as violations of social norms, and the validity of the distinction between disorder and deviance has been of great interest to philosophers of psychiatry. This article provides an overview of some of the major conceptual strategies that have been discussed as a means of discriminating between mental disorder and social deviance, and the extent to which these strategies can be said to be philosophically successful. While psychiatry in its official capacity remains committed to its ability to distinguish between disorder and social conflict (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), the philosophical verdict is more guarded, and reflects the fluid nature and fuzzy boundaries of these concepts. Although we restrict ourselves to mental disorders in this article, the problem is by no means restricted to psychiatry and is relevant to many other areas of medicine as well.