Volume 36, Number 15 · October 12, 1989
Should World Psychiatry Readmit the Soviets?
By Peter B. Reddaway
The current situation in Soviet psychiatry needs a surrealist to describe it. On the one hand, an increasing number of Soviet journals have been forthrightly saying what Soviet dissidents and Western observers have said for almost twenty years. This is that abuses of psychiatry for political reasons—including the confinement of political dissidents in psychiatric institutions—have taken place in the USSR on a large scale for decades, violating the Hippocratic oath and causing enormous human suffering. Many of the confined dissidents, for example, were gratuitously injected with the drug Sulphazine, which, without having any medical benefits, induces a high fever and also excruciating pain in the area of the injection. Second, some of these journals point out that abuses, though much reduced in scale, continue to occur.
Feature, 5364 words
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