Posts Tagged ‘Soviet psychiatry’
Quebec press and media are instilling a Soviet mentality of fear and repression in Quebec to silence political and personal freedom
We are descending into the Soviet system at a rapid clip with the aid of unscrupulous or uncritical press. In an outrageous item in the leftist French-language Le Devoir daily paper of 16 January 2016, citizens who "complain" to their elected representatives are duly "warned". The title of the article reads [translation]:
Warning to professional complainers. “Unreasonable” citizens make life hard for public agencies
"Unreasonable" is apparently Fortier's euphemism for "mentally deranged".
Fortier's
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Shrinking the Freedom of Thought: How Involuntary Psychiatric Treatment Violates Basic Human Rights
Even under the legislative frameworks that are typical of most modern democratic societies, psychiatry still treads a particularly fine line between benefiting and harming the exercise of human rights. This is largely because the cultural objectives of psychiatry and human rights are, to some extent, opposed to one another. While the basic principle of human rights is to set limits on the degree of social authority which is allowed to be imposed on individuals, the specialty of psychiatry is to fit 'difficult' individuals into the social fabric. These fundamental differences sometimes threaten to turn psychiatry and human rights into antitheses, even in the most benign political conditions.
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Soviet Psychiatry Returns
On Oct. 8, a verdict was announced in the case of Mikhail Kosenko, one of the demonstrators in the May 6, 2012 protest march at Moscow’s Bolotnaya Ploshchad. Kosenko was just one of the 28 people accused in the case, but his verdict was immediately picked up by the press and caused mass protests outside the courtroom. The crowd chanted “Misha!” so loudly that Judge Lyudmila Moskalenko could barely be heard in the courtroom.
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In Two Minds about Soviet Psychiatry
Next week, the World Psychiatric Association will decide whether to let the Soviet Union back in. The Soviet Union resigned in 1983 rather than answer a debate on the political abuse of psychiatry. Already, the battle lines have been drawn between those committed to allowing the Soviets back and those who believe it would be premature. Sceptics want better safeguards before the Soviet Union is made respectable again.
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Another Betrayal by Psychiatry?
By I.F. Stone
December 22, 1988, The New York Review of Books
Seventeen years ago I attacked the World Psychiatric Association in these pages in “Betrayal by Psychiatry”1 for refusing to hear complaints from Soviet dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov, about the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. The WPA staged a repeat performance a few weeks ago at a regional meeting here in Washington.
The WPA leadership turned down a request from Western and Soviet activists to present
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The Case of Dr. Koryagin
Fears are mounting that the psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin is near to death in the notorious jail of Chistopol in central Russia. Letters that have reached the West from his wife and a friend indicate that he is so weak that unless he is given expert medical care he could die at any time. Dr. Koryagin has been in prison for the last four years for actively opposing the political abuse of psychiatry. The abuse takes the form of labeling dissidents as mad and forcibly treating them with drugs in mental hospitals.
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An Appeal to Psychiatrists
The New York Review of Books
March 18, 1982
Peter B. Reddaway
A defiant appeal to world psychiatrists has recently been smuggled to the West from a Russian labor camp in the Urals. The author, Dr. Anatoly Koryagin, is a Soviet psychiatrist who was given a twelve-year sentence last June for opposing the use of political psychiatry to lock up and torture dissidents. His analysis of the practice was published in April in Western medical journals. Now he calls for an international campaign.
Doctors
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