Posts Tagged ‘Soviet Union’
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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Echoes of the Past: Punitive Psychiatry by Alexander Podrabinek
Source: Echoes of the Past: Punitive Psychiatry by Alexander Podrabinek
Nation
Echoes of the Past: Punitive Psychiatry
21 October 2013
Alexander Podrabinek
In October, Russian activist Mikhail Kosenko, one of the accused in the "Bolotnaya Square Case," was sentenced to compulsory psychiatric treatment. This was the first instance of an open use of psychiatry for political purposes in post-Soviet Russia. Author and human rights campaigner Alexander Podrabinek, who was
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Soviet Forever by Alexander Podrabinek
Former Soviet dissident, Alexander Podrabinek, describes the calculated revival of the Soviet Union by the Putin regime. Published on the 10th of April 2013 by the IMR Institute of Modern Russia in its Analysis category, this article confirms with numerous new and crucial details, the assertions by former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky in his own public Distinguished Lecture of Tuesday, October 13, 2009 for the Cato Institute under the title: “The Power of Memory and Acknowledgement,” namely that Old KGB-ers are Reviving the Soviet System.
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The “Catastrophe” is Returning: Old KGB-ers are Reviving the Soviet System
What is more depressing is that the country returned to political repressions. We have today, a couple of dozens of political prisoners, again. Which I thought would never happen in my lifetime.
Even more than that, at a certain point, the psychiatric use for repressions was returned again. And that was by far the most depressing news for me. I thought we buried that method of repression forever.
And yet, it did happen again. Several cases. Luckily, we managed to stop it in time, but we cannot guarantee it would not be renewed tomorrow.
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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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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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