Rendering Unto Caesar: Investigating Soviet Political Psychiatry‏

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

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 psychiatry is such that the profession is perfect as an instrument of political control. It is the ideal Orwellian power tool.

Thomas Szasz criticized the feigned shock and horror of American psychiatrists over this news. He pointed to a similar mechanism in the American version of the profession that characterizes defiant children as sick in the head. It is a nifty device that provides parents with the authority to dope up children when they become frighteningly disobedient. It also gives teachers the capacity to marginalize students who have yet to buy into the program of educational indoctrination.

In their work on the problem of social problems Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse describe the political machinations of American and other Western psychiatrists to control the debate over the political aspects of psychiatry. When calls for an investigation into Soviet practices went out few sociologists had the cycles to spare on the project. Psychiatrists insisted on recruiting researchers who were not hostile to their profession. The fear that a sociological inquiry into Soviet abuses would be used to look into abuses on the other side of the Iron Curtain was not unfounded. After all the field of sociology was known to be critical of psychiatry including the famous Rosenhan experiment. (That study sent fake patients into mental "health" facilities in order to further open up the can of worms of psychiatric abuse.)

Psychiatry serves well as a loophole in the institution of civil rights. Anyone can be stigmatized as a mental case and denied rights supposedly guaranteed by the government. Children can be defrauded of their rights to parental contact when one or both parents rub government bureaucrats the wrong way. Once an individual has been sucked into the mental "health" regime they are never the same as before. Even if a victim of psychiatry escapes the brain damage of "treatment," they cannot escape the iron maw of official stigma. Certainly this is not completely the fault of psychiatry itself, but the profession resists attempts to strip it of such power. We can see this in Spector and Kitsuse's description of resistance to investigations into psychiatric abuse.

Do you truly believe that Western psychiatry is immune to the practices witnessed in the Soviet Union? Have you ever met anyone who is the victim of psychiatric abuse? Could it be said that any mental "health" patient has escaped psychiatric abuse?

Links: Thomas Szasz on the Soviet psychiatry. Spector and Kitsuse on psychiatric resistance to sociological investigation.

Comments

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

How do you feel about vaccines?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

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

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

That in no way addresses the above question.

[usekh.livejournal.com]

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

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

Stay classy.

[usekh.livejournal.com]

I am sure that made sense in your head.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Respectfully, psychiatry does have a quite checkered history. There are many who would be here today but aren't because of activities carried out under its aegis.

The issue of Soviet psychiatry being misused against political dissidents is well known. Strangely enough, it is even more well known than Aktion T-4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4), the systematic attempt by the Nazis to exterminate the mentally ill (judged incurable by... psychiatrists).

The notion of the "medical treatment of deviance" is well known; that is, it becomes an illness to be different, rather than somebody who suffers from an actual pathology. Homosexual orientations were considered a psychiatric illness until relatively recently. Gender Identity Disorder is listed in DSM-5. Thousands of women, whose behaviour was considered to uppity, were lobotomised.

Whilst there is a significant side of psychiatry which deal with those brain chemistry is a danger to themselves and others, we must not overlook the very significant use of psychiatry to achieve political objectives.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Robert Jay Lifton is an excellent source on the connection between Nazi psychiatric euthanasia and the development of gas chambers for the extermination of war prisoners. The idea for the use of gas resulted from the psychiatric treatment of German soldiers who suffered emotional breakdowns after the massacre of civilians. This prompted the idea to develop an extermination method that was easier on the German soldier. American bureaucrats never developed a sympathy for the plight of soldiers who had no stomach for the extermination of civilians.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

As I said, this was a tradition in Russia that went back to at least the mid-19th Century as the fate of Chaadayev showed. Bolshevism simply took the idea from the Tsars and did it on a much vaster scale much more efficiently.

[oportet.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Do you acknowledge that there are people who are seriously mentally ill and cannot function unless they are on medication?

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Next time I see someone with depression, I'll prescribe them a good dose of exercise and vitamins.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I will see your Scientology advocacy and raise you one:



Frances characterizes anti-depressants as working by placebo effect.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Obviously, you're of the big pharma establishment(TM) for asking this question. We all just have to admit it, we're bought by the grand conspirators of the establishment to bring this amazing piece of scientific thought down like the good status quo tools that we are.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I acknowledge that there are people who suffer from conditions that the average Jane or Joe would refer to as a mental illness. I also acknowledge that there are people who take solace in chemical therapies. What I also acknowledge that is not acknowledged by advocates of chemical therapy is that there are people who have recovered from such severe conditions without chemical therapy. I also acknowledge that there are people who have been characterized as suffering from a severe condition, but whose condition does not meet the criteria of severity to warrant their characterization. This includes children who have difficulty dealing with educational institutions and uncomfortable family environments as well as adults who have difficulty dealing with established power structures.

[paft.livejournal.com]

ss: I acknowledge that there are people who suffer from conditions that the average Jane or Joe would refer to as a mental illness.

Do you consider the term "mental illness" invalid? If so, why?

ss: I also acknowledge that there are people who take solace in chemical therapies.

By "take solace" what do you mean? Actually being able to communicate with others and function?