Apr 4, 2025 03:33 AM
(This post was last modified: Apr 4, 2025 03:34 AM by C C.)
https://theconversation.com/the-dark-sid...ies-248493
INTRO: In his new book, No More Normal, psychiatrist Alastair Santhouse recalls an experience from the 1980s when he was a university student in the UK helping deliver supplies to “refuseniks” – Soviet citizens who were denied permission to leave the USSR. These people often faced harsh treatment, losing their jobs and becoming targets of harassment. Some were even diagnosed with a psychiatric condition called “sluggish schizophrenia”.
By the time Santhouse encountered this diagnostic category, sluggish schizophrenia had been kicking around psychiatry in the Soviet Union for some time. It first entered the diagnostic lexicon in the 1930s, coined to describe cases in which adults diagnosed with schizophrenia had displayed no symptoms of the disorder in childhood.
This notion of a symptomless disorder gave it tremendous value to Soviet officials in the 1970s and 80s, who wielded it ruthlessly against those who suddenly suffered from delusions of wanting a better society or hallucinatory desires to emigrate.
But they weren’t the only ones to wield psychiatry to repress and control. “Punitive” or “political” psychiatry has proven to be quite a useful tool in many parts of the world. One well-known case is that of Chinese political activist Wang Wanxing, who marked the third anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy student protests in Tiananmen Square by unfurling his own pro-democracy banner on that same spot.
He was immediately arrested, jailed, and then diagnosed with “political monomania”: a “condition” characterised by the irrational failure to agree with the state. For treatment, he was confined for 13 years in a psychiatric hospital, part of the Ankang (“peace and health”) network of psychiatric institutions where dissidents like him were forcefully medicated and subjected to “treatments” such as electrified acupuncture.
More recent applications of punitive psychiatry pop up periodically in our news feeds and disappear just as quickly. Some women who removed their headscarves or cut their hair as part of anti-government protests in Iran in 2022 were diagnosed with antisocial behaviour, forcefully institutionalised and subjected to “re-education”.
In 2024, in Russia, an activist’s choice of T-shirt, bearing the slogan “I am against Putin”, was considered so problematic that it required the summoning of a “psychiatric emergency team”.
As in the Soviet Union, the advantages of punitive psychiatry were not a little Orwellian: diagnosing a citizen with a mental illness made it easier to isolate their ideas, cut them off physically and discourage similar behaviour.
Not just authoritarian regimes
While authoritarian regimes certainly seem to wield it with the most abandon, punitive psychiatry has not been absent in the west... (MORE - details)
INTRO: In his new book, No More Normal, psychiatrist Alastair Santhouse recalls an experience from the 1980s when he was a university student in the UK helping deliver supplies to “refuseniks” – Soviet citizens who were denied permission to leave the USSR. These people often faced harsh treatment, losing their jobs and becoming targets of harassment. Some were even diagnosed with a psychiatric condition called “sluggish schizophrenia”.
By the time Santhouse encountered this diagnostic category, sluggish schizophrenia had been kicking around psychiatry in the Soviet Union for some time. It first entered the diagnostic lexicon in the 1930s, coined to describe cases in which adults diagnosed with schizophrenia had displayed no symptoms of the disorder in childhood.
This notion of a symptomless disorder gave it tremendous value to Soviet officials in the 1970s and 80s, who wielded it ruthlessly against those who suddenly suffered from delusions of wanting a better society or hallucinatory desires to emigrate.
But they weren’t the only ones to wield psychiatry to repress and control. “Punitive” or “political” psychiatry has proven to be quite a useful tool in many parts of the world. One well-known case is that of Chinese political activist Wang Wanxing, who marked the third anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy student protests in Tiananmen Square by unfurling his own pro-democracy banner on that same spot.
He was immediately arrested, jailed, and then diagnosed with “political monomania”: a “condition” characterised by the irrational failure to agree with the state. For treatment, he was confined for 13 years in a psychiatric hospital, part of the Ankang (“peace and health”) network of psychiatric institutions where dissidents like him were forcefully medicated and subjected to “treatments” such as electrified acupuncture.
More recent applications of punitive psychiatry pop up periodically in our news feeds and disappear just as quickly. Some women who removed their headscarves or cut their hair as part of anti-government protests in Iran in 2022 were diagnosed with antisocial behaviour, forcefully institutionalised and subjected to “re-education”.
In 2024, in Russia, an activist’s choice of T-shirt, bearing the slogan “I am against Putin”, was considered so problematic that it required the summoning of a “psychiatric emergency team”.
As in the Soviet Union, the advantages of punitive psychiatry were not a little Orwellian: diagnosing a citizen with a mental illness made it easier to isolate their ideas, cut them off physically and discourage similar behaviour.
Not just authoritarian regimes
While authoritarian regimes certainly seem to wield it with the most abandon, punitive psychiatry has not been absent in the west... (MORE - details)
