LAT: Russian dissidents committed to asylums in growing numbers

[DeepModem Mom]

Speak Out? Are You Crazy?
In a throwback to Soviet times, Russian dissidents are being committed in growing numbers, human rights activists say.
By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer
May 29, 2006

....Through much of the Cold War, the Soviet Union waged a chilling psychiatric war against political dissidents. Critics of the communist authorities found themselves locked for months or years behind the barred windows of state asylums, drugged into tranquillity and prevented from talking to lawyers or family.

The end of the Soviet Union saw the adoption of laws that raised legal protections for psychiatric patients to international standards, granting potential mental patients guarantees of legal representation and commitment only on the orders of a court. But (Albert) Imendayev's trip behind hospital walls last September was, human rights activists say, one of many signs that punitive psychiatry has not disappeared.

"This has only just resurfaced in recent years, and for a time we couldn't even believe it was happening. But now it seems quite clear that such abuses are on the rise, and that this is a trend," said Yury Savenko, president of the Independent Psychiatric Assn., an advocacy group of professional psychiatrists that has pushed for mental health reforms in Russia.

The ranks of the "insane" over the last three years have included women divorcing powerful husbands, people locked in business disputes and citizens, like Imendayev, who have become a nuisance by filing numerous legal challenges against local politicians and judges or lodging appeals against government agencies to uphold their rights....

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"People are being institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals unlawfully, and on the most diverse grounds," the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights concluded in a 2004 study. "Not only did punitive psychiatry exist during the Soviet period, and not only does it exist today, unfortunately there are no grounds to hope that it will disappear in the foreseeable future."...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-psychiatry30may30,0,3013970,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[TygrBright]

1. Geeeez.... The Russians can afford ASYLUMS for their mentally ill? n/t