Psycho-torture claims ’more propaganda’

Press, 1 September 1977, Page 9

Psycho-torture claims ’more propaganda’

NZPA-Reuter Honolulu

Allegations that the Soviet Union uses psychiatry as an instrument of political repression were a psychiatric variant of anti-Soviet propaganda, a top Soviet mental health official was quoted as saying in Honolulu yesterday. Dr Andrei Snezhnevsky, director of the psychiatry institute at the Soviet Medical Science Academy, told the “Honolulu Advertiser”: “Most, people who have acted

i against Soviet power are ! mentally healthy, and they I are in prisons.” Dr Snezhnevsky was commenting on statements by Western delegates at the sixth world psychiatry congress that political dissenters were confined to psychiatric hospitals in the Soviet Union. People in mental hospitals had been sent there because they suffered from psychiatric disorders and not for their political opinions, according to the Soviet psychiatrist, a

member of the Soviet delegation at the congress. In Soviet mental hospitals, nobody was being detained for political or religious reasons, he said. Several dissidents who had spent some time in Soviet mental hospitals were in psychiatric hospitals in Paris and two of them had emigrated from the Soviet Union and had died in foreign medical institutions, he said.