Political use of psychiatry questioned

Press, 2 May 1981, Page 14

Political use of psychiatry questioned

By

PETER C'j E

For more than a decade, medical and humanitarian ' groups in many countries have been protesting against the political use of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. In 1977, the World Psychiatric Association (W.P.A.) called on the Soviet Union “to renounce and expunge“ such use. The pressure has had successes: it has secured the release of some well known individuals like the mathematician Leonid Plyushch (who has been expelled from the Soviet Union) and it has given invaluable moral support to other victims of K.G.B. psychiatrists. But something far more drastic is needed if there is to be a genuine curtailment of this deep-rooted, sinister practice. The question of whether to start the process of expelling the Russians from world psychiatry is now urgent. There are three main reasons. First, the practice of imprisoning sane dissenters in mental hospitals and "curing’ them, of their dissent with powerful drugs is continuing. Second, the Soviet psychiatrists’ society has refused all co-operation with the W.P.A. committee set up in 1977 to investigate the practice. Third, between February, 1980, and February, 1981, the K.G.B. arrested all six members of the Moscow Working Commission — an affiliate of the Helsinki Monitoring Group — which has been fighting the abuses. Some 500 cases have been documented. The Working Commission’s psychiatrists, Alexander Voloshanovich and

Anatoly Koryagin (who was ‘ arrested in February), have - examined more than 50 dis-senter-victims. mostly after their release, and have written detailed reports on them. ■ They found most of them perfectly sane; none needed hospitalisation. Two recent cases stand out. One is that of the 43-year-old Don Basin miner Alexsei Nikitin, who has been in and out of prison hospitals since 1971 for his part in trying ' to organise a free trade union. The other is that of Viktor Ryzhov-Davydov, from the Volga city of Kuibyshev. For his part in a student human rights movement he was harassed by the K.G.B. and threatened with" psychiatric interment. He sought out the Working Commission and was examined by Dr Voloshanovich, who ; concluded that he was intelligent and fully responsible for his actions. Despite this, psychiatrists at Moscow’s Serbsky Institute diagnosed him as having “sluggish schizophrenia,” unknown outside the Soviet Union. When Ryzhov’s wife, Larissa, visited him in the Kazan prison-hospital last autumn, she found that 30 tablets a day of the powerful psychotropic drug, Mazheptil, were being forcibly administered to him, even though there were contraindications for the purely physical reason that he has a kidney disease. He was suffering severe kidney pains and had become extremely thin. When he had complained to the psychiatrist in charge of him ; about inhuman treatment, she

had said she would increase the dose to 200 tablets a day. adding: “We have our own methods of curing people ■here.” ■ ’ In November. Ryzhov was transferred to a prison-hospital in Blagoveshchensk, near the Pacific coast, more than 2300 miles to the. east. His despairing wife appealed to friends abroad: “I beseech-you to help us!"’ • The refusal by the -Soviet psychiatrists’ society to help the W.P.A. investigate cases like, these was predictable. Its president, Professor Georgy Morozov, is the director of the Serbsky Institute, a signatory of many fraudulent psychiatric reports on dissenters, and a friend of the K.G.B. chief Yury Andropov. Its most senior academic researcher. Dr Andrei Snezhnevsky, has been so deeply involved in political psychiatry that he preferred last year to resign his honorary membership of Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists. rather than defend himself against the college’s formal charges. And its leading ambassador for foreign assignments, Professor Marat Vartanian, has a consistent record of denying all such charges. (Professor Vartanian is on the committee of an international congress of psychiatrists in Stockholm in June. Clashes over Soviet political psychiatry seem inevitable.) More generally, the Soviet psychiatrists’ society has deliberately hindered the Working Commission's already hazardous work and has made no protest at its members’ arrests. Three members — Dr Leonard

Ternovsky, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and Alexander Podrabinek — have already been sentened to three years each of forced labour in prison camps. The other three — Irina Grivnina, Felix Serebrov, and Dr Koryagin — still await trial in prison, all threatened with more serious charges involving: up to 12 years for “anti-Soviet agitation.” Resolutions calling for the « expulsion of the Russians from J the World Psychiatric Associa-

tion would not be debated until the next world congress in Lisbon, in 1983. But if such resolutions are put forward by member societies this year, as seems possible, danger signals, will start to flash in Moscow. Ever since the psychiatric associations of Japan and Sweden belatedly supported the 1977 W.P.A. vote condemning the Soviet Union, it has been clear that a motion calling for Soviet expulsion in 1983 would have a good chance of success.

Such a precedent could be followed by similar bodies in other fields, leading to disastrous blows to Soviet prestige and economic interests. Evidence I have studied suggests that the political masters of Soviet psychiatry would pay a considerable price — for example the curtailing of abuses and the removal of Professor Morozov and others like him — to prevent all this happening.— Copyright, London Observer Service.