Psikhushka

Psikhushka ("????????") is a Russiancolloquialismfor "psychiatric hospital". It has been occasionally used in Englishsince the dissidentmovement in the Soviet Unionbecame known in the West. In the Soviet Union, psychiatric hospitals were used by the authorities as prisonsfor forced treatment of political prisonersin order to isolate them from "normal" society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. The official explanation was that "no sane person would declaim against Soviet government and communism".

Historians debate the circumstances of the origins of this practice, but there is evidence that it was used by the end of 1940s(see Alexander Esenin-Volpin), and it is generally believed that it was in wide use in the wake of the Khrushchev Thawperiod in the 1960s. The official Soviet psychiatric science came up with the definition of "sluggishly progressing schizophrenia" (??????????? ??????????), a special form of the illness that supposedly affects only the person's social behavior, with no trace on other traits: "most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoidstructure," according to the Serbsky Instituteprofessors (a quote^{[{{fullurl:Template:FULLPAGENAME}}#endnote_Applebaum]} from Vladimir Bukovsky's archives). Some of them had high rank in the MVD, such as the infamous Danil Luntz, who was characterized by Viktor Nekipelovas "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Naziconcentration camps".

The sane individuals who were diagnosed as "mentally ill" were sent either to a regular psychiatric hospitalsor, those deemed "particularly dangerous", to a special ones, run directly by the MVD. The "treatment" included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, a range of drugs (such as narcotics, tranquilizers, and insulin) that cause long lasting side effects, and sometimes involved beatings. Nekipelov describes inhuman uses of medical procedures such as lumbar puncturesas "treatments".

In 1971, Bukovsky smuggled to the West over 150 pages documenting abuse of psychiatric institutions for political reasons in the USSR. The facts galvanized the human rightsactivists worldwide, including inside the USSR.

People

• Vladimir Bukovsky
• Pyotr Grigorenko
• Zhores Medvedev
• Andrei Sinyavsky
• Viktor Nekipelov
• Andrei Sakharov
• Natan Sharansky

See also

• Psychiatric imprisonment
• Human rights
• Gulag

Bibliography

1. ^  ISBN 0767900561Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pages

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It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psikhushka Wikipedia article Psikhushka.