Page "Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union" Paragraph 17

Psychiatric diagnoses such as the diagnosis of " sluggish schizophrenia " in political dissidents in the USSR were used for political purposes.

It was the diagnosis of " sluggish schizophrenia " that was most prominently used in cases of dissidents.

The leading critics implied that Snezhnevsky had designed the Soviet model of schizophrenia and this diagnosis to make political dissent into a mental disease.

According Robert van Voren, the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR arose from the conception that people who opposed the Soviet regime were mentally sick since there was no other logical rationale why one would oppose the sociopolitical system considered the best in the world.

The diagnosis " sluggish schizophrenia ," a longstanding concept further developed by the Moscow School of Psychiatry and particularly by its chief Andrei Snezhnevsky, furnished a very handy framework for explaining this behavior.

The weight of scholarly opinion holds that the psychiatrists who played the primary role in the development of this diagnostic concept were following directives from the Communist Party and the Soviet secret service, or KGB, and were well aware of the political uses to which it would be put.

Nevertheless, for many Soviet psychiatrists " sluggish schizophrenia " appeared to be a logical explanation to apply to the behavior of critics of the regime who, in their opposition, seemed willing to jeopardize their happiness, family, and career for a reformist conviction or ideal that was so apparently divergent from the prevailing social and political orthodoxy.