Page "Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union" Paragraph 56

Viktor Nekipelov, a well-known dissident poet, was arrested in 1973, sent to the Section 4 of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry for psychiatric evaluation, which lasted from 15 January to 12 March 1974, was judged sane ( which he was ), tried, and sentenced to two years ' imprisonment.

In 1976, he published in samizdat his book Institute of Fools: Notes on the Serbsky Institute based on his personal experience at Psychiatric Hospital of the Serbsky Institute and translated into English in 1980.

In this account, he wrote compassionately, engagingly, and observantly of the doctors and other patients ; most of the latters were ordinary criminals feigning insanity in order to be sent to a mental hospital, because hospital was a " cushy number " as against prison camps.

According to the President of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia Yuri Savenko, Nekipelov's book is a highly dramatic humane document, a fair story about the nest of Soviet punitive psychiatry, a mirror that psychiatrists always need to look into.

However according to Malcolm Lader, this book as an indictment of the Serbsky Institute hardly rises above tittle-tattle and gossip, and Nekipelov destroys his own credibility by presenting no real evidence but invariably putting the most sinister connotation on events.

After publishing his book, he was sentenced to the maximum punishment for " anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda " of seven years in a labor camp and then five years in internal exile.