Thursday, February 16,1978-THE BULLETIN-7
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World psychiatrists take stand on Soviet abuses
The evidence of how the Soviet Unhn uses psychiatry to suppr^^^ to ignore, writes Lynne lanniello, executive manager of ADL's commum
This article is reprinted from November, 1977, issue of ADL BULLETIN, national publication of Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
By LYNNE lANNIELLO
Andrei Dubrov was lucky. He was released from Moscow's Psychiatric Hospital No. 3 after only two weeks.
He was 22 years old, a former student who had been expelled for dissident activity. Soviet authorities put him in the hospital for "observation." The reason: He refused to join the Red Army after a last-minute revocation of permission to emigrate to Isi-ael with his mother.
He shared a ward with 19 others, "naked men ... tied down, writhing in convulsions, issuing wild cries. From time to time, an orderly gives them a punch in the stomach.... They quiet down for a time, just moan ... almost all of them are mjected with ammazin (a tranquilizer). . . . The ward is permeated by a sickening smell of rotting; the patients perform their natural functions on the beds they are tied to.
After two weeks, as Western publicity and .protests mounted in his behalf, Dubrov was discharged — foUowuig interrogatibn by a commission of Soviet doctors.
The questions they asked were curiously non-medical in character: "Do you intend to be politically active in the West?" "Will you take part in the Zionist movement in Israel?" That was in 1972. He was permitted to emigrate in 1973 and settled in Vienna.
Dubrov's case is one of more than 200 described by Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway in their book, "Psychiatric Terror: How Soviet Psychiatry Is Used To Suppress Dissent" (Basic Books). The work, which details the evolution and character of Soviet psychiatry.
was timed for publication just prior to the sixth congress of the World Psychiatric Association held in Honolulu late last August.
It is credited with playing a large role in that group's censure of the Soviet Union's "systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes."
In New York for a series of interviews and television appearances. Dr. Bloch, a British psychiatrist and lecturer in psychiatry at Oxford University, talked about the conference and the book.
"At last," he said, "the World Psychiatric association has gotten off the fence and acted in a morally responsible fashion."
THE VOTE TO CENSURE was 90 to sa, taken in a secret ballot following embittered debate. The narrow margin was probably inevitable. Dr. Bloch said.
Psychiatric associations from the Soviet Union, Soviet satellites and Third World countries were against the resolution. Prominently opposed, too, were Scandinavian associations which favored talking to the Russians, "and who knows what other groups were opposed, perhaps because of skepticism, perhaps because of fear of giving the entire field of psychiatry a black eye."
Six years ago, at the last world conference, in Mexico Gity, an appeal to consider aivailable evidence of Soviet abuse was, in the words of Vladimir Bukovsky, "simply swept under the carpet."
Bukovsky, who spent a total of nearly 10 years in Soviet psychiatric hospitals for various charges of anti-government agitation and was under arrest at the time of the Mexico conference, had sient to Western psychiatrists documented reports of his own incarceration as well as that of other dissidents. He was finally released in 1976, following strong Western campaigns in his behalf, and now lives in Bonn, Germany.
"This time, it was different," Dr. Bloch said. "Even more unportant than the vote to censure was a 121 to 66 vote to establish a permanent committee to investigate the political manipulation of psychiatry anywhere in the world."
Countries suspected of using psychiatric **treatment" to suppress dissent include South Africa, Rumania, Czechoislovakia, Chile and Argentina. But the evidence is scanty or inconclusive.
"There is no doubt," Dr. Bloch said, *'that Soviet psychiatrists have labelled dissenters mentally ill and hospitalized them solely because of their political activities."
DIAGNOSES INCLUDE such things as "sluggish schizophrenia" and "paranoid delusions of reforming society." They are made by a relatively small number of Soviet psychiatrists, "a sort of elite group" described by Dr. Bloch as being "made up of doctors who becaime iniportant partly because of their political astuteness. They recognize what the piarty wants and give it to them — a formula in which dissent can be paired with mental illness."
Then, in the prison and civil psychiatric hospitals, more and more doctors are involved^
"There is a problem of dual loyalty — to the patient and to the ^
employer, which is the government," Dr. Bloch said.
It starts, he went on, with social conditioning. The psychiatrists, who take an oath "to be guided by the principle of communist morality," may really believe that "those who disagree with the political system are strange. And if they do not, then they are dissenters. It is easier to play along."
There have been doctors who raised questions or protested and were warned not to make problems or were themselves arrested.
Do the psychiatrists need psychiatry? "That's been discussed," Dr. BIdch said. "It's a frightening thought."
But at the Honolulu meeting, internationally known Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky, whose theories on schizophrenia effected the use of psychiatry to stifle dissent, called criticism a "malicious concotion . . . a psychiatric variant of anti-Soviet propaganda."
At a press conference called by the Soviets on the afternoon of the vote, he and Dr. Edward Babayan, the chief Soviet delegate and head of the Soviet health ministry, referred to Dr. Bloch as **a doubtful psychiatrist" and dismissed his co-author, Peter Reddaway, a senior lecturer in political science .at the London School of Econom ics, as unqualified.
Their "so-called book," the Russians said, is "a good compilation of slander."
"The book," Dr. Bloch said, "repriesents six years pf research, of collecting evidence,' of interviewing Soviet emigrants — psychiatrists and dissenters who had been hospitalized for nonmedical reasons. There is no way of knowing how many such people remain in Soviet psychiatric institutions or how many more will be confined."
The Honolulu conference represents a positive step, he said. "It created the machinery to monitor psychiatric abuse. It also set the stage for worldwide protest — and that, more than anything else is what will stop the practice and get peoplereleased."
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FROM THE DEPTHS of Perm labor camp, Russia, where he is serving a lb-year sentence for seeking exit, to Israel, Prisoner of Conscience Wolf Zalmanson has nianaged:!to pass out a message, obtained by the Student struggle for Soviet Jewry [reproduced actual size]. Addressed to members of Kibbutz Degania Bet, Israel, which has 'adopted' him, he declares In modern Hebrew: *'The day wlU come when I will be released and I will throw off the chains that hold me, and come back home to fulfili the will of my ancestors and inherit the legacy of our people."
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