EVER SINCE the US Supreme Court’s 1997
Kansas v. Hendricks decision, 14 more states have passed laws
instituting civil commitment procedures for sex offenders (for a total
of 20 states). These laws allow committal due to “mental abnormality”,
which is a far lower standard than for any other mental disability and
are quite clearly intended as further punishment for a despised group
(subsequent court decisions allowed continued incarceration even when
no “therapy” was offered.) As a society we once roundly condemned such
psychiatric abuse – now we routinely practice it.
Psikhushka is a Russian colloquialism for psychiatric hospital. In the
Soviet Union, psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities
as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of
society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally;
as such they were considered a form of torture. The official
explanation was that "no sane person would declaim against Soviet
government and communism".
Psikhuskas had already been in use since the late 1940s (for example,
Alexander Esenin-Volpin was imprisoned in 1949 for “anti-Soviet
poetry”) and this increased during the Khrushchev era in the 1960s.
(One of the first psikhuskas was the Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the
city of Kazan. Beria transferred it to the NKVD in 1939. In 1969 the
head of KGB, Yuri Andropov, submitted to the Central Committee of CPSU
a plan for creating a whole network of psikhushkas.)
Soviet psychiatry created and then abused the diagnosis of sluggishly
progressing schizophrenia -- a special form of the illness that
supposedly affects only the person's social behavior, with no trace of
other traits: "most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and
justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure,"
according to the Moscow Serbsky Institute professors. Some of them had
high rank in the MVD (the Ministry of Internal Affairs), such as the
infamous Danil Luntz, who was characterized by Viktor Nekipelov1 as "no better than the criminal
doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi
concentration camps."
Psychiatrists described a “sufferer” of sluggishly progressing
schizophrenia as a person appearing quite normal most of the time but
who would break out with a severe case of "inflexibility of
convictions," or "nervous exhaustion brought on by his or her search
for justice," or "a tendency to litigation" or "reformist delusions."
The treatment involved intravenous injections of psychotropic drugs
that were so painfully administered patients became unconscious.
“Criminal lunacy” became part of the Criminal Code in 1961 and
described a person who was unable to “realize his actions or to control
them.” Such actions included, “dissemination of patently false
statements defaming Soviet political and social system,” “abuse of a
national emblem or flag” or “active participation in group acts that
break public peace.”
Russian historian and archivist Anatoli Prokopenko said, “By certifying
people who were undesirable for the State as insane, it was possible to
isolate them in psychiatric hospitals without court actions or public,
internal or international upset.”
The sane individuals who were diagnosed as mentally ill were sent
either to a regular psychiatric hospitals or, those deemed particularly
dangerous, to 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 punctures.
At least 365 sane people were treated for "politically defined madness"
in the Soviet Union, and "there were surely hundreds more."1
Lest you think this was an abuse peculiar to the Soviet Union, another
example is drawn from the work of a prominent Chinese forensic
psychiatrist, who discussed crimes committed by persons with
schizophrenia: "Among the cases under discussion ... the person would
often display absolutely no sense or instinct of self-preservation, for
example by openly mailing out reactionary letters or pasting up
reactionary slogan-banners in public places -- and even, in some cases,
signing his or her real name to the documents ... "2
By
these criteria, political dissenters who openly attempt to build a
democratic structure in China, rather than conspiratorially trying to
undermine the communist state, are especially susceptible to being
called mentally ill.
American psychiatrists are certainly not immune to bending science to
the service of the state. Remember how not so very long ago they
claimed homosexuality was a mental disorder and inflicted medieval
tortures on people trying to “cure” their gayness?
Remember when “drapetomania” was a treatable psychiatric disorder? The
term derives from the Greek drapetes ("runaway [slave]") + mania
("madness, frenzy"). This was a diagnosis proposed
in 1851 by physician Samuel A. Cartwright, of the Louisiana Medical
Association, to explain the tendency of black slaves to flee captivity.
In the case of slaves "sulky and dissatisfied without cause" -- a
warning sign of imminent flight -- Cartwright proposed "whipping the
devil out of them" as a "preventative measure."
We laugh at the obvious pseudo-science behind such nonsense, but you
can bet the victims of those diagnoses weren’t laughing. The same holds
true for the present day victims of civil commitment. Unless and until
objective and independently verifiable criteria can be established, the
civil commitment of sex offenders cannot be seen as anything other than
a rank abuse of psychiatry and a failure of the law to protect the
human rights of a despised minority. For a country that continually
pats itself on the back for being a shining beacon of liberty, this is
nothing less than a shameful shortfall from our professed ideals.
Notes:
0. This article excerpted from various Wikipedia entries and other web
sites.
1. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History,
Doubleday, April, 2003, ISBN 0-7679-0056-1
2. Munro R: Judicial psychiatry in
China and its political abuses. Columbia Journal of Asian Law 14:1-125,
2000
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