be about one step removed from Soviet-style abuse of psychiatry for nefarious political purposes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union
"During the leadership of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, psychiatry was used to disable and remove from society political opponents ("dissidents" ) who openly expressed beliefs that contradicted the official dogma.[4][5] The term "philosophical intoxication", for instance, was widely applied to the mental disorders diagnosed when people disagreed with the country's Communist leaders and, by referring to the writings of the Founding Fathers of Marxism–Leninism—Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin—made them the target of criticism.[6]
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The campaign to declare political opponents mentally sick and to commit dissenters to mental hospitals began in the late 1950s and early 1960s.[38] As Vladimir Bukovsky commented on the emergence of the political abuse of psychiatry,[64] Nikita Khrushchevreckoned that it was impossible for people in a socialist society to have an anti-socialist consciousness. Whenever manifestations of dissidence could not be justified as a provocation of world imperialism or a legacy of the past, they were self-evidently the product of mental disease.[38] In a speech published in the Pravda daily newspaper on 24 May 1959, Khrushchev said:
A crime is a deviation from generally recognized standards of behavior frequently caused by mental disorder. Can there be diseases, nervous disorders among certain people in a Communist society? Evidently yes. If that is so, then there will also be offences, which are characteristic of people with abnormal minds. Of those who might start calling for opposition to Communism on this basis, we can say that clearly their mental state is not normal.[38]
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On 15 May 1969, a Soviet Government decree (No. 345–209) was issued "On measures for preventing dangerous behavior (acts) on the part of mentally ill persons."[80] This decree confirmed the practice of having undesirables hauled into detention by psychiatrists.[80] Soviet psychiatrists were told whom they should examine and were assured that they might detain these individuals with the help of the police or entrap them into coming to the hospital.[80]The psychiatrists thereby doubled as interrogators and as arresting officers.[80] Doctors fabricated a diagnosis requiring detention and no court decision was required for subjecting the individual to indefinite confinement in a psychiatric institution.[80]
By the end of the 1950s, confinement to a psychiatric institution had become the most commonly used method of punishing leaders of the political opposition.[9] In the 1960s and 1970s, the trials of dissenters and their referral for "treatment" to the Special Psychiatric Hospitals under MVD control and oversight[81] came out into the open, and the world learned of a wave of "psychiatric terror" which was flatly denied by those in charge of the Serbsky Institute.[82] The bulk of psychiatric repression spans the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.[83]As CPSU General Secretary, from November 1982 to February 1984, Yury Andropov demonstrated little patience with domestic dissafection and continued the Brezhnev Era policy of confining dissenters in mental hospitals.[84]....(more)
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