Rights Activist Tells of Detention In Russian Psychiatric Institutions

[DeepModem Mom]

Source: Washington Post

By Nora Boustany
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 22, 2007; Page A18

It was just an errand, one more stop to get through the red tape, said Larissa Arap.

Arap, a rights activist in Russia, said she was seeking a driver's license, and all she needed was a routine signature from a doctor certifying that she was in good health. But instead of complying, a psychiatrist in the northern Russian town of Murmansk asked Arap whether she was the one who had written "Madhouse," an article in a local paper that had exposed unorthodox and dismal conditions in psychiatric wards....What followed that July day was a horrific six-week stay in psychiatric wards, said Arap, who recounted her story in an interview last week in Washington.

Activists say Arap was only one of countless Russian citizens who have been wrongly spirited into the hallways of mental facilities. The tactics echo those used during Soviet times, when a whole class of professionals, doctors, judges and low-level officials cooperated with government officials to silence critics. Some government critics have called the phenomenon "police psychiatry."

These days, such tactics are used to muzzle political opponents, incapacitate rivals or simply remove tenants from apartments where they are not wanted, said Marina Litvinovich, who accompanied Arap to Washington and who serves as a political adviser to the civic organization run by chess champion Gary Kasparov....

***

While she was held, Arap said, she spoke to dozens who were perfectly healthy but found themselves in the same situation: forcibly hospitalized for political reasons, or because of some competitive business venture that wanted them out of the picture, or for reasons of real estate, meaning someone coveted their apartment....Others were witnesses in key criminal cases, added Arap. Litvinovich said it's much easier to send people to a psychiatric hospital than to have them murdered....

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102101386.html?hpid=moreheadlines

[madrchsod]

1. for years the soviets/russian were banned

from the world community of psychiatry because they either refused to speak out against this practice or participated in imprisoning political enemies of the state in insane asylums. the usa just puts them on an british island in the middle of the indian ocean.

[provis99]

2. an asylum is nice compared to what we do

In America, dissidents get sent to Guantanamo to be tortured, or shipped off to "foreign rendition" in Eastern European prisons. If I were a dissident and had a choice, I'd rather be sent to live with schizophrenics for a while, rather than be tortured by the US Military for years. Rather sad that Soviet style totalitarianism is looking mild compared to the current state of affairs in America.

[seriousstan]

3. Dissidents? Name one.

[DeepModem Mom]

4. I don't like to be argumentative, but I think if "dissidents" were sent to Gitmo...

all of us here would be there. The woman in the article was sent to a psychiatric institution for writing (something of a dissident nature), which is what we all do here.

That's not to say there are not innocents at Gitmo; by all reports, there are.