Psychiatry, Soviet-Style

The legal code of the Russian Federated Soviet Republic, the largest of the Soviet Union’s 15 nominal republics, is now being rewritten to make it a crime to incarcerate a “patently healthy person” in a mental institution. With this rather basic gesture toward the protection of individual rights the Soviet Union appears to be taking a welcome step toward alleviating if not eliminating decades-old official abuses of accepted psychiatric practices and treatment. Dissidents and others in Moscow, though, are quick to advise caution. Soviet law is full of supposed promises and assurances about individual rights. The new legal protections now being put on paper will have meaning only if they are scrupulously applied.

The change in statutes governing psychiatric care were announced this week by Tass, the official press agency. Their codification in the Russian Republic is likely to serve as a precedent for action elsewhere in the country. The move follows years of mounting international criticism about the flagrant misuse of psychiatric treatment in the Soviet Union for political reasons. More recently the Soviet press itself has written extensively about the “lawlessness” that exists behind the walls of psychiatric institutions, though without mentioning the KGB.

Probably the most inhumane abuses, involving among other things deliberate torture through the injection of powerful pain-producing drugs, have occurred in the so-called mental hospitals controlled by the secret police. Whether the KGB will now give up its operation of such institutions isn’t clear. The Tass story suggests that diagnoses of persons suspected of having mental illness must from now on be performed at hospitals run by the Ministry of Health. If this means that the KGB is to have no further connection with psychiatric treatment, and that by extension people are no longer to be locked up in mental institutions to punish their political dissent, then a big step will indeed have been taken. But the proof of that is yet to be seen. Humane changes have been promised. Next they must be put into practice.