Week 6 Flashcards
USSR
- utopian, communist
- locus of power (political monopoly)
- Repression
- Authoritarian, totalitarianism (hard to speak out)
- Wanted to bring to other parts of the world
Accusations of psychiatric abuse
- Competition played out in psychiatry
Cold War
- global war for ideological supremacy
- Emergence of 3 blocs
- Fought beyond military domains
Psychiatric Abuse USSR
- Special hospitals
- Punitive treatments
- Soviets denied, sad attempt to “politicize” mental illness to score political points
Snezhnevsky
- Forensic psychiatrist
- Coined sluggish schizophrenia
Sluggish Schizophrenia
- schizophrenia that was hard to detect
Soviet Practices
- Snezhnevsky
- Diagnosing people who weren’t normal as a punishment
- Psychiatrists that did not accept lost jobs
- used to clean up inconvenience across europe
- 1000s impacted
Pushback
Late 70s: accusations, RCP and NGO pushed for investigations
- Important due to new human rights movement
1983: WPA said psychiatry needed a code of ethics
- Cemented treatment transparency, consent, confidentiality, etc.
- If patient/ 3rd party demands actions against code, psychiatry must refuse
- Therefore the soviet delegation quit
Why psychiatry?
- Attractive for punishment of political dissonance
- Medicine: not seen as oppressive as often (vs. cops, army, etc.) seen as help
- Not somatic/ physically seen: same realm as mental health/ illness
- Objective view of science obscures/ reframes political/ speaking out as psychiatric
- Hides human rights abuse
Other examples
- China: 1960s cultural revolution, 70% patients admitted to hospital (for “political reasons”)
- Munro
- Argentina and Chile
Munro / 3 forms of political abuse of psychiatry
3 forms of political abuse of psychiatry
1. Overdiagnosis = when political non-conformity and “absence of instinct for self-preservation” acts as grounds for diagnosis
2. Underdiagnosis = when really mentally ill people are held accountable for political crimes (never diagnosed)
3. Withdrawn from services = some people despite being very ill were withdrawn from hospitals and set to prison/ death
Argentina and Chile
not necessarily about types of politics, more about authoritarianism
Is this about profession or political context?
Van Voren: utopian, authoritarian societies vulnerable
- Expectations of conformity, buy in for collectivist project
- “If you’re unhappy here, you must be mad” (narrow idea)
Bonnie: authoritarian societies promote psychiatric abuse as prone to corruption, as they are not bound by law, state gets its way with intimidation
Issue is endemic to psychiatry itself?
Isn’t diagnostic criteria rooted in societal context?
Innocent application of criteria?
Beyond Authoritarianism
- “Political misuse” not limited to authoritarian contexts
- Adorno: “Authoritarian Personality” what made people fall for authoritarianism?
- Goldwater: surveyed by psychiatrists, deemed unfit/ insane (trump tested this rule)
Psychiatry and war on terror
attempts to demonstrate “psychopathy of terrorists” as narcissistic, psychotic, paranoid
- Largely plagued by methodological issues
- Eg. conclusions reached with secondary research, conducted under distress (eg. torture)
Silke: P and war on terror
Calling them mentally ill is comforting and unchallenging
- Violence becomes only possible response
Military psychiatry refused to acknowledge PTSD of prisoners
Psychologization makes “radicalization knowable and therefore subject to governance” while not necessarily effective, it provides the illusion of control
Hebel: P and war on terror
- Western tendency to psychopathologize rival foreign leaders
Agarwal: P and war on terror
psy-discipline is integral to torture programs in War on Terror
- Post 9/11: mental torture redefined along medicalized lines (had to last for months/ years)
- Psychiatry as torture consultants: instructed on how to be damaging without meeting the definition of torture
Solaz: War on terror
helped develop and cover the torture of the government
Younis: war on terror
war of terror drawn heavily upon psy-knowledge and ideas to pursue “pre-crime”
- Relies upon identification of individual “at psychiatric risk of radical”
- PREVENTS needs public bodies to train staff to detect “terrorist mindset”
Further compliances and conclusions
Mental illness often present in “political ways”
View of “monolithic” science vs plural “sciences”
Inherently political nature of the psy-disciplines means that apoliticality is not possible, but what safeguards can (and should) be applied to prevent misuse of expertise?
