Censuring The Soviets

A white list for patients, a black list for their doctors

Apart from Pavlov and his dogs, Soviet psychiatry is perhaps best known for the breakthrough discovery of "sluggish schizophrenia" accompanied by "paranoid delusions of reforming society." This is a mysterious ailment, usually requiring sudden incarceration, that often strikes political dissenters in the U.S.S.R. Since the late '50s, when Khrushchev announced that "there are no political prisoners, only persons of unsound mind," the Soviets have relied on tame psychiatrists to label troublemakers insane.

In recent years, dissidents have reached the West with tales of political victims held incommunicado in psychiatric hospitals, sometimes drugged into a docile stupor, beaten or tied to their beds to wallow in their own excrement. These practices have outraged world opinion, but the World Psychiatric Association timidly avoided the subject at its last meeting in 1971.

Last week, convening in Honolulu, the group mustered its resolution and by a vote of 90 to 88 censured Soviet psychiatry for its political abuses. Perhaps more important, the organization voted, by 121 to 66, to establish a permanent committee to investigate the political manipulation of psychiatry anywhere in the world. Soviet delegates did not secede from the association, as some feared they would, but greeted the censure sourly. Said Moscow Psychiatrist Eduard Babayan: "It is funny to have a majority of two votes after the millions spent on this propaganda."

In fact, the vote was the result of a carefully orchestrated, six-year effort to steer the association away from its see-no-evil stance. Psychiatric Terror, a book by British Psychiatrist Sidney Bloch and British Political Scientist Peter Reddaway, which describes more than 200 cases of Soviet psychiatric abuses, was timed to appear just before the meeting. Thirty-four Soviet dissidents, including Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov, signed an appeal to the gathering asking for condemnation of Soviet psychiatric abuse. A few of the dissidents showed up at the meeting, including former Leningrad Psychiatrist Marina Voikhanskaya, who marched to the stage to present the meeting with a "white list" of Soviet political victims in mental hospitals and a "black list" of psychiatrists who put them there. Voikhanskaya, who has been living in England since she emigrated in 1975, pleaded with delegates to "help hundreds of psychiatrists in the Soviet Union who have been drawn into crime only because they lack the courage to say no."

The 30-member Soviet delegation boycotted the debate over the censure --"We consider it rigged," said one delegate--but argued outside the halls that the charges were preposterous. After Dissident Mathematician Leonid Plyushch appeared at a press conference and told of his harassment and incarceration as a mental patient, Babayan said "Plyushch is mentally sick. Now that he lives in the West, you will see him and study him in the future. There never was a single case when a healthy person was placed in a mental hospital."

The Soviets complained that the resolution would politically divide the profession--a hint that Western psychiatrists might lose access to Soviet colleagues if the vote went against the U.S.S.R. But the most effective Soviet argument in effect asked: How can you question the diagnosis of mental patients without examining those patients or their records?

Just before the vote, Soviet representatives released to the delegates--but not to the press--the psychiatric records of dissidents in mental hospitals. According to the U.S.'s Howard Rome, current president of the World Psychiatric Association, the unexpected Soviet move helped make the vote close. The anti-Soviet resolution was endorsed by only 19 of the 58 voting societies, but passed by the two-vote margin because of proportional voting weighted according to the number of members each nation has in the world group. Jack Weinberg, president of the American Psychiatric Association, declared himself "saddened" by the need to condemn the Soviet psychiatric abuse but "gratified that we were able to speak up and not be intimidated by any harsh accusations that it is slander."

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