The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman
u.s. psychs digging around inside a 15 year old girl’s brain with an icepick for fun looking back at their soviet counterparts like “mmm I think your methods may be harmful and immoral”
fucking eat me
For example Rosemary Kennedy was lobotomized at age 23 because she was intellectually disabled and “becoming increasingly irritable and difficult.”
God learning about the history of lobotomies, how they were done, why, and to whom fucked me up big time. So many cases of men forcing lobotomies on women because they wanted a passive bang maid, it’s a crime against humanity that basically no one ever saw any consequences for
The Soviet Union officially banned the procedure in 1950[157] on the initiative of Gilyarovsky.[158] Doctors in the Soviet Union concluded that the procedure was “contrary to the principles of humanity” and “‘through lobotomy’ an insane person is changed into an idiot”.[149] By the 1970s, numerous countries had banned the procedure, as had several US states.[159]
Genuinely amazing that apparently only the Soviets were able to say “hey people, maybe the solution to mental illness is not to permanently destroy parts of people’s brains for no reason and with no benefit”.
Yeah psychiatric care was terrible everywhere. It hasn’t really had a chance to evolve unfortunately.
There are Marxist psychiatrists and I would say dialectical behavior therapy is the most communist kind of psychotherapy I’ve come across, but it hardly ever gets the attention it deserves and finding groups that practice it can be almost impossible. Depending on where you are located.
It’s one of the most vulnerable groups in any society, not really a surprise they get the short end of the stick often.
True. Sucks to say but there was a reversal of progress on many disability/mental health advancements under Stalin along with the other social rollbacks that occurred, although it should be abundantly clear a hundred years later that a socialist society is the only society capable of resolving these issues, even if it isn’t a 100% guaranteed thing.
Person who just today learned about the historical nature of psychiatric care very concerned about psychiatric care in the place that is the enemy of their empire.
was the enemy of their empire. The Soviet Union hasn’t existed for over 30 years and they’re still fighting it 👻
I have known far too many washed up old Cold Warriors who are still fighting the Soviet Union… sometimes, I’m willing to spend a couple hours with absolute nightmare far right ghouls, just because listening to their Red Scare rants lets me pretend for a bit that we never lost the war, as long as I don’t say anything argumentative. Lol.
I see a distinct lack of numbers in the argument and that wiki article.
I’m willing to bet if you go through the sources for this shit the sources themselves are hazy about details and that any investigation into the numbers shows like mere handfuls of people getting caught up in this stuff. Not that this makes it ok that it happened but that highlighting it as a problem in the context of a time when the west was electrifying thousands of people for being gay as “mentally ill” at a time when the Gay Liberation Front was radical and communist…
The attacks on queer people through the use of psychiatry can similarly be turned into a criticism of the west’s abuse of psychiatry to attack their political enemies because the lgbt movement itself was seen as a radical threat to the state filled with communists. I guarantee capitalism’s misuse of psychiatry against its political enemies is many hundreds of times worse than any misuse of psychiatry under socialism, and as such socialism despite being imperfect is a progressive improvement in that regard.
Don’t forget that just like every corrupt businessman and genuinely treasonous military officer becomes a smol bean “dissident” if they criticize the state and get imprisoned for the aforementioned crimes.
We can criticize Soviet handling of mental illness, but within those involuntary internment, how many of the so-called dissidents were also seriously mentally ill and their detention had nothing to do with their politics? Additionally, how many were just lashing out at whatever was there because they didn’t (and we can blame the Soviets for this as any state) have tools for dealing either their condition more constructively?
Yeah I don’t know about that. My general point is that when an argument lacks numbers it’s an indication that the argument is flimsy and weak if you put numbers to it, so they get left out. It’s easy to see that is the case here with the argument against socialism but wouldn’t be the case with the argument about capitalists doing it.
I went through the article, and the highest claims are of 15k people over the 70 year history of the Soviet Union. For reference, there are over 700k homeless people in the USA by the lowest estimates.
idk man, maybe being anti-communist is the one mental illness that’s fine to lockup and mistreat
It’s sort of interesting that characterizing your opponents as mentally ill seems to be something that all the liberals and anti-communists do nowadays, while us communists try to be more respectful of mental illness
To be completely fair to the Soviets here, being rabidly anti-communist kinda is a mental illness and definitely requires some getting to the bottom of by mental health professionals. But I really don’t think intentional abuse of these people, whether in a jail or in a mental hospital, is an actual solution to anything. It’s a vindictive and sadistic post revolution revenge fantasy and one of the worst sorts of idealism. Do some of these people genuinely need reeducation, mental health treatment, or both? Absolutely. But that should consist of tested and true evidence based treatments and pedagogy, not vindictive abuse.
On the other side of things, if you were pro-state they would give you a massage
Wtf I love capitalism now
pro-state masages are great
Something something Synanon, something something Troubled Teens Industry. Something something MKUltra
After reading Joe vs. Elan School, I don’t want to hear a goddamn word from capitalists about psychiatric abuse. These prisons are run for-profit on children that causes lifelong trauma and other problems adjusting once they escape. It’s no wonder Paris Hilton turned out the way she did with substance abuse problems after going through something like this. And she’s richer than God, so imagine what happens to kids that aren’t.
I was threatened with that kind of thing as a young kid… because people in power thought I was a communist. (I was, even then, but that’s not the point.)
And these people accused the Soviets of throwing adult political dissidents into “criminally insane” asylum-jails, while these Western ghouls invented the idea of child dissidents, who they throw into straight up for profit prisons. Which they’re allowed to do with no actual mental health diagnosis at all, not even the Drapetomania level farce that is “Oppositional Defiant Disorder”, because Western paradigms of family and society treat children as property and all you need to do is convince the parent/property owner the kid has a problem and you can fix it.
Don’t worry, psychiatry is definitely not a weapon under capitalism! Wait… I’m being handed a note…oh shit
The note
considering the state of anti-soviets so called dissidents in the 90s, very much needed practice.
for real, psychiatric care everywhere is disgrace and soviet one also wasn’t good so eh, live and learn
Damn, I bet they even did horrible things like lobotomies in order to control people deemed too “unruly”
Wait, what do you mean they immediately banned the practice for being inhumane and monstrous when it was practiced freely throughout the west, including on children?
Cool. Well chuds think anyone who disagrees with them is mentally ill and wants me dead for my supposed “idiocy” (not like they have any right to act like they’re the smart ones!)
Many libs have also questioned my sanity due to my refusal to admit that amerika is the greatest civilization ever to exist and will always dominate the planet and that this will also be a good thing.
In my entire life, I have never met a reactionary that could even entertain the idea they might be wrong, let alone that the right isn’t an omniscient in every single way. To them, nothing is true unless a rightoid says so.
Anti-communist sentiment in the USSR could have easily been treated by giving dissidents visions of the excesses of America in the wake of a bad ending to the cold war.
Sooooo like now?
