[D66] Psikhuskas

[J.N.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psikhushka

Psikhushka (Russian: психушка; [pʲsʲɪˈxuʂkə]) is a Russian ironic
diminutive for psychiatric hospital.[2] In Russia, the word entered
everyday vocabulary.[3] It has been occasionally used in English since
the Soviet dissident movement and diaspora community the West used the
term. In the Soviet Union, psychiatric hospitals were often used by the
authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the
rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and
mentally; as such they were considered a form of torture.[4] The
official explanation was that no sane person would be against socialism.[5]

Psikhuskas were already in use by the end of the 1940s (see Alexander
Esenin-Volpin), continuing into the Khrushchev Thaw period of the 1960s.
On April 29, 1969, the head of the KGB Yuri Andropov submitted to the
Central Committee of CPSU a plan for the creation of a network of
psikhushkas.[6]

The official Soviet psychiatric science came up with the definition of
sluggish schizophrenia, a special form of the illness that supposedly
affects only the person's social behavior, with no trace on other
traits: "most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice
are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure," according to the
Moscow Serbsky Institute professors (a quote [7] from Vladimir
Bukovsky's archives). Some of them had high rank in the MVD, such as the
infamous Daniil Luntz (ru), who was characterized by Viktor Nekipelov as
"no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments
on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps".[7]

The sane individuals who were diagnosed as mentally ill were sent either
to a regular psychiatric hospitals or, those deemed particularly
dangerous, to special ones, run directly by the MVD. The treatment
included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, a range of drugs
(such as narcotics, tranquilizers, and insulin) that cause long lasting
side effects, and sometimes involved beatings. Nekipelov describes
inhumane uses of medical procedures such as lumbar punctures.

Notable political prisoners of psikhuskas include poet Joseph Brodsky,
dissidents Leonid Plyushch, Vladimir Bukovsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya,
Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Pyotr Grigorenko, Zhores Medvedev, Viktor
Nekipelov, Valeriya Novodvorskaya, Natan Sharansky, Andrei Sinyavsky and
Anatoly Koryagin, politician Konstantin Päts, and whistle blower Larisa
Arap .