No asylum

If No Asylum: State Psychiatric Repression in the Former USSR, Theresa C. Smith and Thomas A. Oleszczuk offer the first detailed account of psychiatric abuses in the USSR, based on more that 700 well-substantiated individual cases, presenting incontrovertible evidence that these abuses did occur.

Comparing the diagnostic methods adopted by most countries with those of the Soviet Union, Smith and Oleszczuk identify ways in which Soviet practice differed from that of other countries who used psychiatric diagnosis for political reasons. They argue that healthy people in the USSR were not detained idiosyncratically or occasionally but systematically, at predictable times. Detentions followed behavior critical of the government, religious observances, and actions advocating prohibited causes.

Forced hospitalizations took place on a scale corresponding to the activity level of the dissident movement. Concluding with a chapter on developments under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Smith and Oleszczuk maintain that although politically-motivated psychiatric detentions virtually ceased as the Soviet Union fragmented, it is too early to write an epitaph for psychiatric abuse.