Return to the USSR and a Gray Zone

First, let’s deal with how much the old ways are back. During Soviet times, psychiatry was a tool of the state. We have had reports of this for the last two-plus years. This is the clearest, with the most details.

It is coming from the resistance. But assuming they depose Putinism, they will have a long way to go to bring some trust back to psychiatry as a branch of medicine. So here is their report. It distills this to its core:

Back to square one: the return of punitive psychiatry.
Putin can be proud: at the beginning of 2024, the number of people convicted under political charges under him exceeded the indicators of the USSR during the times of Khrushchev and Brezhnev combined (more than 116 thousand people were subjected to direct repression in Russia in the last 6 years alone).

But plus, the Kremlin neo-Soviet regime decided to remember that inconvenient oppositionists can be sent not to prisons, but to mental hospitals to discredit them. Perhaps they will not declare a dissident under “treatment” with a diagnosis of “schizophrenia” a prisoner of conscience. Who will take seriously the complaints and letters of a “madman”?! A very convenient method of dealing with undesirables, which was actively used against political opponents until the very end of the 1980s, and is again gaining strength today.