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From Black and White to Shades of Grey

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From Black and White to Shades of Grey Chapter 18 From Black and White to Shades of Grey The meeting in Bratislava was the beginning of a long series of conferences and seminars, where a selected group of reformers from Eastern Europe gathered in order to discuss a certain theme, make plans and exchange experiences. More than visits to institutions in the countries themselves, these Network meetings offered the possibility to get insight in the way of thinking of the average Soviet psychiatrist. During three- four days they would congregate in a conference center, far away from civilization in order to avoid the distractions of shopping or meeting friends. This intense time facilitated a very rapid relationship of trust building with some of the participants. This bond not only resulted in a reliable working relationship, but also the opportunity of discussions and questions arising from all participants not possible in their own countries. During one of the conferences I spoke with a psychiatrist from Vinnitsa in Ukraine about whether Soviet psychiatrists, who declared dissidents to be mentally ill, had known what they were doing. In other words: did they know that these dissidents were not suffering from a mental illness at all, or did they believe in the diagnoses they established? The psychiatrist had been a prominent member of the Communist Party and at a certain moment even head of the party organization in her district. In 1985, Gorbachev came to power as Party leader, for the first time in many years a young person at the helm of the Party. The three previous Party leaders – Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko – had died while being in power, no longer able to utter a sensible word. Following the first Party plenum after Gorbachev’s ascent to power, the documents had been sent to her, as usual, and they concerned the new Party policy. These documents contained instructions how to act, how to respond to certain situations and how to answer challenging questions. When reading them, she said she was first surprised, then concerned and, eventually, shocked. Something was wrong with the new leader. As she learned more, the image of Gorbachev was clearer to her and she had a diagnosis: this man was suffering from delusions of reform, he was persistent, had a garbled image of reality. To her these were clear symptoms of sluggish schizophrenia. And to think of your almighty leader in such a way was in those days was quite something! For her, the developments after 1985 confirmed her earlier diagnosis, time and again. Until 1991, when the failed coup in Moscow led to the immediate collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine became 188 On Dissidents and Madness independent, from one day to the next. The windows and doors opened up, a fresh wind blew through the country. What she had dismissed all those years as symptoms of mental illness and had refused to believe, now turned out to be true and “normal.” It was a shock from which she had not yet fully recovered when we met. During the same period, the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association started an investigation into the political abuse of psychiatry. For Semyon Gluzman this was a complex issue: on one hand it was clear that such a discussion would lead to tension within the association; but, on the other hand, it shouldn’t be ignored as had been the case in most of the former Soviet Republics. The Association had adopted a resolution shortly after its founding, in which the political abuse was acknowledged and condemned, but that was quite something else than an open discussion and a thorough investigation in the background of how and why such abuses occurred. In 1994, we organized a conference on the theme, to which representatives from various former Soviet Republics were invited. Representatives from the Baltics attended, and also from Russia, Belarus, the Caucasus and some of the Central Asian Republics. Dainius Puras gave a talk on the situation within the Lithuanian Psychiatric Association, where a discussion had been held but no resolution had been adopted. Yuri Nuller discussed how in Russia the wind was gradually changing its course and starting to blow from a different direction and where the systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was again being denied and degraded as a “scientific disagreement” or an issue of “hyperdiagnosis.” It was particularly notable that the Director of the Serbsky Institute, Dr. Tatyana Dmitrieva, was an active proponent of this position. This was not so strange, as she had been a close friend of the main architects of “political psychiatry.” The discomforting issue was, however, that she was increasingly powerful and that her opinion became more and more influential. The delegate from Belarus, Roman Evsegneev, showed the most innovative way out of the dilemma. “We carried out an extensive investigation,” he said, “and did not find any proof of even one dissident who had been put in a psychiatric hospital in Belarus.” To the answer that this was not so strange, as Belarus hardly had any dissidents and that one of the most prominent ones, Mikhail Kukobaka, had lived in Moscow and not in Belarus and had been hospitalized in Special Psychiatric Hospitals in Russia, he responded with a grin. He knew very well that he was just playing with words. The conference was merely a first step. A commission was formed to systematically and scientifically investigate the political abuse of psychiatry .
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