Plot

The abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was a systematic practice in the Soviet Union. On the covert orders of the KGB, thousands of social and political reformers-Soviet "dissidents"-were incarcerated in mental hospitals after being labeled with diagnoses of "sluggish schizophrenia", a disease fabricated by "Moscow school" of psychiatry and its leader professor Snezhnevsky. The "anti-Soviet" political behavior of some individuals was defined simultaneously as criminal acts and symptoms of mental illness. Exploring one of the most atrocious crimes a state could ever commit against a citizen, Current Time's "Dissenters And Madness" narrates the story of punitive psychiatry in the USSR starting from the early sixties, when the practice of psychiatry abuse got massive till the late eighties when the state had to admit the use of punitive medicine, the archives started opening, and the truth about punitive medicine became widely known.—Pavel Butorin

The abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was a systematic practice in the Soviet Union. On the covert orders of the KGB, thousands of social and political reformers--Soviet dissidents--were incarcerated in mental hospitals after being labeled with diagnoses of "sluggish schizophrenia", a disease fabricated by the "Moscow School" of psychiatry and its leader professor Snezhnevsky. The "anti-Soviet" political behavior of some individuals was defined simultaneously as criminal acts and symptoms of mental illness. Exploring one of the most atrocious crimes a state could ever commit against a citizen, "Dissidents And Madness" narrates the story of punitive psychiatry in the USSR starting from the early sixties, when the practice of psychiatry abuse got massive till the late eighties when the state had to admit the use of punitive medicine, the archives started opening, and the truth about punitive medicine became widely known. "Dissidents And Madness" premiered on Current Time TV on May 30, 2023.