After years of activists' complaints about abuses in Soviet psychiatric facilities, 26 American psychiatrists, lawyers and interpreters last March toured such institutions in the U.S.S.R. and interviewed more than two dozen patients whose hospitalization had been questioned. The watchdog group concluded that while improvements had been made, disturbing evidence remained of unjustified confinements and fundamental shortcomings in psychiatric practice. Most troubling were the continued use of drugs that appeared to have more punitive than therapeutic value and the domination of the Soviet psychiatric establishment by some of the very officials who ruled it when abuse was rampant.
Thus, when the World...
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