No Asylum: State Psychiatric Repression in the Former USSR - Paperback

by Thomas A. Oleszczuk (Author), Theresa C. Smith (Author)

No Asylum is a quantitative assessment of the incidence of state repression via the peculiar institution of forced psychiatric hospitalization of evidently healthy Soviet dissidents. The book explains who was targeted and why, as the State used psychiatry to attempt to deflect, defuse, discredit or destroy the multifaceted dissident movement. Although new detentions virtually ceased as the Union fragmented, it is too early to write an epitaph for psychiatric abuse: political use of psychiatry could be revived in Russia.