Psikhushka ("психушка") is a colloquialism for "psychiatric hospital" in Russian language. It has been occasionally used in English language since the times when the dissident movement in the Soviet Union has become known in the West. In the Soviet Union, psychiatric hospitals were used as prisons for forced treatment of political prisoners in order to isolate them from the "normal" society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally.

It is generally undisputed that this practice was in use by the MVD in the wake of the Khrushchev Thaw period in the 1960s. The official Soviet psychiatric science came up with the definition of "Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia" (вялотекущая шизофрения), a special form of the illness that supposedly affects only the person's social behavior, with no trace on other traits: "most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure," according to the Serbsky Institute professors (a quote¹ from Vladimir Bukovsky's archives). Some of them had high rank in the MVD, such as infamous Danil Luntz , who was characterized by Viktor Nekipelov as "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps."

The sane individuals who were diagnosed as "mentally ill" were sent either to a regular psychiatric hospitals or, those deemed "particularly dangerous", to a special ones, run directly by the MVD. The "treatment" included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, range of drugs (such as narcotics, tranquilizers, insulin) that cause long lasting side effects, and sometimes involved beatings. Nekipelov describes inhuman uses of medical procedures such as lumbar punctures as "treatments".

In 1971, Bukovsky smuggled to the West over 150 pages documenting abuse of psychiatric institutions for political reasons in the USSR. The facts galvanized the human rights activists worldwide, including inside the USSR.

People

• Vladimir Bukovsky
• Pyotr Grigorenko
• Zhores Medvedev
• Andrei Sinyavsky
• Viktor Nekipelov
• Andrei Sakharov

See also

• Psychiatric imprisonment
• Human rights
• Gulag

Bibliography

• ¹ ISBN 0767900561 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pages