GUILTY!
Posted on 08/07/2007 2:51:07 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
MURMANSK, Russia - Heavy sedatives keep Larisa Arap languishing in a woozy haze at a mental asylum, the victim not of a troubled mind, her family says, but of a Soviet-era practice that continues to muzzle and punish dissent in today's Russia.
Earlier this summer, Arap, an activist with former chess champion Garry Kasparov's opposition movement, co-wrote an article that alleged abusive practices at local psychiatric clinics. When Arap appeared at a Murmansk clinic to pick up a routine medical certificate July 5, a doctor called police and had her taken to a local asylum.
The doctors handling Arap's case have made it clear why they want her committed to a mental institution, says Arap's daughter, Taisiya.
"One of the doctors asked whether I thought it was normal to write such things," Taisiya Arap said. "She said, 'It's not possible to write such things. It's forbidden.'"
The Soviet Union routinely locked up dissidents in asylums, a practice that attracted worldwide condemnation because of the protests of Andrei Sakharov and other human-rights activists. Today, 16 years after the Soviet collapse, authorities are increasingly returning to psychiatry to suppress political opponents or punish activists, according to human-rights organizations and other watchdog groups.
The trend reflects a government that has yet to fully divest itself from a Soviet way of thinking and governing, says Yuri Savenko, president of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia.
"We're returning to this Soviet scenario when psychiatric institutions are used as punitive instruments," said Savenko. "I call this not even punitive psychiatry but police psychiatry, when the main aim is to protect the state rather than to treat sick people."
Soviet psychiatrists revised definitions of mental illnesses, describing paranoia as an obsession with "the struggle for truth and justice," says Vladimir Bukovsky, a writer and dissident...
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
Look for this to come to your neighborhood should Hitlery or someone of her ilk gets into the White House in 2008
Bend over, take your happy pills or wind up like Vince Foster.
I would rather a bus run over my entire family RIGHT NOW!
I don’t know about that. But pray for these poor people because Putin has no shame or heart, and the outside world can’t help.
Mrs VS
Sigh, I had long hoped ‘this’ Russia was behind us. And this is the socialism that Hillary and others like Sean Penn want to hoist on us! I can’t believe people are buying her lies. I’m just waiting for one of her supporters (no doubt with her tacit knowledge) to try to tell us why doping dissenters is a good thing. After all, Hillary and her fans are already urging socialized medicine and taxes to share the wealth for ‘the common good’. My grandparents came here ahead of communism, some from Russia, to avoid it and now some people want it here, too. My grandmother must be rolling in her grave...
This story has been censored.
You’re crazy.
GUILTY!
You just want to oppress me!
czar, communism, Putin...it’s all from the same authoritarian tradition.
Russia is still the Evil Empire.... Russians love brutality and dictators. I guess it’s a cultural thing.
Yeah, everyone wants to oppress you. Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean you are crazy. We are watching....
psychiatry has a long, long history of aiding and abetting this practice
In the US, conservatives are considered mentally ill. “In Denial.”
The photo that you posted, was taken after she had been held for a period of time, it was taken by her daughter in the hospital, with her cell phone.
If you will go to this link, you will see this photo and one of her, as she looked, before she was jailed and the rest of the story.
http://russophobe.blogspot.com/2007/08/annals-of-weaponizing-psychiatry-now.html
They will start to do the same with Global Warming Deniers over here.
Ping to the real history of this action:
http://russophobe.blogspot.com/2007/08/annals-of-weaponizing-psychiatry-now.html
I like to think that life was a little different, a little less oppressive under the tsars, but in the realities of daily life, at least at the time of the tsars, a mostly pre-industrialized country, it probably didn’t seem much different. And if a peasant had a benevolent landowner to work for under the system, perhaps a little better than for others. I had hoped we could see the union of a non-commie, modern Russia, but it seems we have to wait a bit longer. It’s sad to see them backtrack, but according to some (admittedly a few tinfoil hat alerts included) sources, the commies never really left, just restructured. Sigh.
Of what? Criticizing Putin?
Not much different than scientists who do not accept the global warming dogma being branded as tools for big oil and evil polluting corporations.
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