{"id":1672,"date":"2023-01-18T19:14:41","date_gmt":"2023-01-18T19:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2023\/01\/18\/psychiatry-as-ideology-in-the-ussr\/"},"modified":"2023-01-18T19:14:41","modified_gmt":"2023-01-18T19:14:41","slug":"psychiatry-as-ideology-in-the-ussr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2023\/01\/18\/psychiatry-as-ideology-in-the-ussr\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychiatry as Ideology in the USSR"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sidney Bloch, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, Oxford
<\/span>Journal of medical ethics<\/em><\/a>, 1978, 4, 126-131<\/span><\/p>\n

I got the reference from an article<\/a> on the defenestration of Jordan Peterson.  Commentary on Bloch's paper from the same article:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The Oxford psychiatrist Sidney Bloch\u2019s classic 1977 academic paper<\/a> \u201cPsychiatry as Ideology in the USSR\u201d demonstrated how psychiatry in Josef Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union actually worked\u2014in an eerily similar way to how it now also works in Justin Trudeau\u2019s Canada. Firstly, whilst only a minority of psychiatrists were full-blown Communist Party members, almost all those in positions of actual authority were, reflecting Stalin\u2019s key principle that loyalty to leftist party ideology was more important than actual professional ability when it came to handing out the top jobs; the Ontario College of Psychologists might agree.<\/span><\/p>\n

A full 25 percent of Soviet medical students\u2019 curriculum was devoted to studying not actual medicine, but unrelated Marxist-Leninist dogma\u2014more than studying actual surgery. Russia replaced the old Hippocratic Oath with a new one in which medics swore to \u201cin all my actions be guided by the principles of Communist morality\u201d rather than, say, actual medical reality\u2014hence, a \u201cgood\u201d psychiatrist might commit an entirely sane political dissident to a mental home just to shut them up, something justified on party grounds, not medical ones.<\/span><\/p>\n

Victims were accused of suffering from entirely fictional disorders like \u201csluggish schizophrenia\u201d\u2014whose symptoms, conveniently enough, were so vague they could only be noticed by trained Communist physicians, not the wider public, to whom the patient might appear 100 percent sane, a diagnosis that makes about as much sense as saying someone who is clearly still walking around wide awake has slipped into a symptomless coma<\/a>. The only real way for patients deliberately misdiagnosed to escape from incarceration was to agree with their doctors that, yes, they really were mad after all, and that their \u201cincorrect\u201d opinions were simply unfortunate symptoms of their insanity, much as Jordan Peterson is expected to admit his own \u201cincorrect\u201d views are symptoms of his own mental unfitness to practice today.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sidney Bloch, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, OxfordJournal of medical ethics, 1978, 4, 126-131 I got the reference from an article on the defenestration of Jordan Peterson.  Commentary on Bloch's paper from the same article: The Oxford psychiatrist Sidney Bloch\u2019s classic 1977 academic paper \u201cPsychiatry as Ideology in the USSR\u201d demonstrated how psychiatry in … Continue reading “Psychiatry as Ideology in the USSR”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,221],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-psychology","category-psychology-and-personality-typology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}