The political use of psychiatry

In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was systematically used for political purposes. Soviet psychiatric hospitals were used by the state as prisons in order to isolate hundreds or thousands of political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. Formerly highly classified extant documents from Special file of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union published after the dissolution of the Soviet Union demonstrate that the authorities of the country quite consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent.

In the United States, the Ionia State Hospital - located in Ionia, Michigan and now converted to a prison - was one of America's largest and most notorious state psychiatric hospitals. The hospital used to, as a mater of policy, diagnose African Americans with schizophrenia because of their civil rights ideas.