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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 campA concentration camp is a large detention centre created for political opponents, aliens, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, often during a war. The term refers to situations where the internes."
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 narcoticThe term narcotic derived from the Greek word for stupor, originally referred to a variety of substances that induced sleep (such state is narcosis . legal context, narcotic refers to opium, opium derivatives, and their semisynthetic or totally synthetics, tranquilizers, insulincarbon; green: oxygen; blue: nitrogen; pink: sulphur. The blue/purple ribbons denote the skeleton [-N-C-C-]n in the protein's amino acid sequence H-[-NH-CHR-CO-]n-OH where R is the part protruding from the skeleton in each amino acid. Insulin ( Latin insu) that cause long lasting side effects, and sometimes involved beatings. Nekipelov describes inhuman uses of medical procedures such as lumbar punctureIn medicine, a lumbar puncture (colloquially known as a spinal tap is a diagnostic procedure that is done to collect a sample of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) for biochemical, microbiological and cytological analysis. Indications The most common indication fos as "treatments".
In 19711971 is a common year starting on Friday (click for link to calendar). Events January January 1 British divorce Reform Act comes into force January 2 66 die in stairway crush at Rangers v Celtic football match, Glasgow, Scotland. See Ibrox disaster. Janua, 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.
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