THE WORKING COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE THE USE OF PSYCHIATRY FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES (WC) – established on January 5, 1977, under the Moscow Helsinki Group at the initiative of Petro HRYORENKO, a member of both the MHG and the UHG, with the aim of identifying and publicizing cases of psychiatric abuse and assisting the victims of psychiatric repression. The Commission included Vyacheslav Bakhmin, Irina Grivnina, Irina Kaplun, and Alexander Podrabinek, and later Felix Serebrov and Leonard Ternovsky. Alexander Voloshanovich and Anatoliy KORYAHIN from Kharkiv also participated in its work.
The Commission’s investigations concerned individuals who were accused of political crimes, declared not criminally responsible, and sent by the court for compulsory treatment. In these cases, the Commission conducted its own independent examination, seeking to obtain answers to three questions: 1. Was the medical examination conducted with sufficient scientific integrity? (To answer this question, the Commission involved independent psychiatric experts, who sometimes acted anonymously and sometimes agreed to the publication of their names). 2. Were all the requirements of criminal procedure law observed during the examination? 3. Did the act of which the defendant was accused represent a sufficient public danger to justify raising the issue of compulsory treatment?
Having received a negative answer to at least one of these three questions (and in most cases, to all three), the Commission would raise the issue of reviewing the court’s decision.
In addition, the Commission collected and publicized data on the conditions of detention in special psychiatric hospitals, studied cases of the forcible commitment of citizens to psychiatric hospitals without a court order, based on the instruction on emergency hospitalization, and developed and raised issues concerning the rights of citizens suffering from mental illness. It also published an Information Bulletin (a total of 24 issues were released).
The WC’s activities were supported by the world community. In August 1977, the WC prepared an appeal, “To the Psychiatrists—Participants of the Congress in Honolulu”; the book by A. Podrabinek, “Punitive Medicine,” which summarized materials on the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR, was passed on to the VI Congress of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), held in 1977 in Honolulu. The Congress reviewed the evidence sent by the WC and passed a resolution condemning the Soviet Union.
Over the course of four years, all members of the commission were arrested (except for Irina Kaplun, who died in a car accident in July 1980). After the arrest of the last member of the Commission, Leonard Ternovsky (February 1981), its activities ceased completely. However, the Commission succeeded in drawing the attention of international medical and psychiatric associations and the world public to the problem of punitive psychiatry in the USSR. In 1983, under the threat of expulsion from the World Psychiatric Association for the use of psychiatry for political purposes, the USSR was forced to voluntarily withdraw from this international organization.
Kirill Limanov
From materials of Moscow’s “Memorial.”