Good piece on abuse of psychiatry

http://sites.google.com/site/punishingthepatient/prisoners/treatment-or-torture

http://sites.google.com/site/punishingthepatient/human-rights

"broadened the definition of schizophrenia by adding the category ‘sluggish schizophrenia.’ He defined the disorder as a slow-developing illness without the hallucinations that are a classic element in the Western definition of many schizophrenias. Instead, the ‘symptoms’ could be nearly all forms of behaviour—unsociability, mild pessimism, stubbornness—that deviated from the social or political ideal.

This description of schizophrenia could easily be derived from the current DSM-IV diagnostic criteria, in which ‘hallucinations’ are only one of five possible Criterion A symptoms and are not an essential feature of schizophrenia. Evidence of ‘unsociability, mild pessimism, stubborness, that deviated from the social ideal’, could easily trigger a diagnosis of schizophrenia using DSM-IV guidelines. Disorganised behaviour (Criterion A4) combined with negative symptoms such as affective flattening (Criterion A5) and social dysfunction (Criterion B) would probably be sufficient. If a person was troublesome to their family or a social nuisance in a Western country, there is little doubt that the Soviet criteria could be used for at least a tentative schizophrenia label such as schizophreniform disorder (DSM-IV) or simple schizophrenia (ICD-10).

The same Time article described the torture/punishment imposed on Soviet dissidents as being ‘hospitalised for years under prison-like conditions and put on powerful drugs that turned them into zombies’.[54] But the powerful drugs that violated human rights by turning Soviet dissidents into zombies are the same neuroleptics used on similar types of people by Western psychiatrists."