Source:
Washington PostBy Nora Boustany
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 22, 2007; Page A18
It was just an errand, one more stop to get through the red tape, said Larissa Arap.
Arap, a rights activist in Russia, said she was seeking a driver's license, and all she needed was a routine signature from a doctor certifying that she was in good health. But instead of complying, a psychiatrist in the northern Russian town of Murmansk asked Arap whether she was the one who had written "Madhouse," an article in a local paper that had exposed unorthodox and dismal conditions in psychiatric wards....What followed that July day was a horrific six-week stay in psychiatric wards, said Arap, who recounted her story in an interview last week in Washington.
Activists say Arap was only one of countless Russian citizens who have been wrongly spirited into the hallways of mental facilities. The tactics echo those used during Soviet times, when a whole class of professionals, doctors, judges and low-level officials cooperated with government officials to silence critics. Some government critics have called the phenomenon "police psychiatry."
These days, such tactics are used to muzzle political opponents, incapacitate rivals or simply remove tenants from apartments where they are not wanted, said Marina Litvinovich, who accompanied Arap to Washington and who serves as a political adviser to the civic organization run by chess champion Gary Kasparov....
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While she was held, Arap said, she spoke to dozens who were perfectly healthy but found themselves in the same situation: forcibly hospitalized for political reasons, or because of some competitive business venture that wanted them out of the picture, or for reasons of real estate, meaning someone coveted their apartment....Others were witnesses in key criminal cases, added Arap. Litvinovich said it's much easier to send people to a psychiatric hospital than to have them murdered....
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