Extrajudicial detention, Soviet Union, psychiatric

Soviet criminal psychiatry provided a means of extrajudicial detention. Its origin traces to Andrei Snezhnevsky, who, starting in 1962, headed the Institute of Psychiatry of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow. "His key diagnosis was called "creeping" or "sluggish" schizophrenia, which is said to show itself early in difficulties with parents and authority figures, and with stubborn "reformist tendencies."

In other cases, the treatment was more illusionary and simply used psychiatric drugs to induce confusion and inability to act. Others, not necessarily acting directly on higher brain centers, caused physical discomfort used as a disciplinary technique within the psychiatric facility, as a disincentive to inform "others about his fate". or electroconvulsive therapy as a means of torture for suppressing dissent.