A Question of Madness
- Author:
Zhores and Roy Medveaev Macmillan
2.75
It is impossible to read this short book without being profoundly moved. The facts as related are stark and clear. Zhores Medvedev, a distinguished Russian biologist, largely responsible for debunking the Lysenko school of false genetics, incurred further official disfavour by his published plea for co-ordinated scientific research on a world-wide scale.
He was dismissed from his post and subsequently, under the pretext of discussing certain problems of his adolescent son with a local senior psychiatrist, was himself confronted with the suggestion that his own writings showed several signs of mental deviation. He was invited to enter a psychiatric hospital voluntarily.
He refused and was forcibly abducted from his home by the police. Zhores’ equally distinguished twin brother, Roy, organised a campaign of protest with some of the leading Soviet publicists, scientists and writers and Zhores was eventually released.
But not before he was subjected to further so-called psychiatric commissions in an effort to find some mental abnormality. In hospital he was reported to be showing ‘signs of heightened nervousness’, not surprising perhaps in the circumstances. After repeated enquiry his friends and relatives learnt that he was ‘a psychopathological person with reformist tendencies’ who had ‘an exaggerated opinion of himself and showed poor ‘adaptation to the social environment’. The nearest the authorities got to an actual psychiatric diagnosis was ‘incipient schizophrenia’, whatever that may mean, and not a shred of evidence was presented.
What treatment he needed for such alarming symptoms and why it was necessary to detain him to have it, was never made clear but could be gathered from the final insult on his release. He was expected to attend an out-patient clinic and to give up his public writings if he knew what was good for him. Psychiatric blackmail, indeed, as Medvedev calls it.
It is clear enough that Medvedev’s detention in a psychiatric hospital was politically inspired and that the doctors concerned were merely pawns in the game. Reports of a number of similar cases have seeped out of the Soviet Union where the victims, not as influential as Medvedev, are still incarcerated. For the sceptics and others still inclined to regard it all as just anticommunist propaganda this book should be compulsory reading. In its sober, restrained, factual manner it is a tremendous indictment of a despicable practice of psychiatry prostituted to serve the interests of a totalitarian state.
David Shaw
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