At RealClearScience, King’s College healthcare historian Caitjan Gainty looks at a new book on the ways that psychiatry can be used to silence dissidents:

In his new book, No More Normal, psychiatrist Alastair Santhouse recalls an experience from the 1980s when he was a university student in the UK helping deliver supplies to “refuseniks” — Soviet citizens who were denied permission to leave the USSR. These people often faced harsh treatment, losing their jobs and becoming targets of harassment. Some were even diagnosed with a psychiatric condition called “sluggish schizophrenia”. By the time Santhouse encountered this diagnostic category, sluggish schizophrenia had been kicking around psychiatry in the Soviet Union for some time. It first entered the diagnostic lexicon in the 1930s, coined to describe cases in which adults diagnosed with schizophrenia had displayed no symptoms of the disorder in childhood. 

“How Psychiatry Has Been Weaponized to Control Societies,” April 2, 2025

As she points out, in the 1970s and 1980s, this diagnosis enabled complicit Soviet psychiatrists to lock up people who had “delusions of wanting a better society or hallucinatory desires to emigrate.”

“Hospitalized” for Protesting

Similarly, in 1992, Chinese activist Wang Wanxing was “hospitalized” for unfurling a pro-democracy banner at Tiananmen Square on the third anniversary of the massacre:

He was immediately arrested, jailed, and then diagnosed with “political monomania”: a “condition” characterised by the irrational failure to agree with the state. For treatment, he was confined for 13 years in a psychiatric hospital, part of the Ankang (“peace and health”) network of psychiatric institutions where dissidents like him were forcefully medicated and subjected to “treatments” such as electrified acupuncture. 

“Has Been Weaponized“

This use of psychiatry for political control continues both in Russia and in China.

In a recent documentary (January 23, 2025), the BBC looked at the use of psychiatric hospitals to silence China’s critics. People who dare to protest are “drugged and labelled mentally ill”:

From an accompanying article by Nyima Patten:

When Zhang Junjie was 17 he decided to protest outside his university about rules made by China’s government. Within days he had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital and treated for schizophrenia.

Junjie is one of dozens of people identified by the BBC who were hospitalised after protesting or complaining to the authorities.

Many people we spoke to were given anti-psychotic drugs, and in some cases electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), without their consent.

While there have been reports for decades that hospitalisation is used in China as a way of detaining dissenting citizens without involving the courts, a leading Chinese lawyer has told the BBC that the issue — which legislation sought to resolve — has recently seen a resurgence. Junjie says he was restrained and beaten by hospital staff before being forced to take medication. 

“I had anti-government views so they treated me for schizophrenia,” January 22, 2025

At Radio Free Asia, Kitty Wang offers further information on one of the victims, social media influencer Li Yixue:

The incarceration of a social media influencer in a psychiatric hospital after she accused a police officer of sexual assault has sent shockwaves through Chinese social media.

Li Yixue, who hails from the eastern province of Jiangxi and blogs via the Douyin video sharing plaform, China’s version of TikTok, was initially sent for forcible psychiatric treatment at the Jiangxi Mental Health Center in Nanchang in April 2022 after she complained of the alleged assault.

She spent 56 days there, and was re-detained in December 2024. She is apparently still being guarded by the authorities, according to a social media video posted by a fellow Douyin user on Jan. 11.

The local police department carried out an investigation that exonerated the auxiliary officer, and claimed that Li had made four public suicide attempts in 2022.

But an agitated Li told the blogger Shitou on Jan. 11 that official accounts of her detention were “fake,” and that she’d been “driven mad” by her treatment the hands of the authorities. 

“Influencer locked up in psychiatric hospital, prompting social media outrage,” January 15, 2025

Her case is hardly unique, Radio Free Asia reports.

Can Overdiagnosis Be Manipulated in the West?

Alistair Santhouse’s principal concern in his book is with overdiagnosis in the Western world today:

At what point does a low mood tip over into depression? When does a distressing experience qualify as trauma? When does a cluster of symptoms indicate an underlying condition? As the conversation around mental health has moved from the consulting room to the public arena, so the concept of normal is shifting. Today, we are seeing an unprecedented rise in diagnosable conditions, in waiting lists, in diagnoses, and in medication.

Yet, are we really less psychologically healthy than previous generations? In this brave, engrossing and vitally important new book, consultant neuropsychiatrist Dr Alastair Santhouse argues that the consequences of the new climate of diagnosis are immense. Drawing on his decades of clinical experience, Dr Santhouse explores our current malaise and proposes a solution — that we pull back from this diagnostic expansion, focus on the effective treatment of a core group of severe mental health problems, and de-medicalise a vast range of other normal human experiences. 

From the Publisher

Overdiagnosis and overmedicalization can also create a climate that enables political misuse of psychiatry: If all sadness, however caused, is depression and all anger, however motivated, is aggression, government can easily create contexts or pretexts for interference in the personal lives and liberties of opponents that would otherwise be seen as political oppression.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.