Was There a Communist Psychiatry? Politics and East German Psychiatric Care, 1945-1989

Eghigian, Greg

doi:10.1080/10673220216232

Cited by 19 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Several years ago, historian Greg Eghigian (2002) raised the question of whether there was such a thing as a "communist psychiatry," a question which we might expand to the sciences of the mind and brain more generally. As Sarah Marks and Mat Savelli argue in a recent volume (reviewed in this issue by Gregory Dufaud (2016)), until recently the assumption among historians was that "communist psychiatry" was characterized by: (a) the centralization of psychiatric policy for the Eastern Bloc in Moscow; (b) its widespread use as an instrument of political repression; (c) an overwhelmingly Pavlovian and anti-Freudian conceptual orientation; (d) an emphasis on work as a primary means of therapy; and (e) isolation from networks of Western psychiatry (Marks & Savelli, 2015, p. 1).…”

Section: History and Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Postsocialism, the psy-ences and mental health

Raikhel

Bemme

2016

Transcult Psychiatry

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Over the past decades, the formerly socialist countries of East Central Europe and Eurasia have experienced a range of transformations which bear directly upon the domains of mental health, psychiatry, and psychology. In particular, the disciplines and professions concerned with the human mind, brain, and behavior ("the psy-ences") were strongly affected by sociopolitical changes spanning the state-socialist and postsocialist periods. These disciplines' relationship to the state, their modes of knowledge production, and the epistemic order and subjectivities they contributed to have all undergone dramatic ruptures. In this essay, we trace the literature on these issues across three thematic domains: (a) history and memory; (b) the reform of psychiatry in an era of global mental health; and (c) therapy and self-fashioning. We argue for a closer articulation between the social science and historical literature on socialism and its "posts" and the literature among anthropologists, sociologists, and historians on the sciences of the mind and brain, and we suggest that each of these literatures helps to critically open up and enrich the other.

show abstract

Section: History and Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Postsocialism, the psy-ences and mental health

Raikhel

Bemme

2016

Transcult Psychiatry

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As the foundation for psychiatric training and research in East Germany was based on Pavlovian biological psychiatry, the non-materialistic psychoanalytic approach was abandoned 8. In Lithuania and Armenia, only biological explanations were allowed to explain the causes of mental illness because social problems could not exist in an ideal socialist society 14,15.…”

Section: Etiology Of Psychiatric Disordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, the majority of neurasthenia patients in China are responsive to anti-depressants 25. The emotional distress related to collective surveillance, repression of freedom of expression, and social discrimination against the underprivileged class in socialist society was usually expressed in a psychosomatic form in East Germany 8. In the Soviet disease classification system, somatoform disorders were included in the neurology section rather than the psychiatry section 9…”

Section: Diagnoses and Clinical Features Of Psychiatric Disordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…After being discharged from psychiatric hospitals, patients were followed up by psychiatrists who were in charge of their diagnosis, drug prescriptions, and in-person care 6,19. The mental health system in East Germany was also heavily concentrated in large outmoded psychiatric hospitals for chronic psychiatric patients 8. The relative paucity of trained psychiatrists in East Germany gave rise to the unequal distribution of the mental health workforce after reunification 41…”

Section: Treatment Of Psychiatric Disordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Psychiatry in Former Socialist Countries: Implications for North Korean Psychiatry

Park

Jun

et al. 2014

Psychiatry Investig

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Very little information is available regarding psychiatry in North Korea, which is based on the legacy of Soviet psychiatry. This paper reviews the characteristics of psychiatry in former socialist countries and discusses its implications for North Korean psychiatry. Under socialism, psychiatric disorders were attributed primarily to neurophysiologic or neurobiological origins. Psychosocial or psychodynamic etiology was denied or distorted in line with the political ideology of the Communist Party. Psychiatry was primarily concerned with psychotic disorders, and this diagnostic category was sometimes applied based on political considerations. Neurotic disorders were ignored by psychiatry or were regarded as the remnants of capitalism. Several neurotic disorders characterized by high levels of somatization were considered to be neurological or physical in nature. The majority of "mental patients" were institutionalized for a long periods in large-scale psychiatric hospitals. Treatment of psychiatric disorders depended largely on a few outdated biological therapies. In former socialist countries, psychodynamic psychotherapy was not common, and psychiatric patients were likely to experience social stigma. According to North Korean doctors living in South Korea, North Korean psychiatry is heavily influenced by the aforementioned traditions of psychiatry. During the post-socialist transition, the suicide rate in many of these countries dramatically increased. Given such mental health crises in post-socialist transitional societies, the field of psychiatry may face major challenges in a future unified Korea.

show abstract

“…Over the course of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, this change was most marked in Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, the United States, and West Germany, although similar trends were also evident in Eastern Europe. 114 A century-long pattern of increasing numbers of hospitalized psychiatric patients was reversed by a variety of projects designed to integrate and maintain the mentally ill and disabled within the community at large. Supported and promoted by enthusiastic reformers who often saw them as part of a broader progressive reform of social welfare, "community mental health" and "social psychiatry" quickly became rallying points for burgeoning patient and disabled citizens' rights movements.…”

Section: The Welfare State and The Age Of Mass Consumerismmentioning

confidence: 99%