through drugs and violated in a manner reminiscent of the Middle Ages.

The logic of this travesty is cruel and simple: the authorities can commit a dissenter to a mental institution by administrative action. In the criminal commitment procedure, the defendant can be ruled "not accountable" and ordered by the court to receive compulsory psychiatric treatment, without the right to participate in his own defense or be present at his own trial. The trial itself is closed to the public.

Psychiatric incarceration spares the authorities the embarrassment of staging full-scale trials of political dissidents; a person's views are discredited by calling them crazy. Indefinite sentences without the de facto right of appeal are then thrust upon those whose continued activity is a nuisance to the state. Once in an institution, the victim is administered powerful drugs with painful and debilitating side effects in order to induce recantation. Others on the outside are then dissuaded from exercising their rights by the threat of psychiatric institutionalization.

No wonder this practice led the Sixth World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association in 1977 unprecedentedly to single out the Soviet Union for condemnation! In recent weeks, as a result of yet new disclosures, the Royal College of Psychiatrists in England has voted to ask the World Psychiatric Association to expel the Soviet Union when it next meets in

1983.

We are all here aware that the repression of human rights in the Soviet Union has increased in intensity--clearly an act of defiance and disdain for this meeting and the Helsinki process. As part of that repression, all of the founding members of the Working Commission for the Investigation of the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes have also been imprisoned or exiled.

Let us examine this abnormal phenomenon in human terms, using a few current examples:

Dr. Anatoly Koryagin, a consulting psychiatrist with the Working Commission had examined numerous people confined for alleged psychiatric illness and found them to be normal, sane individuals. For such activity he was sentenced last June to seven years in strict regimen camp plus five years internal exile. In taking his moral stand, Dr. Koryagin knew that Dr.

Semyon Gluzman, a young psychiatrist, had been sentenced ten years earlier for refusing to cooperate with this abuse of medical science. We hope that when Dr. Glużman's long incarceration and exile is over, he will be permitted to emigrate.

A recent letter of Dr. Koryagin's, written in Soviet labor camp Perm #37, appeared in a British medical journal, Lancet. He writes:

"Let there be no doubt that Soviet authorities have turned our most humane branch of medicine into an instrument for achieving the main aim of their internal policy--the suppression of dissent....I appeal to you not for a moment to forget....

To show that we have not forgotten, let us go on:

Aleksandr Podrabinek wrote a monograph, Punitive Medicine, in which he described Soviet medical malpractices against dissidents. He was sentenced this last year to three years in a labor camp.

Felix Serebrov was sentenced last July to a total of nine years in severe regime labor camp and internal exile for, among other things, appealing to this very CSCE meeting to help stop the practice of psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union.

· During the same month, Irina Grivnina, mother of a small child, was sentenced to five years in internal exile for having passed along information which helped to expose the misuse of psychiatry.

Last February, Yuri Valov, a member of a group formed to defend the rights of invalids in the Soviet Union, was sentenced to a psychiatric hospital for his samizdat paper, "An Invalid's Message. This, Mr. Chairman, in the year proclaimed by the United Nations as "The Year of the Invalid."

Dr. Leonard Ternovsky was sentenced a year ago to three years in labor camp for having been unafraid to speak up against the political abuse of psychiatry. Dr. Ternovsky's words at his trial are illuminating:

"I have felt a particular responsibility as a doctor for things done in the name of medicine. I became convinced that psychiatry is in fact being misused, and that it is necessary to oppose such misuses....I would have been happier if my activities and statements were not needed....I foresaw

my arrest and this trial. That does not mean I
wanted to go to prison. I am almost fifty, not
fifteen. I no longer need romantic notions. I
would much prefer to escape years of imprisonment.
But I only did what I considered necessary. If
I had failed to do so, I would have lost my self-
respect."

Dr. Ternovsky and Dr. Koryagin are by no means alone. Other Soviet physicians are now in prison for their defense of human rights and their protest of the Soviet abuse of medical science. We here recognize the heroism of Dr. Mykola Plakhotnyuk, Dr. Zinovy Krisivsky, Dr. Algirdas Statkevicius.

Copious documentation of the torture we have described exists for more than five hundred persons, out of the thousands so punished. Nor can the existence of the inhumane abuse be denied. The evidence is too great, and it has been confirmed by Soviet Ministry of Health officials. In a paper prepared under the direction of the chief psychiatrist at the Ministry of Health for presentation to a congress of Soviet psychiatrists this past summer, we learned officially that persons · are indeed confined in mental institutions because they made "groundless" and "slanderous" statements against the govern

ment.

Keeping pace with the growth of the human rights movement, the government has increased the number of Special Psychiatric Hospitals from three in the early 1960's to twelve in 1981. These hospitals are managed by the Ministry of the Interior, the same ministry that runs the Soviet prison system. Dissenters confined there live in constant danger from the truly criminally insane patients.

Nor is the confinement of dissenters limited to political dissidents. Religious activists are frequently similarly victimized.

Valeriya Makeeva, an Orthodox nun, was confined in Kazan Special Psychiatric Hospital from 1979 until her transfer to an Ordinary Psychiatric Hospital near Moscow in early 1981. Intensive treatment with drugs left her right arm paralyzed.

Members of unregistered Christian groups in several regions of the Soviet Union have also been forced into psychiatric hospitals. A case in point is Vladimir Pavolovich Khailo, a worker with fifteen children, member of the Reform Baptist Church, a faith not recognized as legal by the Soviet government, and long the target of persecution. On September 22, 1980, with our

Madrid Preparatory Meeting in session, Khailo was forcibly
interned in a mental hospital. On December 1, 1980, he was
ruled "not responsible" for his actions on the grounds of
insanity and sentenced by a closed court. Khailo remains in
psychiatric confinement to this day in spite of his desire
to emigrate.

Soviet authorities also have used psychiatry to suppress incipient free labor organizations. Mr. Chairman, we have joined here with many in condemning the military government in Warsaw for its efforts to crush Solidarity. It is useful to remind ourselves that Soviet workers, who have fought for reforms similar to Solidarity's, are themselves too often persecuted and too often condemned to mental hospital cells.

A number of workers formed a group in Moscow in 1976 collectively to protest violations of their labor rights. By early 1978, no fewer than five of the group's leading members had been confined to psychiatric institutions.

Later that year, another group announced that they were. forming a similar unofficial trade union group. Within three weeks, one founding member was in a psychiatric hospital, while other members were sentenced to imprisonment or exile.

When Mikhail Zotov publicized a lockout at an auto plant in Togliatti, doctors declared him "mentally incompetent" and committed him to the Togliatti General Psychiatric Hospital. Vladimir Klebanov, a foreman in a Ukrainian coal mine, once complained to superiors that his men were dying in accidents because they were exhausted from too much overtime work. Klebanov went on to announce the formation of an independent union, he was sent to the Drepropetrovsk Special Hospital, where he is still being held.

When

In 1980, Soviet officials moved against an outspoken coalminer and former member of the Communist Party named Aleksei Nikitin, who first had protested lax safety precautions in the Donetsk mines eleven years ago. This led to his confinement in the Dnepropetrovsk Special Hospital, and he has been in mental hospitals nearly all of the last decade. Although he was examined in September 1980 by the psychiatrist, Dr. Anatoly Koryagin, and pronounced absolutely sane (which pronouncement led to the doctor's arrest), Soviet authorities ended Nikitin's efforts to form a freee trade union in Donetsk and locked him up again just a few months ago in a special psychiatric hospital in Kazakhstan in distant Central Asia, far from family and friends. He is being injected with sulfazin, not an accepted therapeutic drug; and he writes that it "is like a drill boring into your body that gets worse and worse until it's more than you can stand."