Soviet Union Patients' Rights

One of the most chilling by-products of the Kremlin's aversion to protest has been its use of the Soviet mental-health-care system as an instrument for suppressing dissent. An untold number of dissidents have been clapped into mental hospitals and sometimes kept under control with mind-numbing drugs. , Now, under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness, Soviet psychiatric practices are finally getting what could prove to be a cathartic airing. Amid demands for reform, the Soviet press has begun printing stories of abuse, corruption and incompetence within the psychiatric establishment. On the political front, Western analysts note that since last spring, the government has released some two dozen dissidents who had been held in psychiatric institutions.

Last week Moscow took yet another reformist step by announcing that broad new legal rights would be granted to mental patients and their families. The regulations, as described by the official news agency TASS, "provide legal guarantees against possible errors and malpractice." Among other things, relatives will be given the right to legal redress of doctors' decisions concerning the confinement or treatment of a patient. The provisions also make the "illegal commitment of a patently healthy person to a mental hospital a criminal offense." Significantly, authority over an unspecified number of so- called special psychiatric hospitals will be transferred from the Ministry of Interior, which has control over the internal security forces, to the Ministry of Health. It is in these "special" hospitals that political dissidents have usually been confined.

If enforced, the law would be a significant step toward abolishing long- criticized practices. The accompanying press campaign seems to indicate that the regime means business. Recent articles have told of how local militia obtained psychiatric commitment orders for people who had done little more than complain about their neighbors or threatened to expose instances of corruption to higher authorities. There has been no suggestion by the Soviet press, however, that such abuses were sanctioned by high officials for political purposes.

Whether the new law actually reduces the power of the authorities to use psychiatric confinement as punishment could be put to an early test. Members of a Moscow-based group called Press Club Glasnost, composed mostly of former political prisoners, last week pointed to the case of Lev Ubozhko, 54, a Moscow dissident who spent 15 years in psychiatric hospitals before being freed last spring. They said Ubozhko had been rearrested and was being held in a psychiatric hospital at Chelyabinsk in the Urals, where he was taken after the director of a Moscow hospital refused to admit him on the ground that he appeared to be healthy.