Ukrainian Association of Psychiatrists Commission of Experts is disbanded
The board has been disbanded for the banal reason of money. Today its doctors, lawyers, and forensic psychologists are out pounding the pavements, while the telephone keeps ringing from those in need of the experts’ protection. The commission was a kind of court of arbitration in cases when civil rights were violated by perpetrators using the victim’s psychiatric diagnosis to achieve their nefarious ends. According to representatives of the Association of Psychiatrists, their eleven years of experience has shown that the use of psychiatry as an instrument of punishment or a method of competition did not disappear together with the collapse of the Soviet Union and still exists, albeit under the conditions of a market economy. According to the Ukrainian Association of Psychiatrists, in 2001 alone 1,402 persons turned to the association seeking justice. By comparison, before 1995 only 300 to 400 persons appealed to the association annually and 700 annually between 1997 and 1999. Significantly, while at that time people mostly requested that their diagnosis be reviewed or annulled, now they request protection from avaricious relatives claiming title to the patient’s property. Almost three-fourths of all the appeals involve property. However, while in the 1990s the offenders were mostly strangers — gangs on the prowl for disabled persons’ apartments — now they are relatives, daughters, brothers, and grandchildren. They follow a quite simple scenario. After being found incompetent, the person is sent to a mental hospital, and the relatives make out all the deeds confirming their title to property. This happened to a Kharkiv native, whose story attracted even foreign media attention. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she spent three years in a mental hospital in the village of Strileche. She had been taken there at the insistence of her lawful husband who later informed their children that their mother died tragically. While his wife was undergoing treatment, he remarried, sold their house, and emigrated. After escaping from the hospital, the woman appealed to two psychiatric expert boards in Kharkiv and Kyiv at a time. They confirmed that she had never had any symptoms of the schizophrenia for which she had been institutionalized.
The Association of Psychiatrists has also reviewed appeals from officers who had been falsely diagnosed. Last year alone there were four cases when psychiatrists in the uniformed services confirmed false diagnoses. Plus there were the usual appeals to the board for expert examinations. To illustrate, in 1998 a native of Vinnytsia requested that the commission “protect her from psychiatry and annul her disability status.” While the woman had never shown any symptoms of mental disorder, she was diagnosed as schizophrenic. On the basis of this diagnosis, the court ruled her incompetent. However, soon the Kyiv board concluded that she had never had the symptoms. Therefore, she did not need the guardianship her son had been seeking to establish.
It seems that now people with similar problems will have nowhere to turn in Ukraine. In the West, cases where abuse of psychiatry is even less evident are taken to court, no questions asked. In the post-Soviet states, however, these thorny problems are addressed by nongovernmental organizations only. According to Semen Hluzman, executive secretary of the Association of Ukrainian Psychiatrists, all these years Ukraine’s applied psychiatry was sponsored by Dutch philanthropists and the EU. Ukrainian officials could not find the money, despite the fact that the board was set up upon the initiative of Ukrainian government agencies. (Incidentally, the funding required for the board to function comes to $1000 a month.) In the early 1990s, Health Minister Yury Spizhenko was inundated with phone calls and letters from citizens demanding that their diagnoses dating from Soviet times be reviewed or annulled.
How have medical officials reacted to this situation? As The Day learned from Yury Yudin, chief of the Kyiv Department of Mental Health Protection, such independent expert boards serve the interests of the state. After all, it is clear that a person suffering from a mental disorder cannot be deprived of civil rights. Therefore, the more boards there are, the better protection people will have. To quote Mr. Yudin, the problem is due to the fact that psychiatrists are still considered versatile experts. Everybody expects them to know the legal details of cases relating to psychiatry. According to him, “In principle, we can set up boards and provide counseling. But there is in fact nobody else to defend the interests of patients in courts and look into their conflicts with relatives.”
