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When Dissent Became Illness: The Soviet Science of Silence
When Dissent Became Illness: The Soviet Science of Silence
Fear that your conscience could be diagnosed as a disease: Soviet psychiatry turned dissent into "sluggish schizophrenia," a label that required no symptoms and erased people from public life. How did a diagnostic manual become a tool for indefinite detention and legal erasure?
In this episode, we trace the practice from a Moscow visit in February 1989 through earlier international precedents, following cases where political acts alone justified psychiatric confinement and asking how medicine was made to silence truth.
Person: Samuel…
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