Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. — 234 p.
Psychiatry in Communist Europe ed. by Mat Savelli & Sarah Marks is the first book to address the history of psychiatry under Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, from the Soviet Union to East Germany. It brings together new research addressing understandings of mental health and disorder, treatments and therapies, and the interplay between politics, ideology and psychiatry. The study deconstructs a predominant totalitarian interpretation frame and embeds the history of psychiatry in Communism in a broader context. Challenging standard interpretations of psychiatry in communist-era Europe, this collection offers important contributions to the social history of medicine. The ten chapters illustrate a rich variety of topics, particularly around treatment options, national-cultural differences, and contest within the Soviet psychiatric profession. The extensive array of primary sources cited, and the variety of topics and settings offered, demonstrates the scope for continuing study in this sphere. Psychiatry in Communist Europe is important reading for anybody interested in the relationship between science and ideology. Not only does it offer thick descriptions of how politics impacted psychiatric knowledge in various national contexts in eastern Europe, it also importantly moves the study of psychiatry in this region beyond the well-known theme of politically motivated psychiatric abuse. This collection could be a very effective learning tool in undergraduate courses on the global history of medicine.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Communist Europe and Transnational Psychiatry
Sarah Marks and Mat Savelli
The Dialectics of Labour in a Psychiatric Ward: Work Therapy in the Kaschenko Hospital
Irina Sirotkina and Marina Kokorina
Insulin Coma Therapy and the Construction of Therapeutic Effectiveness in Stalin’s Soviet Union, 1936–1953
Benjamin Zajicek
Soviet Psychiatry and Drug Addiction in Central Asia: The Construction of ‘Narcomania’
Alisher Latypov
Psychiatry and Ideology: The Emergence of ‘Asthenic Neurosis’ in Communist Romania
Corina Doboş
The History of the Hungarian Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology between 1945 and 1968
Melinda Kovai
Ecology, Humanism and Mental Health in Communist Czechoslovakia
Sarah Marks
Beyond the Therapeutic Revolution: Psychopharmaceuticals Crossing the Berlin Wall
Volker Hess
Translated from the German by Arthur Eaton
Blame George Harrison: Drug Use and Psychiatry in Communist Yugoslavia
Mat Savelli
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Russian Variations on a Psychiatric Theme
Rebecca Reich
Index