Andrei Snezhnevsky

Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky (Russian: Андре́й Влади́мирович Снежне́вский) (7 (20) May 1904, Kostroma — 12 July 1987, Moscow) was a Soviet psychiatrist notorious for expanding the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, a step that allowed for arbitrary labeling of political dissidents as having sluggishly progressing schizophrenia. Despite being associated with the authoritarian politics of using the psychiatry in USSR as a system of oppression, Snezhnevsky today is still respected by some Russian psychiatrists for his theoretical work.

In 1968 Snezhnevsky wrote of a distinction between the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia,^[1]:164 a concept that came to be increasingly used in schizophrenia research and classification since 1970's, citing his colleague I.F. Ovchinnikov that the symptoms appear to exist "as if on two levels".^[2]

Helen Lavretsky suggests that a totalitarian regime, the lack of a democratic tradition in Russia, and oppression and “extermination” of the best psychiatrists during the 1930-50 period prepared the ground for the abuse of psychiatry and Russian-Soviet concept of schizophrenia.^[3]

Snezhnevsky was long attacked in the West as an exemplar of political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.^[4] He was charged with cynically developing a system of diagnosis which could be bent for political purposes, and he himself diagnosed or was involved in a series of famous dissident cases, including those of the biologist Zhores Medvedev and the mathematician Leonid Plyushch.^[4]

In 1980, the Special Committee on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry, established by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1978, charged Snezhnevsky with involvement in the abuse^[5]:223 and recommended that Snezhnevsky, who had been honoured as a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, be invited to attend the College's Court of Electors to answer criticisms because he was responsible for the compulsory detention of this celebrated dissident, Leonid Plyushch.^[6] Instead Snezhnevsky chose to resign his Fellowship.^[6]

On basis of the available data and materials accumulated in the archives of the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry, one can confidently conclude that thousands of dissenters were hospitalized for political reasons.^[7]

According to Moscow psychiatrist Alexander Danilin, the so-called ‘nosological’ approach in the Moscow psychiatric school established by Snezhnevsky boils down to the ability to make an only diagnosis, schizophrenia; psychiatry is not science but such a system of opinions and people by the thousands are falling victims to these opinions—millions of lives were crippled by virtue of the concept ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ introduced some time once by Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky, academician, whom Danilin called a political offender.^[8]

St Petersburg academic psychiatrist professor Yuri Nuller notes that the concept of Snezhnevsky’s school allows, for example, to consider schizoid psychopathy or schizoidism as the early, sluggishly progressing stages of an inevitable progredient process rather than the personality characteristics of an individual, which may not develop along the path of schizophrenic process at all.^[9][10] That results in the extreme expansion of diagnosing sluggish schizophrenia and the harm it has done.^[9][10] Nuller adds that within the scope of the sluggish schizophrenia concept, any deviation from the norm evaluated by a doctor can be regarded as schizophrenia, with all the ensuing consequences for an examinee.^[9][10] That creates ample opportunity for voluntary and involuntary abuses of psychiatry.^[9][10] However, neither Snezhnevsky nor his followers, according to Nuller, found civil and scientific courage to review their concept that clearly reached a deadlock.^[9][10]

See also

• Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union

References

External links

• "Behavior: The Children of Pavlov". Time. June 23 1980. http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,922041,00.html. 
• Reich W. (January 30 1983). "The World of Soviet Psychiatry". The New York Times (USA). http://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/30/magazine/the-world-of-soviet-psychiatry.html?&pagewanted=print. 
• van Voren, Robert (2009). On Dissidents and Madness: From the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the "Soviet Union" of Vladimir Putin. Amsterdam—New York: Rodopi. ISBN 978-90-420-2585-1. http://books.google.ru/books?id=tyDIKu8XsgcC&printsec=frontcover.