Cold War Psychiatry, Extremism, and Expertise

The 'Special Committee on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry

Bibliographic Data

ID2236628
AuthorsCharlotte Heath-Kelly (0000-0002-5237-4691, University of Warwick, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume16
Issue1
Publication date2022-04-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Political Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1749-5679 • E-ISSN: 1749-5687
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ips/olab034
OpenAlexW4200180994
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited21

Throughout the history of psychiatric ethical professionalization, the question of the 'extremist' contextualizes and frames the limits of medical practice. Using archival research at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the article explores how professional committees debated medical ethics after evidence of psychiatric participation in national security measures against dissidents. British, American, and global professional associations organized a prominent struggle against Soviet membership of the World Psychiatric Association in the 1970s and 1980s-reconstituting the field of professional expertise through Cold War geopolitics. The Special Committee on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry was formed in 1978 at the British Royal College of Psychiatry to publicize the medical detention of dissidents in the USSR and to pursue the expulsion of the USSR delegation from global professional fora. In doing so, it constituted an identity for Global Mental Health (vis-à-vis Soviet abusive practice) as impartial, objective, and uncompromised. However, this article explores the many ambiguities that complicate the performative constitution of Western psychiatry as good, and Soviet psychiatry as bad-reflecting on the political dynamics, and philosophy of science, which underwrote the struggle for global expertise

Constitution · Criminology · Delegation · Geopolitics · Political science · Politics · Professionalization · Psychiatry · Sociology · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medical History and Research · Medicine