Reuters published an article on the 10th of this month alerting the public to the large increase since the start of the Ukraine war in compulsory psychiatric incarceration of Russians for their political views. 48 dissidents have recently been institutionalized involuntarily.

     Instead, Reuters should have published an article on the one million involuntary psychiatric hospital commitments in America in 2022.

     “Punitive psychiatry” had been a method of social control used in the Soviet Union since the nineteen-sixties. Today Russia is following suit by again using psychiatrists to label Ukraine war protestors with a mental disorder so that they can be put in a mental hospital.

     Russian human rights activist Robert Van Voren notes that these involuntary commitments have quadrupled since 2022, the beginning of the Ukraine conflict. Still, they’re only 38.

     To accomplish a “legal” incarceration, Russian psychiatrists had originally come up with two politically convenient diagnoses of mental disorder. “Sluggish schizophrenia” and “reformist delusions” were the terms coined by their psychiatrists, in the same manner that American psychiatrists vote for the inclusion of a new mental disorder into their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

     Communist China solved their problem with social “misfits” through a similar psychiatric tactic. A new mental disorder had been created by Chinese psychiatrists which allowed forceful psychiatric incarceration of Chinese citizens. They were labeled as suffering from what psychiatrists called “culture bound disorder.” Thousands of Falun Gong members, for instance, had been incarcerated in this way because their religious beliefs were considered to
be a threat to an ordered Chinese society.

     In America today, the rate of involuntary psychiatric detentions has increased sharply over the past two decades. In 2014 the rate of all emergency involuntary detentions was 357 per 100,000 people. Today the rate of involuntary psychiatric incarceration in the United States ranges up to a new high of 966 per 100,000 in Florida. 

     Laws for involuntary psychiatric incarceration — such as Florida’s Baker Act — now exist in every state. In some jurisdictions, legal mechanisms like Laura’s Law and Kendra’s Law have been passed which authorize court-ordered, forced ingestion of psychiatric drugs for those with “chronic, untreated severe mental illness.”

     These laws are said to be used to protect an individual from harming himself or others. However, they can too easily be misused when in the wrong hands, as they have been in Russia and China under the complicity of their  psychiatrists.

     The problem in America, of course, may not then be the laws themselves. It is the use of them by  psychiatrists who are able to incarcerate someone involuntarily in a mental institution through the use of one of their DSM labels of a “mental disorder” which has no scientific basis. The psychiatrist does not even always see in person the one who is being incarcerated.

     A psychiatrist just writes down on a form one of the semi-bogus “mental  disorders” from the DSM. Those disorders – like Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, a label for the cramps and heightened emotions for a woman during her monthly cycle – may be no more valid than the “sluggish schizophrenia” or “cultural bound disorder” coined by America’s psychiatric counterparts in Russia and China.

     Yet in 2022 American psychiatrists or their proxies forcefully  committed just over one million people by ordering these involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations.