Psychiatry under tyranny: A report on the political abuse of Romanian psychiatry during the ceausescu years

Romanians suffered incredible deprivations of every sort during the decades of Communist dictatorship. Most of the country’s 1,000 psychiatrists, and most of their patients, were victimized by the political system. A few psychiatrists actively engaged in practices amounting to torture. Many, however, became willing or unwilling participants in the political abuse of their profession. Such political abuses were fostered by abusive legislation and abusive law enforcement by the secret police. Abuses included: mass detentions in psychiatric hospitals of dissidents and political undesirables; abusive interpretation of the laws in detaining persons not suffering from mental illness; false, politically motivated diagnoses and treatment; and detention in secret facilities.     

Rhetoric and psychiatry: A Szaszian perspective on a political case study

Conclusion  The study of rhetoric and the assumption that rhetors generate the grounding for persuasion have been at the root of Thomas Szasz’s psychiatric critiques for almost two generations. His corpus has consistently pointed to a psychiatric rhetoric which creates, rather than discovers, “mental illnesses,” a metaphorical pseudo-medical labeling which, when accepted, confounds the attribution of adult responsibility and substitutes instead an infantilizing dependency.     

Analysing political deception: The virtues of Bernard Williams' anti‐tyranny argument

According to Bernard Williams' “anti‐tyranny argument,” it is important for citizens to have access to true information about the exercise of political power in order to check the tendency of governments and politicians to become tyrannous. Although Williams thinks the argument is one of the better arguments for the importance of truthfulness in politics, he acknowledges 2 limitations. First, it appears to offer little more than the truism that tyranny is a bad thing—a truism that will be accepted by all but tyrants themselves. Second, it may not offer any reasons for the importance of true information about forms of political power, which do not seem tyrannous. I argue that kind of political analysis required to apply the anti‐tyranny argument enables it to overcome both limitations. In so doing, I show that it has a clear advantage over rival arguments for the importance of truthfulness in politics.     

Anorexia nervosa: the tyranny of appearances

This paper explores the possibility that many families of anorexics are overly preoccupied with appearances, valuing what other people think of them more than healthier families do, and that this influences the origin and maintenance of anorexia. This‘rule’is simple and should be open to testing more widely through research.     

A report on the development of sociology in China since its political division

This article is a brief report on the fate of Chinese sociology after the Communist takeover in 1949. In mainland China there are no longer any departments of sociology in the universities; the discipline has been integrated into other departments where it is taught as an interdisciplinary subject. In contrast, in Taiwan sociology has developed primarily along the lines of American sociology, and research and new currents of thought are still progressing.     

A behavioral approach to substance abuse prevention in the correctional setting: A preliminary report

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a substance abuse program in a correctional institution using social skills training for secondary prevention. Forty-four male inmates with a history of substance use participated in the pilot program. Program topics included drug, alcohol, and substance abuse treatment knowledge and development of anger and stress management skills. A pretest-posttest analysis revealed significant improvement in overall knowledge of program topics and within specific areas. Areas of greatest improvement were drugs and alcohol. Clients and group leaders reported that the program was effective in facilitating attitude and behavior change regarding substance abuse. Results suggest a social competence approach to substance abuse rehabilitation in correctional institutions holds promise for both increasing knowledge and teaching effective skills to resist future substance abuse.     

Psychiatry of the Elderly: A Consensus Statement

This document is a consensus statement on Psychiatry of the Elderly jointly produced by WHO and the Geriatric Psychiatry Section of the World Psychiatric Association, with the collaboration of several pertinent NGOs and the participation of experts from countries in several WHO regions.     

Brief therapy in adult psychiatry: results from fifteen years of practice

We report the outcomes from our solution-focused brief therapy outpatient clinic in adult mental health. A questionnaire was sent to clients and their family doctors one year after they ceased to attend. Seventy-five clients were referred, of whom fifty-three were seen and forty-one traced at follow-up. Thirty-one (76%) reported a good outcome, with an overall average of 5.02 sessions, 20% attending only one session. Combining these data with our previous studies, 170 referrals were received of whom 136 attended and 118 were traced. Good outcome was reported by eighty-three clients (70%) with a mean of 4.03 sessions per case. There was no significant difference between the groups in solving additional problems or seeking further professional help. New problems were significantly less common in the 'good outcome' group. Long-standing problems did less well. In all three studies there were no significant differences in outcome between socioeconomic groups.     

Divergences in American psychiatry during the Depression: somatic psychiatry, community mental hygiene, and social reconstruction

The differences between somatic psychiatrists and mental hygienists, already apparent earlier, became much more pronounced during the Depression years, partly as a consequence of their different perspectives on this social crisis. Somatic psychiatrists, emboldened by the apparent success of new medical treatment methods, reasserted the central position of the mental hospital within psychiatry, attempted to improve the discipline's position within medicine, and promoted basic research. Mental hygienists, following the ideal of prevention, proposed far-reaching programs of community mental hygiene to alleviate widespread mental distress. A small group of mental hygienists embraced socialism and advocated measures of radical social reconstruction.     

The gift of the world: A note on political theology

This paper reads Carl Schmitt and the responses to Schmitt by his interlocutors and critics such as Erik Peterson, Jacob Taubes, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida in order to argue that the concept of political theology cannot be exhausted in the sense of the term determined by Carl Schmitt. Taking up to analyse Schmitt's politico-theological appropriation of Søren Kierkegaard and reading Kierkegaard in the light of Jacob Taubes and Jacques Derrida anew, the paper hints at the possibility of reading Kierkegaard more radically than Schmittean reading. Such radical possibility of Kierkegaard for us would lie, not so much in the legitimisation of the profane order of the world-historical politics in the name of a theological foundation, but more radically in the delegitimation of any earthly sovereignty as such. Such radical possibility, passing through a deconstruction of sovereignty, must open itself to a new eschatology or a new messianic thought of justice that defers and differs the execution of judgement by any earthly power, opening thereby to the gift of the world in the spacing that separates the political from the theological.     

Medicalized Psychiatry and the Talking Cure: A Hermeneutic Intervention

The dominance of the medical-model in American psychiatry over the last 30 years has resulted in the subsequent decline of the ??talking cure??. In this paper, we identify a number of problems associated with medicalized psychiatry, focusing primarily on how it conceptualizes the self as a de-contextualized set of symptoms. Drawing on the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology, we argue that medicalized psychiatry invariably overlooks the fact that our identities, and the meanings and values that matter to us, are created and constituted by our dialogical relations with others. While acknowledging the importance of medical and pharmaceutical interventions, we suggest that it is only by means of the dialogical interplay of the talking cure that the client can both recognize unhealthy and self-defeating ways of being and be opened up to the possibility of new meanings and self-interpretations.     

Individual Values and Preferred Leadership Behaviors: A Study of Romanian Managers

Relationships between individual values and preferred leadership behaviors were examined in a sample of 324 managers from organizations in Romania, a country in transition from a controlled economy to a free‐market system. We found the value dimensions of achievement, benevolence, and power to predict preferences for both transformational and transactional leadership behaviors. Specifically, achievement and benevolence displayed positive relationships with both types of leadership. In contrast, power yielded a positive relationship with the preference for transactional behaviors, but an inverse relationship with the preference for transformational leadership. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Sensitivity to reward and sensitivity to punishment rating scales: A validation study on the Romanian population

The “BIS/BAS” Scales (Carver & White, 1994) and the Sensitivity to Punishment and Sensitivity to Reward Questionnaire (SPSRQ; Torrubia, Avila, Molto, & Caseras, 2001) are two self-report instruments used for the assessment of Gray’s concepts of impulsivity and anxiety. In this paper, we examined both instruments in terms of their factorial structure and their construct validity using data from 345 Romanian undergraduate students. The results supported the original factor structure of the BIS/BAS scales, but indicated that a three-factor solution is preferable to the original two-factor solution in the case of the SPSRQ. Both instruments demonstrated good construct validity, correlating with other constructs such as Eysenck’s extraversion, neuroticism and some facets from Strelau’s temperament survey in the expected direction.     

A phenomenology of political apathy: Scheler on the origins of mass violence

In his criticisms of the German youth movement and the emergence of fascism across Europe during the early 1920s, Max Scheler draws a distinction between the different senses of political apathy that give rise to mass political movements. Recent studies of mass apathy have tended to treat all forms of apathy as the same and as a consequence reduced the diverse expressions of mass violence to the same, stripping mass movements of any critical function. I show in this paper that Scheler’s distinction provides the means by which to locate the various origins of mass violence and the practical means by which to address this violence that preserves the liberating potential of collective political movements.

Rhetoric and Psychiatry: A Szaszian Perspective on a Political Case Study

Conclusion The study of rhetoric and the assumption that rhetors generate the grounding for persuasion have been at the root of Thomas Szasz’s psychiatric critiques for almost two generations. His corpus has consistently pointed to a psychiatric rhetoric which creates, rather than discovers, “mental illnesses,” a metaphorical pseudo-medical labeling which, when accepted, confounds the attribution of adult responsibility and substitutes instead an infantilizing dependency.