In both the ordinary and the special hospitals, the doctors aimed, again, at recantation.75 Patients who agreed to renounce their convictions, who admitted that mental illness had caused them to criticize the Soviet system, could be declared healthy and set free. Those who did not recant were considered still ill, and could be given “treatment.” As Soviet psychiatrists did not believe in psychoanalysis, this treatment consisted largely of drugs, electric shocks, and various forms of restraint. Drugs abandoned by the West in the 1930s were administered routinely forcing patients’ body
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