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Cold War psychiatry, extremism and expertise : the "special committee on the political abuse of psychiatry"
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Heath-Kelly, Charlotte (2022) Cold War psychiatry, extremism and expertise : the "special committee on the political abuse of psychiatry". International Political Sociology, 16 (1). olab034. doi:10.1093/ips/olab034 ISSN 1749-5679.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olab034
Abstract
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.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | D History General and Old World > D History (General) R Medicine > RC Internal medicine |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Politics and International Studies | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Cold War, Psychiatry -- Political aspects, Cold War -- Archival resources, Royal College of Psychiatrists, Psychiatric ethics | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | International Political Sociology | ||||||||
Publisher: | Oxford University Press | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1749-5679 | ||||||||
Official Date: | 1 March 2022 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 16 | ||||||||
Number: | 1 | ||||||||
Article Number: | olab034 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1093/ips/olab034 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 14 September 2021 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 1 August 2022 | ||||||||
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