Abstract

This paper attempts to place the historical narrative of punitive psychiatry in Qazaqstan in the greater context of global mental health trends led by “Western” countries (here meaning Western Europe and/or the United States). In the 1970s, the Soviet Union had many Western European mental health clinicians in an uproar after news spread of imprisoned political dissidents in psychiatric facilities. After seemingly many failed conversations with the Soviets on rehabilitating this matter, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) forced Soviet professionals to withdraw from the association in 1983. Information started resurfacing two decades later that the practice of pathologizing and institutionalizing political activists continued in post-Soviet countries, especially in Qazaqstan, a country where youth suicide rates were among the highest in the world. European centers monitoring global practices of democracy were quick to criticize, claiming that the “political abuse of psychiatry” was corrupting Qazaqstan, and that, despite reform efforts, the country was only but a “cunning democracy.”

However, consulting secondary historical articles written by both Qazaqstani and Western scholars on the relationship between Qazaqstani, Russian and Western European psychiatry, there seems to be a trend where 18th and 19th-century European imperialism, including in Central Asia, coincided with a social rise in the authority of psychiatric professionals in Europe, who then became useful instruments of imperialism and social repression with their newfound ability to both pathologize and cure “unwanted others.” This is visible in the publications of British psychiatrist J. C. Carothers—who played an important role in representing psychiatric guidelines of the WHO, as well as in Franz Fanon’s reflections in his book, The Wretched of the Earth, and even in current WHO publications with regards to the representation of researchers on consultation boards for international projects.

Western critics often use the term “political abuse of psychiatry” when referring to countries outside of Europe, but may refer to internal practices of punitive psychiatry as “one-off mishaps.” Fundamentally, the term assumes the following three points: there exists “one preferred way” of practicing psychiatry, this “one preferred way” necessitates a democratic government, and that non-former Soviet European countries practice an exemplary form of democracy. This paper examines, in conjunction, how psychological experiments are conducted and whether "psychiatric normality" exists, the imperalist history of global mental health, and how psychiatry arrived in Qazaqstan to challenge all three of the above assumptions contributing to the suppression of more equitable, cross-cultural exchanges of health information.