---
title: "Sluggish schizophrenia"
chunk: 3/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:38:02.694805+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Only specially instructed psychiatrists could recognize sluggish schizophrenia to indefinitely treat dissenters in a "Special Psychiatric Hospital" with heavy doses of antipsychotic medication. Convinced of the immortality of the totalitarian USSR, Soviet psychiatrists, especially in Moscow, did not hesitate to form "scientific" articles and defend dissertations by using the cases of dissidents. For example, Snezhnevsky diagnosed dissident Vladimir Bukovsky as schizophrenic on 5 July 1962 and on 12 November 1971 wrote to writer Viktor Nekrasov that the characteristics of Bukovsky's mental disease were included in the dissertation by Snezhnevsky's colleague. All the paper products were available in medical libraries. As Semyon Gluzman recollects, when he returned to Kiev in 1982 after his absence of ten years, he was amazed to see all this "scientific" literature in open storage at the Kiev medical library and was even more amazed to read all the "ridiculous stuff" hardly put into scientific psychiatric terminology. In their papers and dissertations on treatment for litigiousness and reformism, Kosachyov and other Soviet psychiatrists recommended compulsory treatment for persons with litigiousness and reformism, in the same psychiatric hospitals used for murderers:

Compulsory treatment in psychiatric hospitals of special type is to be recommended in cases of brutal murders committed on delusional grounds as well as in cases of persistent litigiousness and reformism with an inclination to induce surrounding persons and with a tendency to repetition of the illegal acts.

== Western criticism ==
Westerners first became aware of sluggish schizophrenia and its political uses in the mid-1970s, as a result of the high reported incidence of schizophrenia in the Russian population. Snezhnevsky was personally attacked in the West as an example of psychiatric abuse in the USSR. He was charged with cynically developing a system of diagnosis that could be bent for political purposes. American psychiatrist Alan A. Stone stated that Western criticism of Soviet psychiatry focused on Snezhnevsky personally because he was responsible for the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia for "reformism" and other such symptoms.