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16.08.07
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Case Of Murmansk Activist Creates International Backlash
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By Shaun Walker
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Discipline & Punish
Larisa Arap, an opposition activist from Murmansk, has become the subject of an international campaign in recent weeks. Arap, who works as an accountant in the Murmansk office of Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front, was quoted in an article, published in an opposition newspaper, relating her horrific experiences in a psychiatric hospital in the region three years ago.
The article tells how children at the hospital were forced to kiss and massage the legs of medical staff, and if they refused they were given electric shock treatment. She also claimed that many of those held at the hospital had no psychiatric problems at all. One woman was sent there as a result of a property dispute, whereby the shady people who had organized her confinement had now taken over the rights to her property. A woman from Murmansk, said Arap, had been sectioned after complaining about the rape of her daughter at an elite Murmansk school. The school’s powerful principal, aware of the damage such a scandal would do to the institution’s reputation, found it easier to have the mother declared insane and locked up.
On July 5, when attending a routine medical checkup to renew her driver’s license, Arap was asked if she was responsible for the article. When she answered in the affirmative, she was sectioned under the Law on Psychiatric Care, which states that people who are a danger to themselves and those around them must be isolated from society and forcibly held in psychiatric care. Since then, she has been held at the regional psychiatric hospital in Apatity, over 100 miles from Murmansk. In an irony that might be more than coincidental, she is being “treated” by the same doctors mentioned in the critical article under question.
The story came to international attention at the end of July, a series of articles has appeared in international press condemning her incarceration, and the US - based Committee to Protect Journalists wrote in an open letter to President Vladimir Putin that it was deeply disturbed by “the horrifying method of forcible psychiatric detention as punishment for dissent.” On Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph ran an article entitled “Labelled Mad for Daring to Criticise the Kremlin.”
There are some problems with these accounts. First of all, Larisa Arap is not a journalist, and in contradiction to what has been widely reported, did not write the article in question. She is an accountant at the Murmansk office of the United Civil Front, and was quoted at length in an article written by a journalist named Ilona Novikova entitled “Madhouse” and published in a special edition of a local opposition newspaper titled “Dissenters March”. Secondly, it seems that Ms Arap does have a history of psychiatric problems.
However, Russian law makes it quite clear that whatever psychiatric condition a person may have, they can only be forcibly confined if they represent a danger to themselves or those around them. Following international outrage, Russia’s Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin sent a special commission, headed by Yuri Savenko, head of Russia’s Independent Psychiatric Association, to look into Arap’s case
Having returned from Murmansk, Savenko spoke by telephone: “It’s evident that we are dealing with a really ill person, she was treated in 2004 and over time got better. Then, stresses in her life caused new psychiatric problems.” But, said Savenko, it is absolutely clear that she does not present danger to herself or others, and as such, her detention is illegal. “She has also been sent to an institution hundreds of kilometers away from her home and relatives, whereas the law clearly states that a person must be sent to the nearest possible institution,” said the doctor. He has recommended to Lukin that she be freed immediately.
“She’s very crushed,” said Elena Vasilyeva, Arap’s friend, editor of the newspaper, and head of Kasparov’s United Civil Front in Murmansk, by telephone. “She doesn’t know how many people have got behind her case because she has no access to television or newspapers.” Vasilyeva also revealed that Arap’s daughter, a lawyer working for a bank in Murmansk, has lost her job after the bank objected to interviews she had given to the press in support of her mother.
In Vasilyeva’s view, there is nothing wrong with Arap, and her consignment to the mental institution is a combination of revenge for the article in which she was interviewed and the authorities wanting to put pressure on the United Civil Front. “The head doctor is always talking about the newspaper,” she said. “If you care so much, you can take me to court, I say, but he doesn’t want to; he keeps asking me to apologize. I’ve been told, ‘Aren’t you scared of the consequences of publishing such an article; we can organize things for you too?’”
While Savenko didn’t believe that revenge was a motive in the case, he said it was very worrying that it was so simple to consign someone to an institution with no hard evidence whatsoever. “The examining doctor presented no facts as to why she had been sectioned,” he said. “It’s clear that she presented no danger to herself or others. She never exhibited aggressive behavior. It shows how easy it is for someone to say that there ‘might be’ danger even when there is none.”
Arap’s case has come to light after international pressure, but there might be hundreds or thousands of such cases where there is nobody to advocate the cause. If Arap’s original testimony in the article is to be believed, it is indeed the case that scores of people are sent to psychiatric clinics on all kinds of non-medical pretexts.
“This woman is a member of the United Civil Front and as such was able to get international attention,” said Savenko. “But there are many other cases that are even more disturbing that have not made it to the public domain. We are on the verge of a wide-scale misuse of psychiatry for non-medical grounds that is reminiscent of Soviet times.” |
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